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PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

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Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#71

Post by mauricioc »

jboynyc wrote: post #2

I recently made the switch in NixOS and found it pretty painless. Can't get my mic to work in Firefox though, and the other day I was looking through the manual trying to figure out how to use my HDMI screen's speakers rather than the built-in one and couldn't find the right incantation. Sounds like such rough corner cases will be a thing of the past soon. Congrats to the dev team!

Assuming you're talking about Bluetooth mics: If you're using pipewire-media-session (for example, if you're on NixOS 21.11 instead of NixOS unstable), then profile autoswitching [0] is disabled by default, so you have to use pavucontrol to switch from A2DP to HSP. Profile autoswitching is enabled by default in WirePlumber, which is the default session manager in NixOS unstable as of a few days ago.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Automatic_profile_...

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#73

Post by zamadatix »

goodpoint wrote: post #60
zibzab wrote: post #45

Most pipewire users here seem to be arch users with access to bleeding edge releases. But how does PW work for, say, Debian/Ubuntu users?

Debian Sid (aka Unstable) is just as bleeding edge as any other "rolling" distro.

Sid is a rolling unstable development build, that doesn't compare to a rolling stable release - particularly in regards to conversations on what users should expect.

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#74

Post by mkdirp »

InfiniteRand wrote: post #66
durazabu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are definitely not the only one was has the issue about the automatic switching to bluetooth headset. One workaround is to run `pactl load-module module-switch-on-connect` (not persisted across reboot) as recommended on the arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sound_does_not_aut...

Has switching to a bluetooth headset on Linux ever been non-buggy? I mean I imagine for specific hardware-software combinations it works robustly, but I feel like this is a periodic issue I have to deal with on Linux machines

For me on PulseAudio it consistently switched it as expected, however, it the selected audio profile was quite random.

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#76

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

kirenida wrote: post #30

Is anybody here using pipewire to stream to a different machine on the same network? I currently use Pulseaudio to send audio from my laptop to a raspberry (with a DAC hat) connected to my hifi, but it turns out it's a pretty niche use case. So I'm looking for anybody with a similar use case who has upgraded from PA to PW and can talk about the experience.

I bookmarked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514876 a while ago. I’d love a Sonos-esc ecosystem that doesn’t arbitrarily expire also.

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#77

Post by kirenida »

jck wrote: post #65
kirenida wrote: post #30

Is anybody here using pipewire to stream to a different machine on the same network? I currently use Pulseaudio to send audio from my laptop to a raspberry (with a DAC hat) connected to my hifi, but it turns out it's a pretty niche use case. So I'm looking for anybody with a similar use case who has upgraded from PA to PW and can talk about the experience.

I've had good luck with this method: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sharing_audio_devi...

Yeah, that looks like the PA conf I'm currently using. Did you notice any difference after switching to Pipewire?

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#78

Post by kirenida »

bmicraft wrote: post #62
stuaxo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't talk about that, but I will make a recommendation to try streaming with ROC. I've done quite a bit of streaming in the past with pulseaudio-dlna and the extreme lag isn't fantastic. https://gavv.github.io/articles/roc-tutorial/ I'm also curious about using PW, I upgraded, but I haven't setup any streaming yet.

I've been using roc with pipewire and pulseaudio for a while now and it works really well (much better than pulseaudios native tcp connection for example). You set target latency on the receiver and 150ms is enough to have (almost) no breaks in audio over a couple of hours

I found ROC at one point, but the native PA tcp connection actually works good enough for me.

The only problem I had with my setup was when I changed my router to a Mikrotik hap ac2 - there was a lot of stuttering and dropouts. After switching to OpenWRT on the Mikrotik, everything became usable again :)

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#79

Post by mkdirp »

mhitza wrote: post #61
mkdirp wrote: post #26

I'm not a pro user but PipeWire has been mostly great. I originally switched because of PulseAudio was causing a hissing noise on with my bluetooth headset, and switching fixed it. However, there are still two issues that I'm struggling with and haven't been able to find a definitive answer for. One is the audio sometimes randomly jitters while simply playing music. It seems this only happens when I use my bluetooth…

> One is the audio sometimes randomly jitters while simply playing music I encounter the same issue from time to time. Almost consistently reproducible when I update the kernel and the VirtualBox driver needs to be recompiled (and there's no cap for that process that it should use max X% of CPU). As pipewire is within the user session I would assume higher system load would induce some latency and cause the jitternes…

This sounds about correct. I had a similar hunch, but I noticed it correlating to high memory instead (could be just a symptom, perhaps it was doing more swapping?). I increased my swap partition, which made it happen less often. It could be very well be the CPU.

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#80

Post by nitrogen »

mkdirp wrote: post #79
mhitza wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One is the audio sometimes randomly jitters while simply playing music I encounter the same issue from time to time. Almost consistently reproducible when I update the kernel and the VirtualBox driver needs to be recompiled (and there's no cap for that process that it should use max X% of CPU). As pipewire is within the user session I would assume higher system load would induce some latency and cause the jitternes…

This sounds about correct. I had a similar hunch, but I noticed it correlating to high memory instead (could be just a symptom, perhaps it was doing more swapping?). I increased my swap partition, which made it happen less often. It could be very well be the CPU.

Distros should really be setting niceness levels on more processes by default, especially background software updates. And anything audio-related really needs to be at a realtime priority.
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