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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

#81

Post by stncls »

kn100 wrote: post #35

As someone who has a fairly basic use case for something like Pipewire - I switched to it about a year ago and hope to never switch back. Everything just works properly - and some of the value added stuff we have now (Easyeffects inside a Flatpak sandbox comes to mind) are very cool and work extremely well. My thanks to the developers, who have done an AMAZING job of building a realistic alternative. There is a lot o…

> Everything just works properly

Not to mention the drastically lower CPU usage compared to its predecessor [1] and general lack of bugs.

> There is a lot of REALLY good software coming out

Agreed, but I would still single out PipeWire as being particularly outstanding. None of the other examples are as new, or as uncontroversial. Anecdotically, when I look at the comment section of any PipeWire article here, I see basically universal (and enthusiastic) praise.

In my case, it comes from the fact that so many sound servers have existed before, and none were even close to satisfactory, until now. It seems genuinely like a hard problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502614

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

#83

Post by abdullahkhalids »

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…

I could not get the automatic switching either, so I wrote this script.

https://gist.github.com/abdullahkhalids/21a51240c13e19bfbb63...

I have bound Win+Home to the "general" option that connects to my earphones and correctly lets all applications use them as their sink.

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

#84

Post by yencabulator »

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!

For the command-line folk:

  # mic on, worse audio quality
  pactl set-card-profile bluez_card.DE_AD_BE_EF_FA_CE headset-head-unit

  # mic off, better audio quality
  pactl set-card-profile bluez_card.DE_AD_BE_EF_FA_CE a2dp-sink

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

#85

Post by npteljes »

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?

Fedora also uses PipeWire by default, since version 34, so for almost a year now.

Source: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire

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

#86

Post by squarefoot »

Can anyone link to some documentation explaining how to make it work without messing with other software? I tried twice to enable it on two different Debian installs, and both times I suddenly lost access to all my MIDI devices under Wine (no matter the user or the Wine version), although they were still perfectly usable by native Linux software, so I had to uninstall it back.

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

#87

Post by 127 »

phkahler wrote: post #69
kn100 wrote: post #35

As someone who has a fairly basic use case for something like Pipewire - I switched to it about a year ago and hope to never switch back. Everything just works properly - and some of the value added stuff we have now (Easyeffects inside a Flatpak sandbox comes to mind) are very cool and work extremely well. My thanks to the developers, who have done an AMAZING job of building a realistic alternative. There is a lot o…

>> There is a lot of REALLY good software coming out for Desktop Linux recently. Wayland, Pipewire, Wireguard, etc! etc indeed: OBS Studio VLC Ardour, LMMS, MuseScore LibreOffice (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base) GnuCash, Scribus, Dark Table, Inkscape, Krita, Blender, Synfig Studio, Gimp KiCAD, LibreCAD, FreeCAD, OpenScad, Solvespace, Slic3er And untold others that are incredibly useful.

I would single out both Krita and Blender. Both are fantastic projects that really elevate what you can do artistically with free software.

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

#88

Post by stuaxo »

throwawaybbq1 wrote: post #33
faho wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pipewire was started by Wim Taymans, one of the gstreamer people. Originally it was supposed to allow video-streams in sandboxed environments like flatpak (and was known as "pulsevideo"), but then he noticed that it could be extended to do audio as well. Since pulseaudio's architecture isn't well-suited to incorporate sandboxing, that project continued and it turned out that it could handle compatibility with both pu…

Thank you! So is pipewire a replacement/superset of gstreamer? Or is it supposed to be a higher-level component (more user facing than gstreamer). Alternatively, is Pipewire about connecting audio devices (instruments, speakers) to software on the computer?

Originally gstreamer was going to be used, but in something a bit smaller and less general was needed.

(Gstreamer is fantastic as a swiss army knife, but something a bit more focused is needed).

I believe this will interface with gstreamer just fine though.

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

#89

Post by pimeys »

TD-Linux wrote: post #8

I have been impressed how I've been able to make arbitrarily complex audio graphs in QJackCtl and it just works. I can even activate patch bays and it forces the audio configuration and applications (even browsers) stay happy. It's impressive how it manages to support connections that require reclocking and do the needed large ratio resampling needed behind the scenes, something that PulseAudio was never really able…

Is there a good writing about setting OBS with monitoring using Pipewire? I'd be really excited to make my Zoom streaming better with OBS.

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

#90

Post by jancsika »

jabl wrote: post #25
faho wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pipewire was started by Wim Taymans, one of the gstreamer people. Originally it was supposed to allow video-streams in sandboxed environments like flatpak (and was known as "pulsevideo"), but then he noticed that it could be extended to do audio as well. Since pulseaudio's architecture isn't well-suited to incorporate sandboxing, that project continued and it turned out that it could handle compatibility with both pu…

5. Pipewire doesn't use buffer rewinding, which was a rich source of complexity and bugs not only in PulseAudio, but also exposed bugs in the kernel audio device drivers. And even bugs or poorly specified behavior in HW itself, considering AFAIU neither macOS, Windows (nor Jack) use rewinding.

The PA docs claim that buffer rewinding is used to achieve low-latency updates to a high-latency stream. E.g., user wants to change volume now on some music that has a 2 second buffer. Seems like a common use case.

How does Pipewire deal with this?

Also-- links to the audio driver bug reports, please!

Also-- links to info on the hardware bugs, please!

I believe you, I just want to read about them.

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