Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PipeWire 0.3.62

gitlab.freedesktop.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 98 posts

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#41

Post by amaranth »

RedShift1 wrote: post #23
lionkor wrote: post #14

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. A…

I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.

Raw ALSA can only have one program playing sound unless your hardware has support for hardware mixing (this would generally mean it's very old and also very expensive). More likely you are/were using ALSA's dmix plugin which is a small barebones version of the core functionality of pulseaudio or pipewire. They replace dmix but also give you things like per-program volume control, better latency, better power usage, better mixing, bluetooth support, the ability to do fancy things with audio routing without restarting every program playing audio, etc.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#42

Post by _8j50 »

Oh this thing, and of course it is amazing and popular. But removing it caused so much pain, it's like pulseaudio and asahi all over again.

My gripe is desktop developers and maintainers have this mindset that "users need this stuff, even if they don't want it we will make sure they have it and things will break otherwise".

My wish/hope is for stable/well supported distros like debian to have good support for "minimal" versions of popular DEs.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#43

Post by kobalsky »

RedShift1 wrote: post #23
lionkor wrote: post #14

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. A…

I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.

pulseaudio exists because it's user friendly.

JACK exists becase some people need low latency and dynamic control over non-trivial audio routing.

pipewire attempts to bring the best of both worlds and make it container friendly for security purposes.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#44

Post by codedokode »

Knowledgeable people, please explain. Wouldn't it be better if applications used ALSA for audio output? In this case they could work without Pulseaudio and with (because Pulseaudio adds a sink to ALSA). This way the application doesn't need to know which audio daemon it uses. What are the downsides of this approach?

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#45

Post by codedokode »

RedShift1 wrote: post #23
lionkor wrote: post #14

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. A…

I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.

Because ALSA doesn't allow two programs to use the same audio card simultaneously. ALSA is good for exclusive access, when you want to remove everything between an application and audio card.

Also ALSA cannot do other nice things, like switching audio output when you plug an USB audio card.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#46

Post by codedokode »

amaranth wrote: post #41
RedShift1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.

Raw ALSA can only have one program playing sound unless your hardware has support for hardware mixing (this would generally mean it's very old and also very expensive). More likely you are/were using ALSA's dmix plugin which is a small barebones version of the core functionality of pulseaudio or pipewire. They replace dmix but also give you things like per-program volume control, better latency, better power usage, b…

I am not sure about "better latency". The latency with Pulseaudio cannot be controlled via GUI and is often quite large (on order of hundred ms or more). In my opinion, to get minimum latency one needs to access audio card directly, without intermediate daemons.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#47

Post by codedokode »

kobalsky wrote: post #43
RedShift1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.

pulseaudio exists because it's user friendly. JACK exists becase some people need low latency and dynamic control over non-trivial audio routing. pipewire attempts to bring the best of both worlds and make it container friendly for security purposes.

> JACK exists becase some people need low latency

Wouldn't latency be lower if the application would access audio card directly without any daemons in between?

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#48

Post by seba_dos1 »

codedokode wrote: post #46
amaranth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raw ALSA can only have one program playing sound unless your hardware has support for hardware mixing (this would generally mean it's very old and also very expensive). More likely you are/were using ALSA's dmix plugin which is a small barebones version of the core functionality of pulseaudio or pipewire. They replace dmix but also give you things like per-program volume control, better latency, better power usage, b…

I am not sure about "better latency". The latency with Pulseaudio cannot be controlled via GUI and is often quite large (on order of hundred ms or more). In my opinion, to get minimum latency one needs to access audio card directly, without intermediate daemons.

PA isn't great when it comes to latency, but JACK and PW are.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#49

Post by coldpie »

RedShift1 wrote: post #23
lionkor wrote: post #14

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. A…

I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.

Because they do things many users find useful:

-Per-application volume control

-Seamless hardware switching mid-stream (plug in headphones)

-Different channel configurations into the same device simultaneously

-Cross-application volume ducking

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#50

Post by seba_dos1 »

codedokode wrote: post #47
kobalsky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pulseaudio exists because it's user friendly. JACK exists becase some people need low latency and dynamic control over non-trivial audio routing. pipewire attempts to bring the best of both worlds and make it container friendly for security purposes.

> JACK exists becase some people need low latency Wouldn't latency be lower if the application would access audio card directly without any daemons in between?

Then you would only be able to do fraction of functionality JACK provides you. May be enough for the most simple use-cases, but people who reach for JACK aren't usually after those.
Post reply on HN