PipeWire Gets A Session Manager With WirePlumber

[starshipeleven]

Bluetooth audio support on Linux is part of Pulseaudio (why?),

What? Bluetooth is handled by BlueZ but since version 5 it is just a middleware (it's handling the bluetooth side, not the sound side).

Obviously if you want to stream sound to something, it has to be integrated with the desktop's sound server, so Pulse has its bluez plugins to offload on bluetooth.

But there is nothing Pulse-specific. Someone is maintaining a Alsa-to-BlueZ plugin here for example https://github.com/Arkq/bluez-alsa

[starshipeleven]

Does PipeWire support existing pro audio software like KXStudio's Claudia (a Ladish front end), etc.? If not I wouldn't have any use for it.

Most people don't have any use for it at this stage, it's alpha-grade software. Why you ask for pro audio support when it has not yet reached a level when it can replace Pulse.

[muncrief]

Most people don't have any use for it at this stage, it's alpha-grade software. Why you ask for pro audio support when it has not yet reached a level when it can replace Pulse.

I understand that it's alpha right now, but I assume the architecture has been specified. So someone should know if it will eventually support existing pro audio software. Just curious, as it appears it could be vastly superior to PA.

[You-]

From what I understand, the JACK side is more done than the PulseAudio side.

There is supposed to be an announcement by Fedora Developers soon to test the Jack support. It was meant to be shortly after the Fedora 32 release. Once that is out atleast some software will be testable and the developers can take the feedback to find bugs, see how ready they are in realiity.

[starshipeleven]

I understand that it's alpha right now, but I assume the architecture has been specified. So someone should know if it will eventually support existing pro audio software. Just curious, as it appears it could be vastly superior to PA.

PipeWire's goal is to replace JACK too and be useful for the "pro audio usecase" https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2018/...ion-an-update/ so it should eventually get there too.

[muncrief]

PipeWire's goal is to replace JACK too and be useful for the "pro audio usecase" https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2018/...ion-an-update/ so it should eventually get there too.

Oh wow, if it also supports existing software somehow that would be great! JACK and PA usually work okay, but latency can still be an issue depending upon the software and drivers.

Nevertheless there's simply no comparison between pro audio on Linux vs Windows. Windows is just terrible. In fact one of the major reasons, besides the botnet nature of Windows 10, that I moved back to Linux was because of it's superior audio support.

[kon14]

Oh wow, if it also supports existing software somehow that would be great! JACK and PA usually work okay, but latency can still be an issue depending upon the software and drivers.

It's already a drop-in replacement for Jack. Though it's not yet extensively tested.
You could even have them both installed and explicitly launch Jack stuff with PipeWire using pw-jack.

[ssokolow]

The main problem in the early years of PulseAudio was that it relied heavily on some (prior to PA) rarely used ALSA features that often were overlooked and sloppily implemented in the ALSA drivers. Things like timing information not perfectly matching reality, misreported feature support and various other driver bugs that PA triggered. PA devs refused to work around driver bugs in the PA daemon but they did put a lot of work in contributing driver bug fixes to ALSA. End users were however often stuck with whatever ALSA drivers their distro's kernel came with and often didn't see the result of those bug fixes that PA devs contributed until years later, when a major new version of their distro was released, and as a result were angry at PA for "breaking their audio", which was kind of true but still a bit unfair to PA.

Ahh, yeah. Now that you mention it, I do remember the problem lying more on the kernel side of the stack than the software side... though definitely not exclusively. I have various games where I had to write launcher scripts to get audio working properly on Lubuntu 14.04 because, without something like PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60, I'd get serious crackling or other garbling.

[muncrief]

It's already a drop-in replacement for Jack. Though it's not yet extensively tested.
You could even have them both installed and explicitly launch Jack stuff with PipeWire using pw-jack.

Yay! Thank you for the information.

[pal666]

How close is PipeWire to replace Pulse? I still have some nasty bugs using Pulse like audio slowed down or power cycle audio Interfaces etc.

just to replace pulse or to replace pulse and fix your issues and not introduce new ones?