PipeWire Gets A Session Manager With WirePlumber

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PipeWire Gets A Session Manager With WirePlumber

PipeWire, the Red Hat backed solution for providing modern management of audio and video streams that supports a Wayland-minded environment and also sandboxed applications with Flatpak while fulfilling use-cases set by JACK and PulseAudio, has a new session manager option...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=WirePlumber-PipeWire

[gufide]

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.

[kon14]

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.

It should be functional for basic playback, but doesn't seem to be a drop-in replacement just yet.
Replacing Pulse with PipeWire doesn't seem to be recommended by their README on GitLab either.

It'll most likely be there for testing by the time Fedora 33 gets released in October though.

[ALRBP]

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.

Still far I fear. I often have bugs with Pulseaudio (PA crashes) when using multiple sound cards (inc Bluetooth and HDMI) and hope this will be gone someday. But since Bluetooth audio support on Linux is part of Pulseaudio (why?), I am not sure how difficult it will be to make it usable without Pulse. I also remember the transition from plain ALSA to Pulse to be difficult, with some software unusable with Pulse at the beginning; there is a very high chance that the same happens with PipeWire.

[ssokolow]

Still far I fear. I often have bugs with Pulseaudio (PA crashes) when using multiple sound cards (inc Bluetooth and HDMI) and hope this will be gone someday. But since Bluetooth audio support on Linux is part of Pulseaudio (why?), I am not sure how difficult it will be to make it usable without Pulse. I also remember the transition from plain ALSA to Pulse to be difficult, with some software unusable with Pulse at the beginning; there is a very high chance that the same happens with PipeWire.

Not necessarily. A big part of the problem, as I understand it, was that PulseAudio implemented a narrower subset of what ALSA provided, so switching to PipeWire might be more like how band-limiting an already band-limited signal won't add more Gibbs-effect ripples.

[quikee]

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

Well most of the job is done by BlueZ (handles all the protocols), but there must be some service that handles it as an actual audio device and take care of the stream compatibility (compression of the audio stream, sampling rate conversion,...) - that's what PulseAudio does.

[Tuxie]

Not necessarily. A big part of the problem, as I understand it, was that PulseAudio implemented a narrower subset of what ALSA provided

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.

[GraysonPeddie]

Will I be able to change sound card via PipeWire for testing purposes? I want to use NVIDIA GTX 960 with my home theater receiver for HDMI audio.

[gens]

Well most of the job is done by BlueZ (handles all the protocols), but there must be some service that handles it as an actual audio device and take care of the stream compatibility (compression of the audio stream, sampling rate conversion,...) - that's what PulseAudio does.

There was, alsa. But they dropped the support. Why ? Ask them.

[muncrief]

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.