PipeWire 0.3.22 Released With Many Improvements

[finalzone]

You can tell Pipewire is a serious project when they implement in a few months stuff that took years for Poettering to fix.

Pulseaudio did the heavy lifting on audio for the Linux desktop environment when the Linux audio world was a complete mess back to 2000. Pipewire fast development from which one of developers also contribute to GStreamer took on an existing foundation set by Pulseaudio and make it better with further unification of audio (with JACK) and video.

[Klassic Six]

Mez' You: “Red Hat and GNOME are dictatorships”

Also you: “I started to use Pipewire”

Volkswagen was established in Nazi Germany with direct involvement of Adolf Hitler or Microsoft team up with Intel and IBM creating the USB port, so whats your point? Beside if you believe that redhat actually care about Linux on desktop you're high.

[Danny3]

polarathene they just reopen it. it never occur to me that people mostly have 5.1 so probably devs never test it with 7.1. now after you mention this i've wrote my issue again and mention the 7.1 so they reopen it.
thank you for mentioning the chances of 7.1 system

While not as good as a real system, but I think they can test with 5.1 or 7.1 headphones.
I have a pair of 5.1 headphones. They say it's 7.1 and even allows me to set 7.1 from Realtek control panel on Windows, but I think they're lying as I have only two 3.5 mm jacks.
Still, when you cannot afford or carry a real surround system, these are pretty good.

[pal666]

So you fell into the trap even though i pointed it at and laughed

you hinted and laughed at something else. like "they didn't test every possible setup". well, that's obviously impossible to do

[pal666]

You can tell Pipewire is a serious project when they implement in a few months stuff that took years for Poettering to fix.

what are you trying to say, pipewire implemented systemd?

[oiaohm]

You can tell Pipewire is a serious project when they implement in a few months stuff that took years for Poettering to fix.

There is more to it.

Pulseaudio did the heavy lifting on audio for the Linux desktop environment when the Linux audio world was a complete mess back to 2000. Pipewire fast development from which one of developers also contribute to GStreamer took on an existing foundation set by Pulseaudio and make it better with further unification of audio (with JACK) and video.

Not quite but close.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire

History PipeWire starts as a project called PipeVideo that goal was to improve video handling on Linux. This means there is 2 years of core engine work of PipeWire before PipeWire exists. As if you take from the correct starting point PipeWire engine design is 5-6 years old now. Pulseaudio did not have this hidden core engine work and also started coming decent at 5 years old.

Also the story of Pulseaudio is horrible from development point of view.
1) before Pulseaudio there was no ALSA test suite. So Pulseaudio developers create one.
2) the results of the ALSA test suite they created was a 95 of the existing audio drivers were defective.
3) Fixing defective kernel audio drivers pulled Pulseaudio developers off Pulseaudio so slowing Pulseaudio development.
4) Please note ALSA test suite was made by Pulseaudio developers after they had already created the core of PulseAudio design unfortantly this design is based on a defective audio driver limitations that the developer of Pulseaudio did not know at the time because ALSA test suite did not exist yet. This is still less defective than esound or artsd sound servers.

Like it or not Poettering did a very good job with PulseAudio considering how big of mess the audio stack was when he started Pulseaudio. Now PipeWire developer gets the advantage of the PulseAudio developers work fixing up the Alsa stack. PipeWire developer was able to design without defective drivers giving false appearance how things should work due to the PulseAudio developers work.

Please note I am not saying the PulseAudio could not be better. Software developer its really simple to make a keystone bit of code that is wrong that is very hard to replace without starting the project again unfortunately for PulseAudio in a keystone bit of its engine design there is a mistake that comes from the Alsa driver/audio card Pottering started with that restricts out low latency.

Pulseaudio mistakes were made. Problem was there were a lot mistakes before PulseAudio that directly contribute to the mistakes PulseAudio like the big mistake that existed before PulseAudio was Alsa not having a testsuite at all so drivers being implemented in totally broken ways and those totally broken ways effecting people writing sound servers so they were totally broken as well. Reality here before PulseAudio those making sound servers were really attempting to build roof of house without any proper foundations/walls.

[TuxTuxTux]

You can tell Pipewire is a serious project when they implement in a few months stuff that took years for Poettering to fix.

And yet they are still unable to remix stereo to all channels with pulse daemon. Because who needs bass with music, right?

[Mez']

While not as good as a real system, but I think they can test with 5.1 or 7.1 headphones.
I have a pair of 5.1 headphones. They say it's 7.1 and even allows me to set 7.1 from Realtek control panel on Windows, but I think they're lying as I have only two 3.5 mm jacks.
Still, when you cannot afford or carry a real surround system, these are pretty good.

Not sure it's very representative. Maybe for a 5.1 soundbar directly hooked to your graphics card or motherboard. But a sound bar still only fake surround sound.
But for actual 5.1/7.1/Atmos, you'll need an AV receiver processing and distributing the sound where it's due. And that has always been tricky on Linux. I have no clue how it's faring on other OSes.

When Pulseaudio came out, it worked mostly well, but needed some tweak to daemon.conf and default.pa for proper 5.1 or to order the channels (left and right were inverted or no 5.1, etc...). It was only solved around 2015 for me. Although I'm not sure LFE-remixing has ever been solved (bass redirecting).
Then amdgpu grew between 2017-2018 and I had a whole new lot of sound and video passthrough issues for 18 months. It finally matured enough for these to be solved.

My point is I don't think it'll be enough with headphones. Hooking to an AV receiver (for the real surround experience) has always been tricky and you can't just simulate that.

[AnAccount]

You can tell Pipewire is a serious project when they implement in a few months stuff that took years for Poettering to fix.

Can you please inform your self, at least a tiny bit, before posting garbage. The pipewire and pulseaudio projects worked together to split out all the policy and audio setup code in pulseaudio to a library. So, the reason Pipewire have been able to get things working so well so fast, is because they are actually using puleaudio for the configuration and setup.

[Grim85]

Pipewire switch over seemed fine until I wanted to play some media files with surround sound encoding, all I get out of vlc is static. Switching back to pulse and they play fine - other than that I barely noticed any difference in my testing