The Story Of PipeWire & How It's Getting Ready To Handle Linux Audio + Video

[Alexmitter]

Also, while PipeWire can manage the same latency as JACK we are not yet as reliable. So there is some more work to do.

From the related article.

As a general user of the audio aspect of desktop linux (simple music and video usage and occassional low end game), I don't understand what this is attempting to do for me, after PulseAudio replaced something that already worked. I DO know that a recent Manjaro update completetly fucked my audio, yet thankfully a simple PulseAudio reinstall fixed that.

Likely its just Manjaros horrible config work that broke your sound. Its not the first package that completely broke on manjaro due to the more then incompetent developers behind messing the config up.

Pipewire is not any less focused on the desktop as Pulseaudio.

[wertigon]

From what I gather, PulseAudio was a nice 1st attempt for sound (once the buggy early years were sorted out), but pipewire is the successor - and pipewire can handle more things than just sound, too, and is actually more suited to the whole UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and do it well.

How is this you ask? How can something that handles more things be better suited to the UNIX philosophy? Because pipewire does not make any difference between audio or video pipes, it's all the same. Actually, it could also (at least in theory) provide a generic I/O interface for serial communication too (USB, UART, etc).

Pipewire is ingeniously simple to use; You have a pipe (or stream) with one or more input sources and one or more output sources. This input/output can be analog devices (traditional headphones/microphones), digital devices (USB headphones), or some sort of communication device (ethernet, bluetooth, wifi, UART). Whatever is in the pipe, Pipewire delivers it from A to B, or at least attempts to do so, and from B to whatever the output sources may be.

So, what does this bring to the table? Multiple monitors? Create one pipe for each monitor and let Wayland handle the actual GPU memory stuff while Pipewire delivers the buffers to their proper location. Screen sharing? No problem. Screen sharing over the network? Put a network card in the other end of the screen pipe. Screen sharing with two keyboards? Yeah, Pipewire does that too. All while supporting low-latency speeds, and having a secure model that does not allow for unwanted snooping.

Now, mind you, this is the hype and why I'm excited for it. I could be wrong and I don't think it will 100% live up to the hype, but a geek may dream... Hoping Ubuntu 21.10 brings it, but not expecting it until 22.10 earliest.

[ix900]

Just upgraded to Fedora 34 today. While speaker output is working for my bluetooth headset, microphone input isn't. Hope this gets fixed soon...

When its been worked on for half a decade, and still can't do basic things right, everyone is expected to move to using it. Once its working well they find a way to break it. Linux production audio.

[Quackdoc]

Pipewire is good and all, but still not ready, professionals on the platform will still use jack, and most people will stick with pulse for now, Pipewire still breaks some stuff every now and then, Ill have to wait a little longer, but am expectant it will be good, I just hope pulse+jack integration will be seemless. being able to use jack routers and plugin bays, with traditional pulse input and capture etc. will be so nice.

I expect streamers in particular will get great use out of pipewire audio. (Many already do for video) for the audio effects alone, assuming the latency is fine anyway.

[leech]

Just upgraded to Fedora 34 today. While speaker output is working for my bluetooth headset, microphone input isn't. Hope this gets fixed soon...

THIS! Bluetooth headsets are still terrible to try to use in Linux. I had to buy a different headset to use, as I couldn't get the mic to work, and even the audio was terrible. Headphones I ended up getting in the mean time were the Logitech G935, they work okay, but don't have noise canceling like my Sony WH-1000XM3s do...

[iskra32]

Given the amount of complaining and lack of constructivism in some people's comments I will note this: one of pipewire's goals is to be backwards compatible with pulse applications. If something doesn't work right, file a fucking bug report instead of acting like a luddite on a forum. It takes 30 seconds, and if you're not sure which component is responsible, just file the bug report to your distro, half their job is to figure out where to forward the bug reports to. And if the bugs are game breaking for your usecase, revert to pulse. Same thing could be said for Wayland as well.

[pete910]

Hopefully it was only Manjaro that forced this on the linux world.

Not sure whats going on with manjaro on yours, Just done a fresh install of it on another system and its Pulse.

[davidbepo]

been using pipewire on my systems for a while now, since 0.3.27 all are bugfree, feels nice to have newer better tech that replaces the old one so efficiently unlike *cough* wayland

[pangolin]

Finally replacing PulseAudio is IMO one of the best things to happen to the Linux desktop. Been running PipeWire just fine since 3.19 and every new release keeps improving it.

[darkdragon-001]

THIS! Bluetooth headsets are still terrible to try to use in Linux. I had to buy a different headset to use, as I couldn't get the mic to work, and even the audio was terrible. Headphones I ended up getting in the mean time were the Logitech G935, they work okay, but don't have noise canceling like my Sony WH-1000XM3s do...

The "bad quality" can usually be fixed by selecting another codec. It worked for me at least. PipeWire also lists more codec options now.

Maybe my problem was introduced by Bluez as well, since the mic is not even shown in Gnome audio settings.