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

[darkdragon-001]

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.

Once Fedora migrates away from the shitty Bugzilla, I guess more people will do so. Migrating to Gitlab increased useful bug reports for projects like Debian significantly.

[skeevy420]

Not for you, but for pro-users. They want something "as easy and manageable as pulse audio, but with latencies of JACK". JACK is a nightmare to configure. Also has all the features of pulse and works as a drop in replacement so things like bluetooth audio "just work" without too much hassle.

Why? Linux has the potential to be a massive audio powerhouse if there is a low latency, reliable, professional audio system. Pair with networking stack, various storage technologies and proven scalability on servers and high-performance compute environments and OpenCL, with as much as a super powerful audio system, Linux workstations have the potential to be serious business audio work stations.

Large scale attached storage for endless libraries of music and music related meta-content, especially high quality lossless. I.e. entire collection of masters for an artist or even record label. OpenCL for encoding/transcoding into whatever format is needed.

Its also an OS that can scale down into embedded as well. So everything from DJ mixing consoles, to audio mastering, to high end audio devices, to live sound processing and mixing boards for bands or movies. The sky is the limit.

Your username checks out.

[dlq84]

So yeah, it's not for your desktoppy-types.

PulseAudio is as was said in the article, the consumer based focus with PipeWire becoming more workstation orientated. Hopefully it was only Manjaro that forced this on the linux world.

That's not true at all... PipeWire is a drop in replacement for Pulse. It was as simple as installing pipewire and uninstalling pulse, reboot and everything just worked the same way... Also, desktop users definitely care about audio latency, especially if you play games.

[WalterCool]

How's the latency compared to Jack? I've heard it's not as good...

It's same as Pulseaudio mode. At least Rosegarden works LOT better on Pulseaudio mode than Jack mode under pipewire. That means lot of latency, which is not good.

[MadeUpName]

So yeah, it's not for your desktoppy-types.

Here is a quick tip so you can learn how to use communication skills. When you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about don't state supposed facts ask questions. Both you and every one else will get more value out of your posts that way.

[Quackdoc]

Does pipewire have an application for audio control that can control both consumer and professional yet?

[timofonic]

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.

I hope they handle professional video. From video+audio vigilance systems to high end film grade video+audio systems.

You forgot other interfaces used in consumer and professional audio, including optical ones.

MIDI is similar to UART too. It can be used over other interfaces such as Ethernet, USB, etc.

[stormcrow]

So yeah, it's not for your desktoppy-types.

PulseAudio is as was said in the article, the consumer based focus with PipeWire becoming more workstation orientated. Hopefully it was only Manjaro that forced this on the linux world.

Not sure where you get a "workstation" is different from a "desktop" as far as the software is concerned. The terms are interchangeable. I have a "server" acting as a development "workstation" but it's still a desktop system. The big iron notion of workstation versus desktop disappeared in practice ages ago. "Workstation" is just a computer where you do "real work", whereas back then everything else was a "toy" desktop. That is, one was running Unix and arbitrarily cost $10s of thousands of dollars while the other ran "toy" software like MSDOS. It was BS snobbery then and it's even more BS now. Before you go on about the hardware, I'll point out that there's little distinction in having an audio mixer hooked up to an Alienware "gaming PC" "desktop" and one hooked up to a 5 year old ThinkServer 4U tower beyond one having ECC RAM and the other doesn't. Gamers and any given music afficionado are just as needful for low latency audio as the film editor. No one likes to have something happen on screen one moment, then the audio catches up 500 ms to 1s later.

[ssokolow]

Once Fedora migrates away from the shitty Bugzilla, I guess more people will do so. Migrating to Gitlab increased useful bug reports for projects like Debian significantly.

Maybe, but Bugzilla isn't that bad. Debian's old system is basically a mailing list with a custom read-only web viewer for the list archive. That's why I never reported bugs on Debian. My attitude toward mailing lists and my Thunderbird setup is "It works. Don't f**k with it."

If I can't have either an NNTP interface or a web interface, I'm not interested... and it never occurred to me until just now that it might be mailing list enough to have been carried by GMane.

[arQon]

Once Fedora migrates away from the shitty Bugzilla, I guess more people will do so.

Fedora's problems with "user reluctance" have absolutely nothing to do with the tools involved. 100% of the reason why most people have given up filing bugs against ANY piece of the RedHat empire is how those bug reports are (not) handled by the team responsible for them: ignored for 3 years, then auto-closed as "this release is no longer supported".