PipeWire 0.3.28 Released With More PulseAudio Modules Implemented

[DrYak]

I dont know if it will replace JACK but at the moment without Jack you cant create any music.

The point of Pipewire is to replace JACK by incorporating its API.
professionnal JACK audio application will keep talking to Pipewire over a JACK library.
So you will still have JACK in practice, the difference being that instead of using the reference JACK server and its official libraries,
you'd be using Pipewire's implementation of the same server and the corresponding client side library to talk to it.

(Note: PW devs have mentionned that JACK server interface is very version dependent. It's simpler for them to have PW-specific JACK client library, rather than try to have PW talk with the upstream client library.
Unlike the PulseAudio situation, where PipeWire sets the corresponding socket up and will happily talk to pulse clients over there).

How you will assign/map midi instruments without Jack???

I now that most of the reporting around PipeWire is currently focusing on Audio and Video (mostly webcam sharing and screen casting) because that's what all the cool kids do, but PipeWire can handle other streams, and actually DOES handle MIDI streams too.
(e.g.: check it in Catia plugboard)

So it's more a question of ironing out bugs than adding back entire subset of missing functionality.

[veeableful]

This seems to have fixed an issue where the sound wouldn’t come out when I change volume on YouTube and perhaps other multimedia player playing back on my USB speaker on my laptop! Previously I had to switch sound channels in the GNOME sound settings to fix it.

[pracedru]

This is great news.
My F34 installation works great with respect to audio.
I hope this brings Audio on linux to the next level.

[skeevy420]

I'm not sure if this is beyond the scope of PipeWire or not, but this is an audio issue that has plagued myself and many people for a really long time -- 5.1 or better audio streams on 2.0 equipment. It is really hard to hear people talk because that's usually on the center channel.

It would be really nice if PipeWire could have a built-in method that can detect 5.1/7.1/etc streams and take the rear and sides and merge them into the front left and right channels, split the center channel in two, and cut the LFE out of the mix. With so many streaming devices being Linux based, X.1 to 2.0 is a feature that really needs to exist.

[royce]

Sounds nice! (Pun intended)

I'll have to give it a spin at some point here. Does anyone here happen to known the easiest way to try it out on Ubuntu 21.04?

It does not quite work correctly, at least not in my case. I managed to get wired audio to work, but not bluetooth, with the packages available on 21.04. Bluetooth was my main motivator to give it a shot as high quality duplex audio for calls doesn't work properly on pulseaudio, whereas in theory it should in PW. There were also issues interacting with the mixer on gnome control center as well as Waybar.

You can follow the instructions on this reddit comment if you want to try for yourself: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comm...eb2x&context=3

[sb56637]

Jack is the server (the daemon in Linux speak), not the GUI tools you use to work with it. Those same tools will (and already do) work exactly the same, that's why Pipewire is called an "in place" replacement of Jack (and also Pulseaudio), it means that when you switch out Jack for Pipewire, everything will work exactly the same as before as far as you, the user, is concerned. All the changes are behind the scenes.

Hmmm, so would things like Pianoteq, LinuxSampler, Carla, and the Catia patchbay continue to work without a jackd process running? What about the low-latency aspect?

[microcode]

Nice. IIRC, that's what's needed to provide a toggle for OS-level automatic gain control, so that, when you're multitasking and just want to listen to things in the background, you don't have to keep fiddling with the volume as you switch between various YouTube videos, local videos in something like MPV, audio files in your music player, or any other playlist that doesn't have consistent volume levels.

(Yeah, I know dynamic range compression completely and utterly ruined things like the rendition of the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme in the end credits of Insurrection, but it's great for podcasts and documentary videos and the like.)

AGC based on some sort of policy might be nice, even if it's just a whitelist that says: if it's a YouTube or Spotify tab, it's loudness normalized to about -14 or -13 LUFS so gain offset can be -10dB or so; and if it's anything else not on the list, turn it down 23dB. or some such similar thing.

[pkunk]

Hmmm, so would things like Pianoteq, LinuxSampler, Carla, and the Catia patchbay continue to work without a jackd process running? What about the low-latency aspect?

1) Yes
2) In theory it should be ok. PipeWire was designed with low-latency and pro-audio in mind. In practice we will see.
Here some performance figures: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipew...is/Performance

[pal666]

? after all pipewire is everything we have in the same thing?

i'm not sure what exactly you are asking, but probably answer is "no"

[ssokolow]

i'm not sure what exactly you are asking, but probably answer is "no"

It sounds like andre30correia is asking if PipeWire is all the existing audio/video routing/mixing APIs in a single daemon.