PipeWire 0.3.34 Released With Yet More Improvements, Fixes

[rabcor]

I suggest you file a bug in the pipewire bug tracker, they have been quite responsive around similar issues before.

I just might actually.

[avem]

Is this the next hot thing that no one really supports, brings many bugs where the user is left alone with and the only solution is to remove it and use just alsa? noice, can't wait for it.

PulseAudio is dead and PW is the present (not even the future). It's not X11 vs Wayland where the latter is half-broken semi-complete something which requires new APIs, new thinking and new everything, PW is a 100% compatible in-place replacement for PA with a ton of new features including much better BlueTooth support.

[avem]

yes yes, i'm holding it wrong.

Your sarcasm is really misplaced. Again we're not talking X11 vs Wayland here. We are talking about a well-thought-out and well-executed 100% compatible replacement which solves some architectural PA issues and adds great features. The development team is also different and they actually listen to the user unlike PA where too many bug reports are closed as "We don't care, we won't implement/solve this".

[rabcor]

Your sarcasm is really misplaced. Again we're not talking X11 vs Wayland here. We are talking about a well-thought-out and well-executed 100% compatible replacement which solves some architectural PA issues and adds great features. The development team is also different and they actually listen to the user unlike PA where too many bug reports are closed as "We don't care, we won't implement/solve this".

I agree, pipewire is more promising today than pulseaudio ever was at any point in it's lifetime, pulseaudio has always just been a shoddy piece of hot garbage destined to remain a shoddy piece of hot garbage, poorly and over engineered shit that gets in your way more than it helps.

Meanwhile pipewire tries to do what most people use pulseaudio for, but doing it well enough to be suitable for professionals, and doing it like 10x more cleanly than this messy overengineered piece of crap that pulseaudio is.

(Did I mention before that I hate pulse? Did I also mention that hating pulse is not a good reason to hate on pipewire too? Nille the way pipewire looks to me, is that it's developers are trying to create a pulseaudio replacement that is NOT as buggy and trashy as pulseaudio is, and linux needs this quite badly. I do agree that we would probably be better off just developing alsa a bit further and using that (I mean all it really needs is better dmixing and it'd be good to go really if it wasn't for programs being dependent on pulse these days), but pipewire seems to be aiming to provide something of a middle ground for people like you and me who hate pulse and wish they could be rid of it. Pipewire might be the way we can be rid of pulse. Sure, we get pipewire instead, but maybe don't start hating it until the verdict is out on just how good or bad it actually is in 1.0)

If you have similar issues with both PulseAudio and PipeWire that points more to a driver or hardware issue.

If it was a hardware issue I'd have had these issues when I was on windows too, but I didn',t audio was perfect there (in fact I can't recall any point where audio didn't just work' on windows, but I do recall many issues if I wanted to tweak the sound with enhancemnets, it was basically just "do you have a driver that comes with a gui to tweak the sound? if yes then u can, if no then u can't).

As for driver issue, I mean idk... But I never had such crackling issues on just alsa, which implies that that's not the problem here.

[sb56637]

The only thing I actually use Pipewire for right now is screen sharing for web conferencing.

Interesting, could you explain how you accomplish this? The video capabilities of PipeWire are often overlooked, and I've never seen a practical application of them yet.

Has anybody here actually tried PipeWire as a JACK replacement? If so, how transparent is it with professional audio software that expects JACK support? Any tricks to achieve low latency similar to what JACK can do? And how do things like patchbays and session management work?

There's also a cool feature in Pulse that allows for extremely flexible scenarios like recording from a combined sink that contains the audio stream of a conference and also the local microphone. Can this be accomplished with PipeWire natively, or does it require pactl and Pulse emulation still?

[Brisse]

Interesting, could you explain how you accomplish this? The video capabilities of PipeWire are often overlooked, and I've never seen a practical application of them yet.

I can't speak for Sonadow, but for those of us on GNOME running Wayland-sessions PipeWire is necessary for being able to capture the screen. I've used it for remote desktop (VNC) as well as screen capture with OBS 27 and experimental dma-buf.

[Calinou]

Does anyone have tips for reducing sound latency when using PipeWire + PulseEffects? PulseEffects in particular is adding quite a lot of latency (enough to be a problem for competitive gaming). I use the equalizer because my headphones' default configuration isn't great in terms of audio quality. I'm using Fedora 34.

[Brisse]

Calinou Make sure you turn off unused or unnecessary effects. You can also play around with buffer length and block sizes under the hamburger menu. Too long = unnecessary latency, too short = audio artifacts like crackling and popping.

[arokh]

yes yes, i'm holding it wrong.

You're not even holding it, you are simply making a complete fool of yourself on a technical forum. In a perfect world you wouldn't be allowed internet, to prevent stupidness from spreading and making room for actual useful discussion.

On topic, I've been running PipeWire as a Pulseaudio replacement on both x86/arm for about a year now and it's been quite stable for a while now. It's rendered Snapcast obsolete for my purposes, I now have perfectly synced multi-room audio with virtually no latency. Bluetooth compatibility and features are much improved, and I've even got DMABUF screen sharing in OBS. I feel spoiled getting all of this for free, awesome work by Wim Taymans and the rest of the team.

[Michael_S]

Pulseaudio only goes wacky for me in Firefox. Having to run "pulseaudio -k" is the single issue I have running Linux on my personal computer. I might give Pipewire a try.