PipeWire 0.3.34 Released With Yet More Improvements, Fixes

[reba]

Ah I actually tried pipewire the other day, and it worked kinda well to be honest, I can see why this might become a pulseaudio replacement quite fast, it's ability to work as a drop-in replacement for pulse is most impressive too.

It's just...

It didn't do the one thing I wanted.

I hate pulse because I always have issues with it, it's either crackling audio, too much latency (even for just regular consumer use) or both. Often with a little tweaking I can mitigate it.

Hm, I can't shake my thoughts away from this.
When you're running your pipewire-setup, does it show this:

user@debian:~$ pactl info | grep '^Server Name'
Server Name: pulseaudio

or something like this:

user@debian:~$ pactl info | grep '^Server Name'
Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.33)

?

Former is when audio is going through pulseaudio, latter when going though pipewire.
So when you hear crackling and think it's using pipewire you can double-check your setup with this, it is really using pipewire.
But as you said you have this also when using ALSA I think the problems might be below the audio driver level.

[jacob]

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.

This is the typical fallacy we see often these days, that software complexity and layering is somehow unnecessary, illegitimate and bad. In fact it's there for a reason: the underlying problem is inherently complex and can't just be wished away. In this case, apart from the fact that "just alsa" often either doesn't work or involves way too much user hassle, assuming I was using "just alsa", how could I...

• individually adjust volume for each app, and decide to mute one but not another?
• dynamically switch audio output from one app from the speaker (for example) to bluetooth?
• transparently stream audio to another device without an app being even aware of it?
• etc.

[rabcor]

Hm, I can't shake my thoughts away from this.
When you're running your pipewire-setup, does it show this:



or something like this:


?

Former is when audio is going through pulseaudio, latter when going though pipewire.
So when you hear crackling and think it's using pipewire you can double-check your setup with this, it is really using pipewire.
But as you said you have this also when using ALSA I think the problems might be below the audio driver level.

It seems u misunderstood me, I had sound issues on 4 systems with pulse (crackling, popping and sometimes latency) and my solution to those issues was to use alsa which provided me with another set of less bad issues (broken dmixing or something like that which required re-configuration to solve).

It's just one machine I tried pipewire on, I mean pipewire is really recent man when would I have had time to test it on 4 different machines, I don't change computers like underwear man

Anyhow yes, I did confirm it was running pipewire (besides pulseaudio wasn't even installed so it couldn't have been using it in the first place, at least for my distro they are mutually exclusive.)

I did manage to largely solve my issues on pulse by using the tsched=0 setting, but it wasn't enough for me so I decided to give pipewire another whirl and just mess with the settings a bit more, seeif I could get a good config out of it that would solve most of my problems.

link.max-buffers                       = 128
default.clock.rate = 44100
default.clock.quantum = 2048
default.clock.min-quantum = 1024
default.clock.max-quantum = 4096

These are the settings I changed. Now the issue has been reducedto just getting crackling or occasional popping noises when an audio stream starts or ends (for instance whenever I get a discord notification it crackles like mad)

I think link.max-buffers at just 64 was actually good enough already tho, but the default of 16 was too low and everything crackled like crazy, it's primarily the combination of changing the max buffers and default/min quantum settings that is fixing the crackling for me, I experimented a lot with the quantum settings and this was the best combination I could find.

The plus side is that equalizers (easyeffects) work a lot better with pipewire than with pulse.

So overall I did end up replacing pulse with pipewire, it's not perfect but at least it's useable. If it was a real option I would have just gone back to alsa.