PipeWire 0.3.34 Released With Yet More Improvements, Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PipeWire 0.3.34 Released With Yet More Improvements, Fixes

PipeWire, for managing audio/video streams on Linux and proving itself to be a viable replacement to PulseAudio and JACK, is out with a new update...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PipeWire-0.3.34-Released

[boxie]

This seems like a rather nice shaking out of bugs!

I am looking forward to the eventual full integration of all the things!

[sebastianlacuesta]

After several hours of usage, pulseaudio start doing crackling in both my desktop and my laptop. Best workaround I found is to use pipewire-pulse. Already installed 0.34 from Debian experimental. Glad to be out of a freeze period again

[waxhead]

Not too familiar with pipewire (yet), but when I read that it somehow handles bluetooth battery status.... well suffice to say that those kind of things make people use more toilet paper than usual.

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

Fingers crossed it replaces pulseaudio in Ubuntu 22.04LTS

[reba]

After several hours of usage, pulseaudio start doing crackling in both my desktop and my laptop. Best workaround I found is to use pipewire-pulse. Already installed 0.34 from Debian experimental. Glad to be out of a freeze period again

PipeWire 0.3.34 is already in Debian unstable.

I switched from pulseaudio to pipewire some days ago (then 0.3.33). Was a bit nervous as I depend on playback and microphone working, volume settings, etc.

Installation was dead easy and pulseaudio is truly "switched off" by being automatically masked when installing "pipewire-pulse".

Eventhough I expected some rough edges, so far I found no problem in my workflows. CPU usage is down. Great!

[Sonadow]

Won't be making the jump so soon as I'm still more comfortable with pulseaudio as of now.

The only thing I actually use Pipewire for right now is screen sharing for web conferencing. Perfectly fine with Pipewire doing the desktop sharing and still letting Pulse handle audio.

[Nille]

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.

[reba]

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.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire

Reception

PipeWire has received much praise, especially among the GNOME and Arch Linux communities.

Particularly, it fixes many problems that PulseAudio had experienced, including its high CPU usage, Bluetooth connection issues, and its JACK backend issues.

- https://wiki.debian.org/PipeWire

PipeWire is a server and API for handling multimedia on Linux. Its most common use is for Wayland and Flatpak applications to implement screensharing, remote desktop, and other forms of audio and video routing between different pieces of software. Per the official FAQ, "you can think of it as a multimedia routing layer on top of the drivers that applications and libraries can use."

As opposed to PulseAudio's focus on consumer audio and JACK's focus on professional audio, PipeWire aims to work for all users at all levels. Among other techniques, PipeWire achieves this with its ability to dynamically switch between different buffer sizes, for adapting to the different latency requirements of different audio applications.

Users may also be interested in PipeWire's capacity to be a drop-in substitute for existing Linux audio solutions, including PulseAudio and JACK. Potential benefits include lower CPU usage, better support for Bluetooth devices, and better integration between applications using JACK and PulseAudio. This is the default behavior in some other distros, notably Fedora 34 and newer.

[rabcor]

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.

I've always hated pulse... So much that when it was still an option I just stuck with alsa and had a better experience for it, but nowadays too many applications rely on pulse to work and apulse just isn't reliable enough.

So the one thing I wanted, working audio with no crackling or latency issues. I got working audio. I got no latency issues too, but oh god the crackling was even worse than pulse!!

At least with the tsched=0 setting pulseaudio's crackling is reduced to 'almost never', but with pipewire the best I could get was 'significantly reduced but still too much for enjoyable sound'; and like with pulseaudio, if I try to use any 3rd party applications to enhance audio (like equalizers, pulseeffects/easyeffects), it all gets 10 times worse.

I just want good basic audio on linux with the option to use 3rd party equalizers or enhancement plugins without all the crackling and all the latency, why is this so much to ask?

Some people insist that audio on linux is the best thing ever, but I've had 4 different computers (admittedly all intel hd audio though) and I always have sound issues on linux, I have never not had sound issues on linux... Even when I was just using pure alsa I'd occasionally run into issues with dmixing or something... I also remember alsa didn't have any good equalizer options either, I mean it had some but they were not any better than what was available with pulse and would often cause some issue or other.



Anyhow I do recommend people give pipewire a try if they're interested, for an alpha product it's actualy in a surprisingly good state already.