PipeWire 0.3.34 Released With Yet More Improvements, Fixes

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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?

[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.