PipeWire 0.3.65 Adds New Combine-Stream Module, Bluetooth MIDI

[Wtay]

Ok, good to know.


Yes, obviously native solutions have better latency than wiring audio through PA.

The old solution was native, it just only ran inside the pipewire-pulse server, now it can be used outside and has way more features.

[Old Nobody]

Wasn't this available in Pulseaudio already years ago?

Yes, and it's pretty handy.
I have a speaker built in the wall in every room, connected with cables to a headless pulseaudio server with a 7.1 sound card and controlled with some cheap X11 remotes.
The remap-sink module makes some mono and stereo outputs out of the 8 channels for the different rooms. Combine-sink creates virtual devices so that I can hear music/podcasts via Bluetooth e.g. "everywhere except the office" where someone listens to something else, or "really everywhere" when doing cleaning on the weekend.

Tried to move to PipeWire a few weeks ago. It does not run on headless machines. It has serious trouble with network audio, especially latency. It's missing lots useful features. It might be better on the desktop than Pulseaudio, but it clearly takes some additional years to replace it in all other areas. Will try again in 2026.

[Danny3]

Not sure what you mean. Pretty sure it's the default in Debian testing and the upcoming Debian 12.

Debian 11 has been out for a while so it's understandably not the default there, but you can get a recent version of PipeWire through the bullseye-backports repository, and manually configure it to replace PulseAudio.

Just for Gnome!
I don't see any good reason why they don't want to install it by efault for all desktop environments.
In the end, all need better, audio, better Bluetooth streaming, multichannel audio for games and movies, some need it for the ability to record / share the screen.

[Quackdoc]

I hope this means I'll be able to easily connect several bluetooth headsets to my laptop soon. Watching a movie with family during a train trip is still not a good experience today, whatever the OS.

you can do this fairly easy if you are having a config issue using wireplumber configs, though I do wish we have a native pipewire gui control for this stuff, I personally am to lazy to config anything and just use helvum and make the connections manually xD

[dwagner]

I think that limitation is in Bluetooth, not something PipeWire can fix.

Why do you think it is? One can certainly talk to multiple Bluetooth devices from one host. Sure, they need to share the total available bandwidth, so quality may suffer at some point... but otherwise "multiple bluetooth audio outputs" should not be a problem.

[bug77]

Why do you think it is? One can certainly talk to multiple Bluetooth devices from one host. Sure, they need to share the total available bandwidth, so quality may suffer at some point... but otherwise "multiple bluetooth audio outputs" should not be a problem.

Bluetooth is just crappy, that's why. I can't get a single pair of earbuds to connect reliably (Windows, Android, you name it) without having to "forget" them from time to time

[caligula]

Bluetooth is just crappy, that's why. I can't get a single pair of earbuds to connect reliably (Windows, Android, you name it) without having to "forget" them from time to time

Stop buying shit. Apple headphones work perfectly with Apple. I just randomly bought some cheap shit headphones from Jabra (Elite Active 4 or so). Seems to work perfectly every time.

[Berniyh]

Bluetooth is just crappy, that's why. I can't get a single pair of earbuds to connect reliably (Windows, Android, you name it) without having to "forget" them from time to time

Works fine for me. I'm using my Sennheiser headphones via Bluetooth almost every day and they reliably connect within a second or so.
On Windows it was a bit more tricky, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

I also had the experience that (on Linux) some bluetooth adapters work better than others. I have an older dongle (I think originally it supports 4.0) and with that one there was a 30-50% chance that on the first connect it wouldn't connect properly, i.e. there was no audio device from the Sennheisers but only battery readout etc.
Now I'm using the mainboard-integrated one with an external antenna and that connects very reliably and almost instantly as described above.

[Berniyh]

Why do you think it is? One can certainly talk to multiple Bluetooth devices from one host. Sure, they need to share the total available bandwidth, so quality may suffer at some point... but otherwise "multiple bluetooth audio outputs" should not be a problem.

No, afaik one source to many outputs was not possible with older Bluetooth versions. It's a feature of LE audio, with which it should be possible now.
I'm not sure if LE audio needs specific Bluetooth adapters though or maybe the feature can be implemented in software (and might already be available).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy#Audio

[geearf]

I hope this means I'll be able to easily connect several bluetooth headsets to my laptop soon. Watching a movie with family during a train trip is still not a good experience today, whatever the OS.

We connect multiple headsets here and then map the player to them by using QjackCtl, it works. I wish it would remember that if all headsets are connected to auto-map, but it's only a few clicks.

No, afaik one source to many outputs was not possible with older Bluetooth versions. It's a feature of LE audio, with which it should be possible now.
I'm not sure if LE audio needs specific Bluetooth adapters though or maybe the feature can be implemented in software (and might already be available).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueto...w_Energy#Audio

And we're doing that with headsets not supporting LE audio.