WirePlumber 0.4.9 Fixes Surround Sound For Some Linux Games

WirePlumber is the increasingly used session/policy manager for PipeWire for audio/video streams on the Linux desktop. Out this weekend is WirePlumber 0.4.9 with some important fixes and improvements.

Perhaps most notable with WirePlumber 0.4.9 is ensuring surround sound support is properly exposed for more games on Linux. It was reported that some games within Steam were not able to enjoy 5.1 surround sound with PipeWire in a year-old bug report. A fix landed in WirePlumber a month ago to relax the format parsing within the si-audio-adapter module and this appears to fix up that issue. More details within this bug report.

WirePlumber 0.4.9 also has some crash fixes, addresses a race condition with the Zoom desktop app that could result in audio sharing to fail, Brave / Edge / Vivaldi / Telegram added to the Bluetooth auto-switch application list, and a variety of other fixes and minor improvements.

More details on WirePlumber 0.4.9 via FreeDesktop.org GitLab.