Pipewire tries to replace Pulseaudio? Is it a good idea to proceed?

harvie · 2021-03-02 09:39:00

Doing pacman -Syu today yielded this message:

:: pipewire-pulse and pulseaudio are in conflict. Remove pulseaudio? [y/N]

Is this a good idea? I use following pulseaudio features:

pasystray
alsamixer (sometimes)
audio players and web browsers
audacity recording
USB soundcards
Bluetooth speakers

Will all of these still work if i proceed to replace PulseAudio with PipeWire?
Is the PipeWire mature enough for everyday use?

I mean it would be great to be able to run JACK applications without any hassle on regular desktop setup. But not at cost of breaking everything else.

Last edited by harvie (2021-03-02 09:44:30)

V1del · 2021-03-02 09:48:24

If you do not use some of the more advanced pulse features like network access and the like this can generally be something to attempt, normal audio/ALSA cards should work, bluetooth as well. FWIW the hard dependency here is pulseeffects which you could replace for https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pulseeffects-legacy/ if you want to stay on pulse.

harvie · 2021-03-02 09:56:13

I plan to build some wifi speaker system based on raspberry pi in the future. But i don't really like the pulseaudio protocol, since it does not compress the audio and does not really work over wifi because of that. At the moment i don't really care, but i hope pipewire will support such thing in future.

harvie · 2021-03-02 11:02:24

So i went for it and pipewire seems to work relatively OK, but haven't tested bluetooth yet.

Then i tried to install pipewire-alsa and pipewire-jack
and everything stopped working after i've installed these and rebooted, which i've solved by rm -rf ~/.config/pipewire* and one more reboot

But i still CAN'T run jack applications along with pulse applications.
If there is no playback using pulseaudio, i can launch QJackCtl and hit START button. Then jack apps start working. BUT i guess this just launches jack server and does not use pipewire at all.

UPDATE: you have to use wrapper with JACK, eg.: pw-jack ardour6
It is still rather rough to use as not everything is implemented. So ardour keeps glitching and crashing. But i am not sure if that is problem of pipewire, i've never used ardour before.
But i've confirmed that i can play audio from Ardour using jack interface while mpv plays mp3 using pulse interface. That is nice.

Also the terminal bell sound is awful (sometimes even screeching) since i've migrated from pulseaudio to pipewire.

Another annoying thing is that when i restart pipewire, the pasystray does not reconnect and continues to pretend it is working. but it is not and changing volume does not affect the audio.

On the other hand the pulseefects tool is quite nice and i like it. Having equalizer on hand can be useful.

Last edited by harvie (2021-03-02 11:22:24)

harvie · 2021-03-02 11:55:52

Just checked the bluetooth speakers and it is connected in bluez5 (via blueman-applet), but it does not show up in the pipewire.
This used to work in pulseaudio. So there is still some work left to be done in this field...

Last edited by harvie (2021-03-02 11:56:20)

harvie · 2021-03-04 23:14:38

I have two different BT speakers. One does work and second does not. Not sure what is the problem. There is nothing interresting in the log.

Arch Linux

#1 2021-03-02 09:39:00

Pipewire tries to replace Pulseaudio? Is it a good idea to proceed?

#2 2021-03-02 09:48:24

Re: Pipewire tries to replace Pulseaudio? Is it a good idea to proceed?

#3 2021-03-02 09:56:13

Re: Pipewire tries to replace Pulseaudio? Is it a good idea to proceed?

#4 2021-03-02 11:02:24

Re: Pipewire tries to replace Pulseaudio? Is it a good idea to proceed?

#5 2021-03-02 11:55:52

Re: Pipewire tries to replace Pulseaudio? Is it a good idea to proceed?

#6 2021-03-04 23:14:38

Re: Pipewire tries to replace Pulseaudio? Is it a good idea to proceed?

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