PipeWire 1.0 is out now for modern Audio and Video on Linux

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: BlackBloodRumI'm using uBlock Origin (sorry!), and all those buttons are still fully visible and functional.

No need to be sorry, I advise everyone to use blockers, although there's actually no need for them on here :). The one single "advert" we have is a direct sponsorship from Thunderbird and like that's basically our only real third-party thing but even that is a plain image link directly hosted. Block away!

That's fair - It was never anything personal anyway. The way you do your ads are perfectly acceptable to me, since they seem neither intrusive nor annoying.

However, I just have it enabled for all websites, rather than selecting which ones to block, and I block all Javascript scripts by default (I allow Javascript on GOL, naturally).

Honestly, I think if more websites made less-intrusive ads in general, that is, skip all the flashy stuff, don't make it so the whole page is littered with them, etc. More people would be willing to go without the adblocker. But most ads are just plain annoying and cause more trouble than they're worth.

And you get the likes of say, Youtube, who stick a multi-minute non-skippable ad at the beginning of the video, only to be followed by another non-skippable ad, and then finally a skippable ad, a couple of minutes of video playback and then abruptly interrupt the video with another non-skippable ad and so on, it's no surprise people seek ways to block them, since it's plain anti-user. (Although personally, these days I just download YouTube videos and watch them offline since they're mostly music videos anyway. Don't worry, it's all legal, I have a license to do so from the international pirates association .)

/end minor rant about ads.

I'll sing the praises of pipewire. Aside from gaming, I really do a lot of audio, and it's nice not having to fight with jack. (Once you get jack going, it's perfectly fine, but it can be a pain in the ass, as well.) The less said about pulseaudio, the better. (It really wasn't designed for realtime audio work.)

I tried Pipewire a good few months back, out of curiosity and I couldn't use it with my DAW (Mixbus), using JACK. 100% CPU usage, xruns agogo.

I tried it again a couple of weeks back and it's working flawlessly with my USB UMC204HD, so I'm all in now. The JACK interface is solid and I set up an equaliser sink for my headphones easily enough. Easyeffects is also pretty straightforward, although I'm not utilising it right now.

p.s. never used PA, just ALSA and JACK and have not had any problems with audio but Pipewire's the future and, to be fair, it's pretty much plug and play.


Last edited by fabertawe on 27 November 2023 at 4:47 pm UTC

I'm probably in the minority because of a modified Pulse configuration due to certain niche uses for my audio hardware, but Pipewire introduced latency and messed with the audio piping in a way which added additional noise where I used to have a clean output. I'm not willing to risk upsetting my setup again just because Pipewire now has a 1.0. If it's a seamless transition which takes already existing configurations and merges it into the new setup without introducing latency and noise, then maybe... just maybe... I'll try it out in a year or so...

Quoting: BlackBloodRumHonestly, I think if more websites made less-intrusive ads in general, that is, skip all the flashy stuff, don't make it so the whole page is littered with them, etc. More people would be willing to go without the adblocker. But most ads are just plain annoying and cause more trouble than they're worth.

Yeah, I recently started using an adblocker . . . well, on one of my browsers on one of my machines . . . because some site I was trying to read something on just wouldn't stop shoving ads in the way. Most of the time, though, I sort of manage the ads: I deliberately click on ads, or "shop" for things, that I have no intention of buying but are pleasant to look at. Then it shows me ads that look nice for a while.

Quoting: WorMzyStill not sure what advantages this gives over PulseAudio, but it seems to be pretty embedded in the Arch package ecosystem (it's been present on my system as an unconfigured dependency for something else since mid-2018):

$ pactree -rs pipewire | wc -l  
2409
$ pactree -rs pulseaudio | wc -l
105

Guess it's time to take a look and see what all the excitement is about.

The biggest advantage is that it is a unified solution for both low latency music creators and normal desktop + gaming. Since it also uses less advanced functionality of the underlying ALSA drivers there are some hardware that works better in PW than in PA (since the ALSA drivers for that hw is bad).

Absolutely loving Pipewire, been using it for a while now. Reminds me a lot of CoreAudio on the Mac, though with a bit more up front configuration.

It being a drop in for PulseAudio, JACK, and ALSA, all at the same time while still being great on latency is just *chefkiss*. I can go from gaming to recording music tracks in Ardour with no messing around.

My main experience with PipeWire is likely extremely insulting to what a lot of people use it for, but I switched over to it on a whim because some older native Linux games required ALSA, and I had read it was better to use PipeWire as a drop-in ALSA replacement, so I just went ahead and switched fully over to PipeWire because it gave me a much more hassle-free way to have ALSA and PulseAudio support. It was just a case of switching the packages over and installing the relevant package on Arch.

Maybe the fact that I was able to just switch over to PipeWire, and install its ALSA extension to get older native games to play audio, without noticing any difference, is a selling point to PipeWire?

Either way, the way audio plugins work on any OS is a mystery to me. But PipeWire seems to get a lot of praise as a way to facilitate proper multimedia for sandboxed application distribution, allowing an interface for audio and video sharing agnostic of X11/Wayland/XWayland (i.e. for the likes of browsers and web apps and Electron apps to allow video and screen sharing with audio too), and allowing a much more cohesive Linux Desktop audio experience with virtually no disruption to the desktop users, who may not even know they're using PipeWire.

I don't fully understand what PipeWire is or the nitty-gritty benefits but I can't say I've had any regrets about switching over to it, nor have I noticed anything working differently -- Aside from it being seamless to fix that ALSA issue.

Quoting: sonic2kkMy main experience with PipeWire is likely extremely insulting to what a lot of people use it for, but I switched over to it on a whim because some older native Linux games required ALSA, and I had read it was better to use PipeWire as a drop-in ALSA replacement, so I just went ahead and switched fully over to PipeWire because it gave me a much more hassle-free way to have ALSA and PulseAudio support. It was just a case of switching the packages over and installing the relevant package on Arch.

Maybe the fact that I was able to just switch over to PipeWire, and install its ALSA extension to get older native games to play audio, without noticing any difference, is a selling point to PipeWire?

Either way, the way audio plugins work on any OS is a mystery to me. But PipeWire seems to get a lot of praise as a way to facilitate proper multimedia for sandboxed application distribution, allowing an interface for audio and video sharing agnostic of X11/Wayland/XWayland (i.e. for the likes of browsers and web apps and Electron apps to allow video and screen sharing with audio too), and allowing a much more cohesive Linux Desktop audio experience with virtually no disruption to the desktop users, who may not even know they're using PipeWire.

I don't fully understand what PipeWire is or the nitty-gritty benefits but I can't say I've had any regrets about switching over to it, nor have I noticed anything working differently -- Aside from it being seamless to fix that ALSA issue.

That's a perfectly valid use case.

Wow hitting version 1.0, you know what that means, someone somewhere has just written the first bit of code for the next Linux sound system to fix its short comings!