Re: Switch default from PulseAudio to PipeWire (and WirePlumber) for audio
>>>>> "Dylan" == Dylan Aïssi <daissi@debian.org> writes:
Dylan> We cannot talk about PipeWire without mentioning its session
Dylan> manager. Thus, this change should go along the switch of the
Dylan> default session manager, i.e. from the deprecated
Dylan> pipewire-media-session to WirePlumber. We still use
Dylan> pipewire-media-session as default session manager because it
Dylan> enables PipeWire *only* for screen-sharing and not for
Dylan> managing audio. Whereas WirePlumber always configures
Dylan> PipeWire for audio excepted by modifying conf files in a
Dylan> non-compatible packaging way. This issues was also hit on the
Dylan> Arch Linux side [4]. This WirePlumber behavior may be solved
Dylan> in the next major release 0.5 planned later this year.
I would really like to see bookworm with pipewire and wireplumber.
Major advantages:
* I find pipewire is much more likely than pulseaudio to do something
sane when there are multiple potential sound devices and when sound
devices are added/removed.
* Finally, I can use bluetooth on linux with reasonably good audio
quality!
* pw-jack is good enough for some jack use cases, and is so much easier
to deal with than jackd plus jack-sink and jack-source.
The disadvantages:
* pw-jack isn't really good enough for all my JACK use cases. Doing
network audio doesn't really work well, even given the various options
on the pipewire wiki.
* I find that MIDI gets into a very unfortunate state when I crash a
jack client sometimes and I end up having to restart pipewire and
wireplumber to recover.
I have not been able to articulate reproducing conditions enough to
file a useful bug report.
* If you do need jackd for real because pipewire's jack isn't quite good
enough, pipewire's jack client didn't work at all last time I used
it. So you may be forced to shut down wireplumber and pipewire and
start up pulseaudio.
My jack/pulse needs are kind of complicated because I do need system
audio for my screen reader and realtime audio for my music. And
unfortunately when performing live, I do need to mix the screen reader
audio into my performance headphones, which means I need to get audio
from the pulseish side into the jackish sideof things. Which is to say
that I cannot isolate jackd from pipewire/pulseaudio.
I agree with everyone who suggests switching sooner rather than later.
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