Re: Switch default from PulseAudio to PipeWire (and WirePlumber) for audio

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

Hi Dylan,

Something in pipewire caused my laptop to lose all audio. Since I work
remotely and need to attend meetings over various video conferencing
tools, that was not an option for me, so I reverted back to pulseaudio
by removing everything from src:pipewire from my laptop and rebooting,
which seems to have "fixed" the issue.

Obviously however, this can't be the right long-term solution, but I
don't know exactly what went wrong.

When I opened an ALSA mixer tool, the mixer was set to 0, and moving it
up would work but then restarting the mixer tool would show it was at 0
again.

Opening pavucontrol would show a single device, called "dummy audio
device" (paraphrasing), with no way to select another device.

I'm not familiar enough yet with pipewire to know which tools to use to
debug what went wrong. Can you point me to the relevant docs? Once I
have a better idea of what went wrong, expect a bug report coming your
way ;-)

Thanks,

On Thu, Sep 08, 2022 at 05:58:25PM +0200, Dylan Aïssi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been asked several times regarding when Debian will switch its default
> sound server from PulseAudio to PipeWire without having an official answer.
> Thus, I suppose it's the right time to start a discussion about that.
> 
> As you know, PipeWire is already installed by default with Bullseye (at least
> with Wayland environments) for screen-sharing. PipeWire was not mature enough
> to use it as default sound server for Bullseye, but since it gained in
> stability, features and popularity. Several other major distributions
> (Fedora, Ubuntu is doing the switch with 22.10) have switched to PipeWire
> for audio [1-3].
> 
> We cannot talk about PipeWire without mentioning its session manager.
> Thus, this change should go along the switch of the default session manager,
> i.e. from the deprecated pipewire-media-session to WirePlumber.
> We still use pipewire-media-session as default session manager because it
> enables PipeWire *only* for screen-sharing and not for managing audio.
> Whereas WirePlumber always configures PipeWire for audio excepted by modifying
> conf files in a non-compatible packaging way. This issues was also hit on
> the Arch Linux side [4]. This WirePlumber behavior may be solved in the next
> major release 0.5 planned later this year.
> 
> BTW, I just uploaded latest PipeWire and WirePlumber in bullseyes-backports
> (still in the NEW queue) to allow more users to test them.
> 
> Best,
> Dylan
> 
> [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire
> [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WirePlumber
> [3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ImpishIndri/ReleaseNotes
> [4] https://archlinux.org/news/undone-replacement-of-pipewire-media-session-with-wireplumber/
> 
> 

-- 
     w@uter.{be,co.za}
wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}

I will have a Tin-Actinium-Potassium mixture, thanks.