• Helix 🧬@feddit.deEnglish
      30·
      11 months ago

      Yeah it’s basically Pulseaudio, but better. The devs have done a great job on iterating upon the already pretty good pulseaudio!

        • Auzy@beehaw.org
          21·
          11 months ago

          I’d have to disagree with that. It wasn’t perfect and there were issues for many people at the beginning, but it united everything properly.

          Before then (in xmms days), don’t forget that audio in apps constantly didn’t work, and the sound servers often conflicted. It was far from a seamless experience.

          But, pipewire I agree doesn’t seem to have any downsides and finally fixes from what I felt was the last major issue (low latency)

          • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
            7·
            11 months ago

            Pipewire replaces the need for jack, which was low latency audio routing between audio components. Pipewire even has jack compatible interfaces so you can use jack based apps with it.

            Then there’s the bit most people skip over. Pipewire does the same thing for video!

          • gens@programming.dev
            6·
            11 months ago

            Didn’t work on my last two sound cards, and always had latency problems for many people.

            JACK is for profesionals. If you need to take an input from an instrument, run it through a software filter, and output it immediately. Or if you need to output from one program to another to another. Etc. Usually that means small buffers and a lot of cpu usage. Not really for normal desktop users. Grab a specialized distro like ubuntu studio and try it, if you want.

  • waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    291·
    11 months ago

    Pipewire makes me feel like I’m a bit stupid. I keep reading about it, I read the introduction and FAQ on their website, yet I still couldn’t tell you what that thing even does. All I know is it’s a slightly less buggy drop-in replacement for pulseaudio, and pulseaudio is something I use because Firefox forces me to. (I would still be on plain old ALSA if it weren’t for Firefox.)

    Also, it definitely did not “just work” for me out of the box, I had to do quite some digging and some very non-obvious stuff to get it to a) start up and b) let me use my microphone. I still don’t even know what “starting up” really means for pipewire (is there a daemon or something?), the website likes to pretend that isn’t a thing, but without doing some stuff to start it up, audio just won’t work for pulseaudio and pipewire applications…

    • waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27·
      11 months ago

      In F/OSS, it is not unusual for software to stay below 1.0 version for a long time yet still get a lot of use. Just look at how long OpenSSL, for example, was at 0.9.something, while already being of crucial importance to a lot of internet infrastructure.

      The reasons for this are varied, but the most important is probably simply that free software developers don’t feel the pressure to call a product 1.0 when they don’t believe it is ready to be called that.

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
      6·
      11 months ago

      I was experimenting with the Cadence tools from KXStudio. These are mostly made for JACK, but PipeWire has a JACK interface so it should work. It’s similar to helvum, but with more options.
      Not sure right now which one (maybe Carla), but one of these programs also support adding sound effect nodes that have their own GUI! You probably want to use it in multi-client or patchbay mode

    • deur@feddit.nl
      2·
      11 months ago

      I believe a problem you may encounter asking this question is the fact pipewire does most of that itself?

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    It has finally happened: PipeWire 1.0 has been released as this now very common software to the Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams.

    With time it’s proven to be a suitable replacement to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK while pushing forward the Linux desktop with its modern design and feature set.

    PipeWire 1.0 delivers improved time reporting for less jitter in ALSA when using IRQ mode, various module fixes, Bluetooth LC3 codec and compatibility improvements, improved transport and time handling for JACK, optimized buffer re-use with JACK, and a variety of other improvements.

    There isn’t anything fundamentally different about PipeWire 1.0 but was part of their plan for releasing 1.0 later in the year and finally moving past all the 0.3.xx releases.

    PipeWire has proven itself stable and plenty reliable for Linux desktop uses.

    Downloads and more details on the big PipeWire 1.0 release via FreeDesktop.org GitLab.

    The original article contains 161 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 7%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!