Now that Pipewire is out of the bag for a while now with Fedora’s adoption of it.
How do feel about it?
Better, more configurable than Pulse Audio?
Or don’t “hear” a difference (whether with speakers or headphones)?
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No difference for me, I’m just a regular user, so as long as it can play audio in my speakers/headset and record my Mic, it’s good.
Running Manjaro Plasma with Pipewire.
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Maybe the way Fedora configures it might make a difference?
Remember Peppermint with its PulseAudio “addon” that really made a huge difference.
Not hearing many people mention that “app” or “addon”…
No real difference for me either but I’m also not doing anything sophisticated.
I do have a Bluetooth speaker that seems to operate smoother since the pipewire drop-in replacement but I never really paid attention to it previously so that’s probably just placebo.
Running Arch Linux with Plasma with Pipewire.
It has been great so far but I only listen to audio. Before I would get cracking/static from time to time and have to kill and relaunch Pulse at the CLI. Since Pipewire, perfect.
Not much difference to me other than pulse crashing in the past and having to restart it. With pipewire, I’ve never had to do any troubleshooting since it was adopted.
Have never experienced issues with Pulse before (on the many distros i’ve come to test).
But if stability in overcoming crashes there with Pipewire, then that is a huge plus!
Audio quality I haven’t heard any difference.
I do have an hdmi output I switch between a TV and a monitor using pactl. It works most of the time but occasionally it it switches to another input after switching.
It worked fine after some initial updates and just recently began misbehaving.
Simple enough to work around though.
Was just looking forward to not having to muck about with Pulse Audio and Jack on the same installation.
Sure to give you nightmares that one. And that’s before you totally Bork your sound.
I had to revert to PulseAudio due to no Pipewire support with NoMachine (remote desktop). Nomachine themselves responded to a ticket on their support page about this and how to revert to Pulse but also said they are working on PipeWire support which will be rolling it out soon. Other than that, I had no issues with PipeWire. Ardour allowed me to use Jack without doing any tweaks to Jack (or anything else) so I would say PipeWire is fantastic.
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I’ve only watched a few videos about Pipewire but I’d be surprised if there were any very obvious audible improvements, unless the Pipewire installation process happens to correct something that was previously faulty.
As I understand it - and please correct me if I’m wrong - it’s more like a deep level audio-video “patchbay” software interfacing between hardware I/O and various software control panels and apps and between them too. Pretty much allowing anything (hardware I/O or virtual I/O) to be connected to anything.
This only really becomes apparent - as an improvement - when you’re concerned with things like round trip latency, buffer settings, latency compensation in a plugin or routing multiple audio or video streams to and from various apps, again at the lowest possible latency.
So if all you do is straightforward playback of audio or video, Pipewire’s not doing anything special that wasn’t already being done perfectly well before, so it can’t do it any better? (Or can it?)
There’s a good video from unfa (YT channel: unfa) entitled “I’ve replaced JACK and PulseAudio with PipeWire and this is what happened”, (not letting me post links) showing the audio production stuff Pipewire makes possible that were either impossible or clunky without it. Skip to about 15.00 if you don’t want to watch the set up/install process. I’m not using Manjaro so it wasn’t very useful for me, but the end result was very impressive, kinda mind-boggling, but very cool.
I noticed a difference right away. I am not doing anything professionally with sound though. Pulse used to throw constant cracking and static (it would start from time to time) to where I had to kill it and relaunch. I am no expert but since Pipewire, issue is gone. I am sold on it so far. Not so much for Wayland, yet, but I am on Cinnamon DE so it uses X11 still. Works great for me so far.
I can’t speak for Fedora, but PipeWire on openSUSE has been mostly great for my use cases. I am still using PulseAudio on my production machine but my laptops are running PipeWire due to some seemingly better experience with Bluetooth Audio. I have had issues with PulseAudio and Bluetooth where I had terrible sound quality but using PipeWire fixed that. I can’t speak to any issues of latency but my perceived experience is that there is less latency but I have no numbers to back that up. I haven’t done anything with Jack at this time but I’m sure that will be a thing eventually.