PipeWire plays it

Bryan Quigley

2021-02-01 19:14

I'm running Debian 11 (testing) with XFCE and getting PipeWire up and running was relatively easy - although explicitly unsupported for Debian 11.

sudo apt install pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries
sudo apt remove pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils
sudo apt autoremove

At some future point there will be something like pipewire-pulse which will do the rest, but for now you must:

sudo touch /etc/pipewire/media-session.d/with-pulseaudio
sudo cp /usr/share/doc/pipewire/examples/systemd/user/pipewire-pulse.* /etc/systemd/user/
systemctl --user enable pipewire-pulse pipewire

I suggest a reboot after, but a logout may be enough. Then try playing some music. If it worked, it should play just like it has before.

More processes

1456 bryan     20   0 1023428 102436  50396 S   1.7   2.6   0:02.06 quodlibet                     
690 bryan      9 -11  898044  27364  20932 S   1.0   0.7   0:00.31 pulseaudio

PipeWire runs as 3 separate processes compared to PulseAudio above. Of note, apparently PipeWire does want to adjust it's nice level, but in it's current state it doesn't depend on it - and I haven't seen any need for it.

PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                       
936 bryan     20   0  826812 100484  50472 S   1.3   2.5   0:02.71 quodlibet                     
692 bryan     20   0   94656  12480   5928 S   0.7   0.3   0:00.38 pipewire-pulse                
693 bryan     20   0  107408  15228   7192 S   0.3   0.4   0:00.39 pipewire
701 bryan     20   0  225340  22756  17280 S   0.0   0.6   0:00.06 pipewire-media-

What's works? Everything so far..

Playing music locally
Playing videos locally
Playing music/videos on the web
Video calls via Jitsi
Changing volume using xfce's pulseaudio applet

Except I can't change individual application volumes because pavucontrol was removed. I belive pavucontrol could actually control it, but I haven't tried it.

So worth switching?

If you want to be an early adopter, jump on in. If not Fedora and Ubuntu will both be including it this year (although I'm not sure if Ubuntu will replace PulseAudio with it).

This is my favorite line from the Fedora proposal: "...with both the PulseAudio and JACK maintainers and community. PipeWire is considered to be the successor of both projects."

It's generally a lot of work to get three projects to agree on standards between them, much less to have general agreement on a future path. I'm very impressed with all three groups to figure out a path to improve Linux audio together.