Pipewire as a replacement for pulseaudio

Are there any plans to migrate ubuntu to pipewire and wireplumber by default for audio, now that the LTS is out of the way? My anecdotal experience is that it seems to be working fine and in some cases (eg bluetooth audio, especially headsets) surparssing pulseaudio. Using Ubuntu Jammy’s built in packages.

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I don’t know anything about plans, but I noticed the ubuntu-destop/-minimal packages in Kinetic had these changes recently

* Added pipewire-pulse to desktop, desktop-minimal
* Removed pulseaudio from desktop, desktop-minimal

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That’s right, as of today the Kinetic iso (pending, not yet current since the changes were just made) has been updated to run only pipewire and not pulseaudio. So @copong, you can look forward to this for kinetic.

For Jammy, you might notice that you have both pipewire and pulseaudio running. This is because pulseaudio is still being used for the audio but pipewire is being used for the video. (Pipewire is needed for screencasting and screensharing on Wayland.)

I hope that clears up our plans regarding pipewire/pulseaudio but let us know if you have more questions :slight_smile:

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For many times tried to fix users problems on pulse audio for years.
I welcome PipeWire video and the audio which is integrated together.
https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/pipewire
Which may have other problems associated with its self.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pipewire/+bugs
I encourage the new substitute for pulse audio which is more complicated
to be advised to be fixed. Which is mostly complicated to be resolved.
On: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu
https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/pipewire
May I intrude as only one question of many for pulse audio…
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+question/701780
This is one of over and over questions for pulse audio to solve their questions.
I am hopeful that pipewire is more stable an more adaptive for audio as for 4.1 and 5.1 surround sound.
Thanks @ sabdfl My long time friend…

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Thank You… Very much…

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How is replacing pulse audio with pipewire going to affect jackd, kxstudio cadence etc?

@nostromo19: it shouldn’t affect those at all since pipewire is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for Jack as well. Programs think that they are talking to Jack when in reality they are talking to PipeWire.

Now with the switch done to Pipewire I would love to see Helvum packaged in the repos: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/helvum

https://repology.org/badge/vertical-allrepos/helvum.svg

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Thank you, that’s great news. I actually switched to pipewire already on 22.04 as I was having some weird issues with PA after upgrading from 21.10. Bluetooth headset support on PW is light years ahead.

Is there any tutorials that you will recommend ? I would like to swith to pipewire for audio too :slight_smile:

Sure, https://gist.github.com/the-spyke/2de98b22ff4f978ebf0650c90e82027e

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On Ubuntu Kinetic pipewire has a problem: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pipewire/+bug/1979113

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It’s pretty early still on the Ubuntu development cycle so I would imagine there’ll be a number of those from now to october.

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Does it work if you install wireplumber? There is an upgrade issue I am trying to better understand than fix in Jammy before installing wireplumber by default for computers upgraded to Kinetic.

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Yes, as I commented in my bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pipewire/+bug/1979113
installing wireplumber problem is solved. Note: my problem was on a fresh install of Kinetic, not upgraded from Jammy.

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I’m thinking that this is more of an issue with dpkg/apt than the specific package here. I think the /etc mask needs to not protect /etc/systemd/system and /etc/systemd/user when a package is removed. I don’t see any reason to preserve .service et al files in that directory when the package that provided them is gone. Maybe there should be a better method of preserving /etc in its entirety whereby files added to /etc as part of apt/dpkg package installations should be recorded along with a hash of their contents so that upon attempting to remove a package its files in /etc are purged automatically in all instances unless they have been modified by the user since installation time. (I see this as like replacing the contents of a modified file on package updates/upgrades, which currently prompt the user for a resolution method)

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goodbye pulseaudio and welcome pipewire … Screenshot from 2023-01-19 12-46-33

High Fidelity Playback \o/

Screenshot from 2023-01-19 14-01-48

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