Pipewire on Ubuntu

That’s one of the reasons for sound servers like PulseAudio existing. If you still have any apps taking over the audio hardware then report a bug. They need to be compiled with PulseAudio support instead of accessing ALSA directly.

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You’d have terrible latency issues with PulseAudio on the apps like Ardour. So it was really just alsa or jack for them. But now PipeWire caters to both the PulseAudio and Jack use cases so yeeee!
Low latency audio out of the box is what I’m hoping for :smiley:

I know some people even do low latency kernels but hey, can’t win them all at one time :smile:

Low latency kernels are not lower latency for everything, so you should do your own testing. For example, when working on measuring graphics latency a few years ago I found ‘low-latency’ kernels actually gave higher latency in those tests.

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I use the Ubuntu kernel. I’ve found Ardour works great on alsa and Jack. It’s just that with PipeWire it should be perfect out of the box. No alsa take over and no messing (or messing up) with Jack and all of that. I may like tinkering very much but in the end I just wanna do my work without being bothered by stuff like this :smile:

Funny enough I get a huge latency problem if I install AMDGPU-PRO and I have no idea what’s up with that. But that’s a different issue, I’m just saying for anyone who might be reading and wondering why they have latency issues and this might be it.

Hopefully, that MR has been delayed by an avalanche of drama on what’s otherwise sorely needed. My bluetooth headset doesn’t work right when the mike is in use to the point I’m having to use the laptop’s mike instead.

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Given that we just use the debian packages as they are, you can just follow the Debian wiki documentation to use PipeWire to replace PulseAudio in Ubuntu (and / or Jack and / or ALSA).

Ideally IMHO we should try to switch to use PipeWire by default in next cycle though (not just for audio, but also for video multiplexing).

/cc @KristijanZic, @mhalano

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yes. That would be great.

In 21.04, the gnome is the same, PipeWire should at least be one good thing about the non-LTS update.

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Hello,
Did you try to use PipeWire for music production with eg. Ardour?

I observe discussions on PipeWire in some musician/sound designer’s discord and for today it’s mostly calling for help of PipeWire disasters and complaining eg. for not working audio plugins. Some “how to get rid of” talks also.

This is why I’m uneasy seeing such discussion, as my Ubuntu setup seems to be oasis of stability in compare to Fedora or poor fellows’s computers who try to use PipeWire.
I’m using jackd with PulseAudio sinked on Ubuntu 20.04 and do not complain. Everything works fine. No problems with Ardour stealing whole other sound.

Be careful people (or not too fast), the better is enemy of the good.

Edit: To make this post honest. They also look at Pipewire with hope, but at this moment no one seems to be lucky with it. Especially Fedora users.

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Do you have any experience to share about using PipeWire for JACK? How does it work using pure JACK instead (once pulseaudio is disabled)?

If you have not experience on 20.04, there’s this repository containing latest debian pipewire supporting focal.

Maybe you or someone using Ardour or similar professional tools can test it properly (in both ways)?

If you are running Jack on current Ubuntu releases, then you are already straying away from the default configuration. With some amount of configuration change, you’ll likely be able to continue doing so in future.

However, the hope is that PipeWire will remove the need to do any of that: we should end up with a sound server that is fit for purpose for both pro audio and general desktop use. If it delivers on that promise, there’ll be no need to rip and replace the default sound server if you want to use pro audio apps on Ubuntu.

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I tried just last week to swap pulseaudio for pipewire. It kind of worked for on-board and USB audio devices reasonably well, but I could not make bluetooth audio work at all (yes, I did have the correct packages installed) - audio interfaces would fail to connect / pair.

Maybe fixed in version 0.3.26?

  • Many Bluetooth improvements, support for hardware volumes.
    Bluetooth

  • Various memory leaks and crashes are fixed.

  • Added support for AVRCP hardware volume.

  • Added support for HSP/HFP hardware volume.

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We’ll see when it lands on 21.10 🤷

Will Ubuntu move to PipeWire in 21.10?

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I think Ubuntu should consider moving to Pipewire and replacing PulseAudio with Pipewire. Steam’s Beta version now requires Pipewire to run. If that’s the direction Valve is going to take, not moving to Pipewire will affect Steam users who’re on Ubuntu.

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Web browsers also use PipeWire because it’s the defacto interface for screen sharing in Wayland sessions. But that’s unrelated to potentially using it as an audio daemon.

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Well, here’s the thing. If we’re going to already install it (and it’s not just web browsers, btw, OBS also needs pipewire for screen capture in Wayland) we might as well go all out and let it handle pulseaudio and jack traffic as well.
We have the following use cases:

  1. User currently uses a mix of Jack and Pulseaudio software (ie Rosegarden and Hydrogen alongside vlc and whatever else). Jack is known to take access to the audio hardware away from Pulseaudio when it’s active. With Pipewire, Pulseaudio programs can continue to produce sound even if the Jack programs are running. Because Pipewire will handle both Pulse’s and Jack’s duties and manage, mixing it itself.
  2. There will be programs that natively uses pipewire for audio in the future. These programs will cause Pulseaudio’s own daemon and Pipewire’s daemon to fight over available audio hardware. It gets uglier when Jack gets added into the mix. The logical workaround in this scenario is let Pipewire handle Pulseaudio and Jack as well.
  3. Lastly, it just makes more sense to have just pipewire running and handling all three different protocols than having three daemons with similar functions but different protocols running concurrently and fight over the one available audio hardware.
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One point you are missing out there is that most users don’t install jack nor have such sophisticated requirements, they just want audio to work and be reliable in simple situations (watch videos, play music, make calls through skype/hangout/…).

We are in a known situation today which is working well enough to cover those cases and there is no compelling reason to switch now (from your arguments, 1- is a specialized setup, people who go install jack could as well install pipewire sound server if they wish, 2- is there any such software in the Ubuntu archive yet? 3- is basically back to the first point, there is no conflict on a default installation)

We will eventually want to switch but at this point pulseaudio has been around for longer and is better tested, pipewire is still new and needs to stabilize (reading comments online from fedora users quite some people have latency issues or sound artifacts and are switching back to pulseaudio to workaround those problems). It’s not the sort of change we want to do in a LTS cycle.

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EasyEffects natively uses PipeWire today. EasyEffects succeeds PulseEffects which is in maintenance mode. While EasyEffects is not packaged in Ubuntu today, it will likely be sooner or later.

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At first this sounds reasonable, but life isn’t that simple. What you’re suggesting is similar to “okay, Ubuntu uses systemd, systemd has networkctl, let’s throw Network Manager away and replace it with networkctl to manage all connections”. Well, it’s doable but not necessary at all, and also could bring more issues and user frustrations along the way. A thorough testing is needed first. Here’s just my experience with Pipewire as a replacement for PulseAudio: up to v. 0.3.30 I had been experiencing troubles with auto-detection of 3.5 jack connection/disconnection. Some people still have a similar issue even with recent Pipewire builds.

On the other hand, Pipewire has fixed some Bluetooth audio issues I had with PulseAudio before. And its development pace is very impressive, to say the least. That’s why I think Ubuntu should’ve joined the party and enabled it by default in 21.10 in order to find and fix every bug that would have appeared by 2022. Why not?

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