What are the main differences between pipewire and pulseaudio? Which one is better? What are other alternative popular sound servers besides these two?

  • bloopernova@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Pipewire is the new hotness. I’ve read comments from various audio engineers and programmers that pipewire “gets it right”.

    Pipewire came out in 2017, pulseaudio in 2004.

    “PipeWire has received much praise, especially among the GNOME and Arch Linux communities. Particularly as it fixes problems that some PulseAudio users had experienced, including high CPU usage, Bluetooth connection issues, and JACK backend issues.”

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio

  • The Postminimalist@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    28
    ·
    1 year ago

    Pipewire is much better than Pulseaudio, especially for pro audio work because of its low latency. Another popular option is JACK, which must be used in conjunction with Pulseaudio. Harder to set up, but is also great for pro audio. Some audio engineers were having issues with Pipewire when it first came out so they went back to using JACK, but I think Pipewire has improved. Pipewire has been flawless on my end.

    If you’re not in pro audio or any kind of multimedia work, it doesn’t really matter and you can just stick with whatever comes pre-configured on your distro. But my vote goes to Pipewire as the best server for pretty much anyone.

    • biscuits@lemmy.sdfeu.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I have had some problems with PipeWire as JACK replacement, mostly it was some tearing artifacts that were very annoying. Recently though I learned how to use PipeWire (which is great for general desktop audio usage + works with Bluetooth really good) with JACK for pro-audio applications. By using the JACK DBus detect module it is possible to turn PipeWire into JACK client when ever the latter one is started.

      So this way it is not required to use PulseAudio at all with JACK. There’s also possibility to use PipeWire as JACK server because it also provides such API.

      • Toidi@artemis.camp
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’ve been running Pipewire in pro audio setup for my son and his band mates since the early days of the project. Granted I did run into some issues at first, but for a long time now it has been solid as a rock. With all of the plugins it is a joy to work with, no more Jack, Jack 2, Alsa, Pulse bridging and configuration nonsense, it all just ‘works’ now.

        I would recommend it to anyone as a first option when setting up anything audio related on Linux now.

        • biscuits@lemmy.sdfeu.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I believe that PipeWire is really solid piece of software, but I couldn’t just let go of JACK just yet. JACK just works and it’s easy to modify important parameters like sample rate or buffer size. On PipeWire I still don’t know how to quite do that, I get lost in all those configuration files, but I will get it someday.

          Also one more thing that might be niche, but it’s important for me is JACK timecode (for synching i.e. a DAW with video player) which PipeWire doesn’t support at all at the moment. Getting it work on PipeWire (converting JACK timecode to LTC or MTC) gets ugly pretty quickly. So I’m glad PipeWire allows to use it however I like it, either as JACK server or client.

    • Gamey@feddit.rocks
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      I think that’s half true, Pulseaudio always was very buggy and a main reason for Linux bad reputation regarding none pro audio but most Distros switched already so if you use the default it will probably be Pipewire already.

      • uis@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        I don’t even know why PA grew so much in the first place besides per-application volume control, unkept promises and straight lies.

    • uis@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      which must be used in conjunction with Pulseaudio

      Why? Just why?

      any kind of multimedia work, it doesn’t really matter and you can just stick with whatever comes pre-configured on your distro. But my vote goes to Pipewire as the best server for pretty much anyone.

      Or gaming. PulseAudio has insane latency. Use JACK or no server(that means use ALSA). Maybe Pipewire has tolerable latency, but I didn’t test it myself.

  • Presi300@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    23
    ·
    1 year ago

    Tl;Dr use pipewire, it’s just better and also handles screen capture on Wayland (which looks way better and has a much lower performance impact than X native screen capture in my experience)

  • donuts@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    1 year ago

    Pipewire seems to do everything better than PulseAudio, in my experience. It’s stable, compatible with PulseAudio and JACK stuff, works for low latency stuff like music production, can be routed flexibly, etc… As someone who used to run a PulseAudio+JACK stack but has since replaced both with just PipeWire, I’m a big fan.

  • hummel@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Never had problems with pulseaudio, but pipewire solved all issues i had with Jack so best of both worlds! :)

  • narshee@iusearchlinux.fyi
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    What are other alternative popular sound servers besides these two?

    ALSA; low level, not really recommended to use directly. JACK; professional audio. GStreamer; idk exactly. Pipewire supports applications using any of those.

  • Miku Luna \ she/it@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    Not directly answering your questions:

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire
    I’m bad at describing so take the Arch wiki page.

    You don’t really have to worry about configuring much, it should be fine to install all the packages, maybe enable some services, and forget about it.

    It’s likely that you’re not using Arch, so you’ll have to check your distro’s repos for the packages.

    • spauldo@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Pulseaudio was always buggy for me. I’ve only tried pipewire recently and so far I’ve had no issues.

      The only downside is that (from having to do so much troubleshooting) I know more or less how to configure and tweak pulseaudio. If I ever decide to do weird sound things with pipewire, I’m starting from scratch.

      • Carter@feddit.uk
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Pipewire came installed by default on my OpenSUSE TW install and I never get audio in games. I have to constantly switch audio devices until it finally decides to work. I swapped it out for pulseaudio and I’ve never had an issue since.

        • Gamey@feddit.rocks
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Strange, I had to manually restart Pulseaudio for months before I finally decided to switch to Pipewire, I guess Linux audio just still sucks!

  • uis@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Read xkcd. To be fair it doesn’t seem to create new audio api, but be alternative implementation.

    I still recommend bare ALSA for average users. This includes gamers.