Sound on linux is never getting easier, isn't it?

[dmpogo]

Split from "does gnome require now pipewire?" while it was still easy to split. -- Zucca

Sound on linux is never getting easier, isn't it ?

[lars_the_bear]

[logrusx]

[lars_the_bear]

[Zucca]

My experience with pipewire on just a laptop has been quite flawless.
I think I had to restart the daemon one or twice, when I have lost audio.

That's way, WAY, much better than with pulseaudio.
Pulseaudio constantly used around 4-5% of CPU cycles, and simply stopped outputting any audio.

When Pipewire was at some stage of being able to produce sound, I immediately switched to it. I disabled pulseaudio where ever I could.

Time will tell if we finally get proper solution for audio on Linux.
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..: Zucca :..

[szatox]

There is no getting easier than OSS, when you could just cat a wav file into /dev/dsp.
This said, being able to easily route sound from one application to another is a big step up, so at least the added software complexity (which is mostly hidden from users anyway) is provides real benefits it in this case.
PW take the good from JACK (virtual patch bay) and solves its problems. Like supporting multiple playback devices. Which is great. Dependency on DBUS is less great. Oh well...
Can't say much about PA, I've been using it for a while on another machine and I remember it crashing and tripping over its profiles quite a bit, but it was also a few years ago, when it was a much younger project.

You know what is truly not getting any easier? Printing. You know the joke about keeping a gun next to your printer, don't you? And apparently, people under windows don't have it any better. But that's a different matter.
Web browsing is not getting easier either, though for different reasons...

Anyway, "if you keep improving something for long enough, you're inevitably going to break it"
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Make Computing Fun Again

[lars_the_bear]

[dmpogo]

I did not mean really to start the discussion (it is pretty much deja vu), but I find amusing that when I have some issues now, such as disappearing sound I need to look at least in five or more different places.
Everybidy and their dog seems trying to control my audio devices. Audio can be be muted at Youtube level, at a browser level in the tab, at kmix level, some mix up with devices at pulseaudio level where you need to go to pavucontrol-qt, once I have to restart pipewire service, at last there are physical buttons on laptop (this already more than 5 levels) I am interested to know if anybody in this thread could claim that they can describe the architecture of playing a song in the browser in, say KDE desctop ? How things are related to each other ?

And yes, printing, especially with propagation of bonjour is an unstable mess. Even on Mac it is not very stable. I would say in lpd times we had a solid networking server. We had issues with particular printers drivers, later ppds, but postscript printers over lpd were a pretty solid setup. Now even that part is flaky.

[NichtDerHans]

OT: If I want to print something, I take my USB stick out of the house and go to a local copy shop. It costs a few cents per page, I don't have to worry about printershit.

[Zucca]

[dmpogo]

[mrbassie]

Why do you get extremely bad audio stuttering with pipewire when eg listening to whatever in the background at the same time as moving a file from one filesystem to another with checksumming going on (fletcher4 in my case)? Doesn't happen with pulseaudio or pure alsa.
_________________
I spent a christmas in Vienna twenty something years ago. It was a beautiful city. Everyone was so friendly.

[Dominique_71]

[Zucca]

[ChrisJumper]

[rab0171610]

[lars_the_bear]

[bulletbill22]

Everyone can see the problems of the existing audio services, but no one has the experience with audio development to be able to actually manage the project to produce a quality result. The people who do have those skills are being paid 6 figure salaries to work on some other project, and they're not giving that up so that you can listen to music. The developers, who can see the obvious problems of previous projects, don't have the time or experience to run that sort of project. You wind up with lots of volunteers adding features, which add bugs, which add hacky fixes, and finally the project gets released in a bloated / messy / unfinished / buggy state like all the others before it. Its either that, or eternal development as features get added too slowly to keep up with hardware changes.

I use ALSA. It works for me, so I don't need to switch or need anything new.

[Anon-E-moose]

Pipewire is audio AND video, not just a sound server.

You can use rtkit or just set the nice priority, and set the pipewire executable

[Zucca]

[dmpogo]

What I do not understand is that before pipewire I did not have to run pulseaudio daemon (it was compiled with -daemon flag) and everything was working. But now I have to run wireplumber, which is doing what ?
Session management ? I though I have polkit and elogind to do that, not to mention I do no use any multiple sessions.

[dmpogo]

[Anon-E-moose]

Wireplumber is the part of pipewire that handles interfacing to alsa and bluetooth for sound and elogind/systemd for session mgmt.

Pipewire/wireplumber is useful for containers, though that's not the primary use for it.

The video/audio sharing is part of desktop portals, ie sharing your desktop, or window with other people.
I don't use this part of it, at this time, as I'm not part of a group that needs to share my desktop.

It's not necessary to use pipewire/wireplumber for most cases, short of an individual application requiring it. just like pulse is required for some apps.

Don't want to use pipewire/wireplumber, most of the time there's a use flag to ignore it, for most apps.
If an app requires it, then it's your choice as to whether to use that app and the associated pipewire/wireplumber.

Pipewire consolidates alsa, bluetooth, pulse and jack in one place.
It was mostly a plug and play setup for me, emerge pipewire/wireplumber with use flags, and it was good to go.
I did spend some time messing with getting the equalizer set up properly, according to my listening preferences, but that's all.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

[szatox]

Pipewire moves data in data streams from sources to sinks. Wireplumber tells it which sinks consume data from which sources.

Anon-E-moose, what do you use for equalizer?
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Make Computing Fun Again

[Anon-E-moose]

The reason people are not using alsa so much, is pretty much the same reason people don't write apps in assembler anymore.
They prefer to write to a higher level app and let it talk to alsa.
All this from a developer view point, which is who writes apps, not end users.

I hate to think of the number of threads I've seen over time about how to get an alsa device to work properly,
or having bluetooth work seamlessly with alsa.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland