Functional version of Pipewire is now in bullseye-backports

[tlmiller]

So, if you tend to listen to music a lot on your Debian system, you may wish to consider switching from pulseaudio to pipewire. If you have OpenSUSE LEAP 15.4, Tumbleweed, FEdora, or Arch, you're already running pipewire most likely. I most definitely noticed that bluetooth sound quality is better with pipewire than pulse myself, so I was excited when I saw the backports packages.

On Debian, if you wish to make the switch, install the packages pipewire, pipewire-pulse, and wireplumber from bullseye-backports (It will also uninstall several packages that are obsoleted of the Bullseye pipewire). Reboot to have pipewire running. Then remove pulseaudio (removing pulseaudio before the reboot will also uninstall any volume controllers that are dependent upon pulseaudio such as plasma-pa, but because pipewire-pulse will be running, they won't be removed after the reboot).

[crosscourt]

Good to know as Ill be running Debian on my Lenovo Thinkcentre M600 tiny when it comes.

[tlmiller]

Forgot to mention, if you use bluetooth audio, you'll also need to install libspa-0.2-bluetooth from backports.

[crosscourt]

Thanks!

[wove]

Pipewire is the default sound in Fedora and it works well. I remember Linux have huge problems with sound when first trying the OS. I seems to remember a couple different projects trying to get sound going and the projects spending as much time arguing with each other as the developed their respective systems.

Everything finally started coming together then along came bluetooth and everything went back to not being as seamless as it should have been. Windows and Mac do that very well and it is excellent to see Linux getting just as seamless.

[tlmiller]

Pulseaudio was fairly seemless and functional. It's problem was that it was never the highest quality. Pipewire is able to work with Pulse, or Jack, or other sound servers to deliver specialty sound types. So you can listen to your bluetooth headset using pipewire-pulse (as long as you have the bluetooth libraries), then you can plug in your mixer and have low latency audio capture via pipewire-jack. This is something Pulseaudio simply couldn't do. So being able to use the day-to-say stuff AND be able to use a production qualtiy sound server was VERY difficult to get working with pure pulse as pulse and jack both expected to be the ONLY sound server. The very design of pipewire is superior since it just cares about connections, it doesn't actually care about the sound itself, so it's able to do both.

[crosscourt]

Never had any issues with Pulse and honestly so far Ive been very satisfied with the sound quality overall.

[tlmiller]

No, most people didn't have issues. Unless you were trying to do things that would be considered professional level audio capture/sampling. Pulse wasn't any good at this, and had issues getting to work with jack (which was designed SPECIFICALLY for this) so that they could both function simultaneously. Also pulse on SOME low end hardware would slam cpu usage, but I don't think they ever figured out why, as 2 identical systems with 2 identical installs 1 would slam the CPU usage on pulse, the other wouldn't. Ultimately, it was decided that the best course of action was a completely new server that was superior to pulse or jack independently, and could work with essentially containerized versions of them so that you could, as the saying goes, have your cake and eat it too.

[crosscourt]

No I dont do Professional audio at this point but I do a wide variety of projects involving audio and video and Pulse hasnt caused any issues.