PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by mkdirp on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @05:33AM (#30612998)

I'm not a pro user but PipeWire has been mostly great. I originally switched because of PulseAudio was causing a hissing noise on with my bluetooth headset, and switching fixed it. However, there are still two issues that I'm struggling with and haven't been able to find a definitive answer for.

One is the audio sometimes randomly jitters while simply playing music. It seems this only happens when I use my bluetooth headset, but is fine with built-in audio.

The other is, when the automatic switching to bluetooth headset is hit and miss. Sometimes it switches, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes one applications switch, but others don't. So I'm left to use pavucontrol to switch things over correctly.

My searches haven't returned any fruitful results so I'm not if I'm just searching for the wrong things or I'm the only person who has these issues.

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Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by abdullahkhalids on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @11:12AM (#30616107)

I could not get the automatic switching either, so I wrote this script.

https://gist.github.com/abdullahkhalids/21a51240c13e19bfbb63...

I have bound Win+Home to the "general" option that connects to my earphones and correctly lets all applications use them as their sink.

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Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by mhitza on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @08:15AM (#30614053)

> One is the audio sometimes randomly jitters while simply playing music

I encounter the same issue from time to time. Almost consistently reproducible when I update the kernel and the VirtualBox driver needs to be recompiled (and there's no cap for that process that it should use max X% of CPU).

As pipewire is within the user session I would assume higher system load would induce some latency and cause the jitterness.

But in the end I'm just making assumptions, and correlating.

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Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by Arnavion on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @02:19PM (#30618814)

PipeWire, just like PulseAudio, uses rtkit if available. Your distro may have made it an optional dependency, so you may not have it installed.

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Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by mkdirp on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @10:35AM (#30615586)

This sounds about correct. I had a similar hunch, but I noticed it correlating to high memory instead (could be just a symptom, perhaps it was doing more swapping?). I increased my swap partition, which made it happen less often. It could be very well be the CPU.

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Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by nitrogen on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @10:39AM (#30615634)

Distros should really be setting niceness levels on more processes by default, especially background software updates. And anything audio-related really needs to be at a realtime priority.

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Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by durazabu on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @05:58AM (#30613182)

You are definitely not the only one was has the issue about the automatic switching to bluetooth headset. One workaround is to run `pactl load-module module-switch-on-connect` (not persisted across reboot) as recommended on the arch wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sound_does_not_aut...

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Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by mijoharas on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @07:35AM (#30613763)

meta comment: I find it's almost always worth checking the arch linux wiki for any software you're using (either as a guide or if you're having issues).

It's one of the best resources out there, though obviously if you're not running arch you'll need to tweak things from the suggestions.

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Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by InfiniteRand on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @09:20AM (#30614638)

Has switching to a bluetooth headset on Linux ever been non-buggy? I mean I imagine for specific hardware-software combinations it works robustly, but I feel like this is a periodic issue I have to deal with on Linux machines

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Re:PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead by mkdirp on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @10:09AM (#30615219)

For me on PulseAudio it consistently switched it as expected, however, it the selected audio profile was quite random.

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