PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus [LWN.net]

PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Posted Mar 3, 2021 19:32 UTC (Wed) by dezgeg (guest, #92243)
In reply to: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus by chris_se
Parent article: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

At least my personal recollection is that there was a period where ALSA software mixing (without any tweaking of .asoundrc or anything on most distros) was working very well, better than PulseAudio - as in, many audio problems could be solved by a "killall pulseaudio" (I do not remember if root was required for this or not).

However this was long time (years) ago, definitely before me owning any USB or Bluetooth exclusive audio devices. I do not even remember when "killall pulseaudio" last solved anything And regardless of that being able to adjust sound levels per-application with PA has been very useful (lack of it is not show stopper but just very nice to have).

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PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Posted Mar 4, 2021 4:52 UTC (Thu) by jeltz (guest, #88600) [Link] (2 responses)

I still have to solve audio problems by killing PuleAudio (last time I did it was about 2 weeks ago), and as far as I know it coul always be done without superuser privileges. I am one of the minority who never have experienced PulseAudio becoming stable, it is better than ti was when I first used it but still quite unstable.

PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Posted Mar 5, 2021 0:06 UTC (Fri) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link] (1 responses)

Killing/restarting pulseaudio (pulseaudio -k) after a suspend-to-RAM is required and sufficient to get my USB webcam microphone working again in ~90% of my suspend cycles. That's a few times per day. I didn't bother reporting that because I've seen too many pulseaudio bug reports being dismissed along the lines of "pulseaudio is never buggy, it's the fault of your driver/application/whatever".

PipeWire seems to care about not breaking existing setups and the article implies that the community is nice. I'm happy about that and look forward to testing it.

PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Posted Mar 5, 2021 5:56 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Not to defend PA, but it really smells like USB microphone driver problem. It seem not to handle suspend/resume cycle (while device is opened?).
If you do not report bugs, they won't be fixed. And you will have the same problem with pipewire.

PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Posted Mar 4, 2021 15:45 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (1 responses)

For whatever it's worth I still run purely ALSA with software mixing, including things like USB audio devices (just added a new mic yesterday), multiple applications playing audio at the same time, and everything Just Works with no issues. I do have a .asoundrc, but it's pretty boilerplate and I haven't had to change it in years. The only time I have audio trouble is when I need to run a program that only supports pulse (but there's apulse for that).

The only thing I occasionally pine for is per-process volume control.

PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Posted Mar 18, 2021 9:20 UTC (Thu) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link]

Is pure ALSA able to move a playing stream from one device to another (say, internal speakers to a Bluetooth headset)?