Back to Pulseaudio

Having used Pipewire for a few months now I noticed that one or two of my audio packages no longer worked at all, or functioned properly. I was particularly annoyed when I tried to use AUR package - AudioRecorder, which I hadn’t used in a while. It loaded okay, but wouldn’t start when I tried to make a recording.

The other initial issue was EasyEffects. This didn’t work properly to start with, although in the end I managed to find a solution. This is a very similar looking package to its Pulseaudio equivalent, PulseEffects, which is also AUR. Except the former is in monochrome and the latter has coloured waveforms of your choice. It just looks much nicer.

Although I can live with the look of EasyEffects, AudioRecorder is a must for me. Strangely enough it works fine with Pipewire in Debian type Linux. So with Manjaro it’s back to Pulseaudio, where my audio packages now work fine once again.

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… So this is an announcement?

PS.

Having just installed and ran audio-recorder … this software is kinda janky.
It looks funny and has weird defaults and does a pretty poor job of any logging etc.
If you just launch it and try to record … its likely chosen a bad audio source.
And instead of failing, when a bad source is selected, the program locks up and needs to be forcefully terminated.
But … if you choose the correct audio source … it will work.

That was my experience with audio-recorder and pipewire.

Uninstalling now.

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Yes, same here.
There is an easy alternative for audio-recorder:

pw-record -P'{stream.capture.sink=true}' file.wav

Well audio-recorder has always worked well for me whether choosing Pulseaudio or Alsa as a source. Yes. It did lock-up each time with Pipewire and it took took several seconds to close it. Anyway I have it working fine now on PA. Maybe it has some dependency missing with Manjaro.

It occurred to me to try Audaciity (which I installed a few years ago) as a means of recording streams, although all the demos I have seen always use a mic as a recording source. However it did work using streaming as a source, although I haven’t yet checked whether that would still be the case with Pipewire on Manjaro.

pw-record is a PipeWire CLI alternative for parecord and arecord

The Autostart option is enabled by default but the tray icon is disabled so no way to know it is loaded
The audio level meter works when recording but it is just a narrow white line for me on Xfce
There should be an option to change the button to close GUI to minimise to tray so it can continue recording

The timer options look like they may be useful (/usr/share/audio-recorder/timer-syntax.html)

The recording options appear to be presets that can be edited or replaced,
so maybe package can be configured to use pw-record command (or similar) on pipewire-pulse?

I use butt for simple audio recording tasks but that has different features to this package