Is Pipewire ready for daily use?

What audio codec were you using prior?
I was having trouble with bluetooth in pipewire initially. I disabled the bluetooth service, reinstalled the bluetooth service, and re-enabled the bluetooth service to get it working. Now I do agree, it works perfectly for playback, and there isn’t significant latency, but it’s also not significantly different from pulse.
My prior complaints about bluetooth features/compatibility still stand. Those clearly don’t apply to your speaker, though they’re still worth mentioning.

My evaluation of the Pipewire latency is totally unscientific and anecdotal. I watch quite a lot of drum videos on YouTube and with Pulse this was quite frustrating. The sound of the stick hitting a drum came when the drummer lifted the stick midair and not when hitting the drum. After changing to Pipewire video and sound are in synch.

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If you use Bluetooth or multiple inputs & outputs, I’d say “no”. I tried it for a couple of months, but had to switch back to pulseaudio. I had issues around my headset mic not being detected or not producing any sound when using HSP. I also found that while using my Bluetooth headset I was unable to use the mic on my USB-C webcam (for the double whammy). In the end, I got fed up of having to start preparing for videoconference meeting 20 mins ahead of time. At the moment, pulseaudio just works, while pipewire is flakey. If you’re not using Bluetooth then your experience may differ.

I’ve gone back to pulseaudio for now:

Encountered issues with my bluetooth headset while resuming from standby. Seems the whole bluetooth stack is dying. Wasn’t able to reconnect the headset (Sony xm3) without a reboot.

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I’ll add my two cents to the discussion. I’m on unstable branch for a while and use pipewire a bit longer and in my opinion it’s replacing one issues with another. If someone is willing to jump on pipewire hype wagon, no problem. At the moment it should be a matter of choice, because it’s more like a ‘early access’. Some things work, some not. After one update its working stable, after another not really. I’m currently on 1:0.3.30-2 version and for example pulseeffects getting silence randomly, after closing it there is no sound and after relaunching everything is ok. I’ve check out issues on GitLab and there are plenty off issues like multiple outputs, issues with echo canceling etc. I’m considering that if pulseefects have issues with losing sound source, then should be similar for audio and video calls, which is not the best experience. Once I need to restart system because pw freaks completely and after login I’ve launched deadbeef, and it welcomed me with noise I can’t describe. It was pretty painful because I had headphones on :grin:

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My two cents - replying to this thread and the question that I asked about switching to Pipewire.
I have switched back to Pulseaudio, and I find the sound is much richer using Pulseaudio (only using my ears). Something else that I noticed while using Pipewire, whenever memory usage creeps around 1Gb if audio is playing, all the apps icons on the task bar would show a speaker icon as if suddenly all these inactive apps were playing audio.
I tried, I listened, and IMHO Pipewire is not quite ready for the big stage.

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I’ve been using Pipewire for the last few months with no issues until a few weeks ago. Every time I resume my laptop from s2ram I need to restart pipewire because there is no sound at all. I believe there is some issue with Pipewire not detecting the sound card until restarted. I guess I will have to investigate a little bit this issue and post some tech details to get some help from the forum.

A few months back, I tried Pipewire but the microphone didn’t work and it wouldn’t detect my headphones plugging in/out and always default back to the laptop speakers.

Last week, I tried Pipewire again in combination with Easyeffects to use noise-cancelling. It works well with the included microphone in the laptop. The sound is surprisingly well for this bad microphone, pulseaudio had a big problem with the quality.
My USB microphone, however, works only partly in some applications (OBS or other audio-recording software) but not in any chat application like Zoom or MS-Teams (both I have to use for work). Also, Easyeffects show that it is applying effects (noise cancelling, gate, etc.) but there is no output.

With pulseaudio, I have none of the errors but only in a few months, I can see a lot of progress and I can see myself trying it out again after the next major update. With pulseeffects being deprecated, I’m kind of forced anyway to use easyeffects.

@mithrial Likewise in a few months I’ll give Pipewire a try again.
As far as Pulseaudio is concerned, I have read that version 15.0 has been released. So there also I’ll have the new version of Pulseaudio (when it becomes available in Manjaro) and Pipewire to compare.
I still think that Pipewire is still years before it can really replace Pulseaudio.

Been running it for a couple of months now with no major issues. Also a requirement for running Easyeffects which I nowadays consider a must.

@CGA
Will try it with Easyeffects.
Maybe the combination of Easyeffects and having R128gain to my library will bring me a step closer to not annoying sound.
As usual, will report.

Not impressed and frankly giving up on Pipewire.
Yesterday, installed Pipewire along with Easyeffects. That didn’t go well. I had audio only in the right channel.
I think that I am too impatient. I know that Pipewire is not really ready. I was hoping against all hope that it would really be ready.
I just want things to work, not willing to be a guinea pig.
Thanks to Timeshift, this even never happened :laughing:

Even if Pipewire worked for you, Easy Effects in Plasma environment would be a real pain in your neck.
Disregard this. Probably theming issue.

I guess I must be lucky then, been running Pipewire on KDE the past four months without any major hickups.

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That really depends on your usage. I have in on a different Arch laptop working as well but there I don’t need any recording or effects.

All problems that I have with pipewire are in combination with easyeffects and (horrible) third-party applications (namely, Teams and Zoom).

I’m currently trying it again because with pulseaudio and pulseffects, the only application I need it for anyway is Zoom which also doesn’t work.

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@openminded
@mithrial
I must be a glutton for punishment. Yet again I’ll try Pipewire, this time without Easyeffects.
Frankly I don’t know why I installed Easyeffects, because having applied R128gain to my music library really negates the use of Easyeffects.
Once again, with feeling, hi-ho Pipewire here we go :crossed_fingers:

Nobody has mentioned r128gain before on this forum. I mentioned use of replaygain on the old forum a few times but there was not much interest

I suspect you have very different audio requirements to other Pipewire users
Easyeffects is needed by users for improving audio from laptop speakers but may not be required for good quality external speakers
Most modern laptops also have digital array microphones that need echo-cancellation to configure the beam-forming options

you might want to try using a minimal audio path that does not require Pipewire or PulseAudio
Set the profile of your preferred audio device to Off
and configure your preferred music player to connect direct to the device in ALSA
(This is similar to kernel streaming /WASAPI exclusive output on another OS, but that it does not bypass the mixer controls in ALSA)

For anyone else having this issue (unable to play audio after system resume from S2RAM), there’s a bug report and it seems the issue has been fixed in the latest Pipewire version:

Error:
client 0x55edc34302f0 [Firefox]: ERROR command:-1 (invalid) tag:1906 error:25 (Input/output error)

HTH

@nikgnomic

As of now I don’t know how to do that, but I’ll certainly find out how. I listen to music through a Klipsch 2.1 speaker. Before the Klipsch I had a Corsair 2500 2.1 speaker.

Thanks for the suggestion.

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Follow-up to my comments on bluetooth:
Everything is perfect for me now. I haven’t encountered issues with bluetooth on pipewire since before 0.3.33. With pipewire 0.3.34, support for battery indicators and aptX-LL codec on headsets will arrive too.