I installed Manjaro on a new laptop and had a problem with bluetooth audio earbuds and right codec for high quality. I got the LDAC codec working simply by removing Pulseaudio and then installing pipewire-pulseaudio (and pipewire-jack). I just wonder why this is not the default. Afaik pipewire is better, is working, and is like pro AAA wonder suitable for serious audio work. Also it fix bluetooth hifi audio, for my dear shiny pro Huawei freebuds.
Shouldn’t this pipewire feature be default and the greatness promoted with with a huge fanfare?
That is true in most cases, but Pipewire is generally considered to be better and more modernized. Is there a specific reason for keeping Pulse as the default besides “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”?
That’s the wrong way to do this and will possibly remove other necessary packages. The correct way is just to install manjaro-pipewire, which will ask to replace any conflicting packages.
Also, Arch still installs pulse audio by default if you install any package that depends on it. You have to specify pipewire-pulse if you want it instead.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. I am exclusively running PulseAudio here on my system, and it works well enough for me.
I don’t know why either, but it didn’t work with PulseAudio and I did get the LDAC codec to work simply by installing Pipewire. The hifi audio option just gave no audio at all with PulseAudio. LDAC can do 990 kbps at 24 bit/96 kHz, I guess Pipewire can handle that but PulseAudio can not. Anyway I did not get a it-just–works experience with PA, and got the Pipewire solution from others on net with same problem.
Pipewire is still not considered mature enough, and too many people here at the forum are reporting problems with it.
Not sure who is considering this or what ‘too many reports about problems’ means. My case is at least one for Pipewire as a solution. There are serious problems/limitations with PulseAudio and difficulties with Jack-Pulseaudio bridge. I mean the pulse and jack combo, for using for example Ardour for audio work, is a huge mess. I am sure a lot have been reporting problems with that as well, and I am sure a lot just left because the platform was not mature enough for audio work.
I see Fedora considers Pipewire mature enough since 2021, Ubuntu since autumn 2022, and Debian 12 will go with Pipewire (summer 2023 I think).
That’s the wrong way to do this and will possibly remove other necessary packages. The correct way is just to install manjaro-pipewire, which will ask to replace any conflicting packages.
Also, Arch still installs pulse audio by default if you install any package that depends on it. You have to specify pipewire-pulse if you want it instead.
Thanks. Eh I installed that manjaro-pipewire now and hope I am ok.
About that dependency thing I hope it will be clear for me if/when that happens. For me it sounds like a bug, as the service already is handled by pipewire-pulseaudio and no package should have pulseaudio package as dependency.
You might want to remind the developers at Mozilla about that then. Last I checked, Firefox requires PulseAudio nowadays — or at least, if you’re going to be listening to sound through Firefox, such as from YouTube.
Manjaro i3wm only has ALSA by default so there is no one default audio server for all Manjaro ISOs
Manjaro users can switch between audio servers simply by installing metapackages so the default is not important. More important is that all users should have a free choice to use whatever packages suit their needs and other users should not be suggesting one solution only.
PipeWire replacement for JACK has been tested and found wanting by pro-users (Unfa never published the benchmarks for pipewire-jack)
For some pro-audio use-cases JACK is still the better option, but for some use-cases the optimal solution for low latency and and fidelity is no sound servers.
Ardour developers/community usually recommend using just ALSA
PipeWire users are not yet capable of resolving issues with PipeWire and ALSA
PulseAudio was not very good when I first started using it on Manjaro 8 years ago, and not very well known by the community. It took about 2 years for forum discussions to get PulseAudio up to “100th monkey” level
This forum, and reddit, are also full of reports of people using Pulseaudio (as installed by default in Manjaro) being unable to connect a pair of bluetooth earbuds, headphones or speakers, and listen to some audio through them (the connecting part usually works fine, it’s the listening part that fails).
And every single one of them (including me) solved it by installing manjaro-pipewire (often after being told that having both pulseaudio and pipewire installed was a misconfiguration).
Since we released Uranos in October 2023 we worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Vulcan. This is also our first release on which we switch over to Pipewire 1.0.