Why is pipewire better than pulseaudio?

Lounge
81

pipewire and pipewire-media-session are already installed along with gst-plugin-pipewire.

1 Like
82

Iā€™ve definitely noticed some sound quality improvements since switching to pipewire today (many thanks to those forum members who helped me get it working!) well worth the effort

Running an Audioquest dragonfly red DAC into quality external amp and speakers

4 Likes
83

Thatā€™s annoying - I found pulseaudio was the issue - the stupid Surround 5.1 setting just messes stuff up and the only way I could get proper sound from MPV or Plex Media Player was to avoid pulseā€¦
With mpv.conf to get proper movie playback I must use

audio-spdif=dts-
hd,truehd,eac3,ac3
# use alsa for audio output
audio-device='alsa/hdmi:CARD=HDMI,DEV=1

But never any other issue.

1 Like
84

I decided to move to Pipewire. So pipewire, pipewire-pulse and pipewire-media-session are installed. Should I install pipewire-alsa too?

I see that my headphones/microphone (I use the mic as a usb soundcard) is listed as default.profile.alsa_card.usb-Samson_Technologies_Samson_GoMic-00. My webcam is also shown as an alsa_card (I donā€™t care about its mic).

85

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire#ALSA/Legacy_applications

1 Like
86

As I understand it, itā€™s just for applications that only support ALSA or I could use it if I donā€™t want Pulse for some reason.
So I donā€™t have to install pipewire-alsa just because it lists my card as alsa_card, right?

P.S.: I have sound (just some bugs), so itā€™s not a matter of fixing something.

87

It uses something like 1/10th the amount of CPU for the same latency and buffer sizes. Achieving sub 20ms latency is fairly simple on Pipewire, this is much simpler and faster than pulse and even jack which can be a huge pain to setup right. Pipewire can bring quality linux audio into the realm of OOTB which pulse couldnt hope for.

Ive been using pipewire with a Focusrite 2i2 and so far have done down to 10ms latency but my usual is 20ms and it hardly loads the CPU compared to pulse for the same settings. My hardware is capable of sub 5ms but i dont feel the need to try that.

2 Likes
88

to switch over you just install all the pipewire packages I.E pipewire-pulse, pipewire-alsa, etc. and it happens automatically

as for why, this is up to you but you dont have to. Pipewire has better dynamic buffers, lower CPU usage and latency, and better resampling quality.

3 Likes
89

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.