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Comment by rescbr | Hacker News Reader

Rinse & repeat when every desktop environment brought their own audio daemons, then later PulseAudio and now PipeWire.

I still roll my eyes and I don’t get surprised every couple of years when somebody releases a yet another Linux audio daemon.

Maybe it’s some kind of Linux tradition.

At least PipeWire is saner compared to PulseAudio.

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> every couple of years when somebody releases a yet another Linux audio daemon.

You seem to be stuck in, oh, maybe 2008.

There hasn't been "yet another Linux audio daemon" in more than a decade. JACK came along in the early 2000's (I wrote it), and PulseAudio in 2004 or thereabouts. All that nonsense with esd, artsd etc. was over because the aughts were over.

artsd.... now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time!

Thank You For JACK.

Even though i don't do audio on Linux.

You seem to have missed pipewire.

While it supports the same APIs as Pulseaudio, it's still a new audio (and video) daemon.

The GP is about pipewire, and was complaining that it's "just another linux audio daemon". I concluded that it wasn't necessary to mention it in the context of my comment.

My problem is that all of these are incompatible. Woe be to whomever has an OSS app, an ALSA app, a JACK app, and a PulseAudio app, all of which want to run at the same time.

I don't get why this was never fixed at the kernel level. You have onions of layers.

PipeWire solves this problem. It provides ALSA, JACK, and PulseAudio emulation (no one has actually used OSS on Linux in decades).

It is the audio solution for Linux.

PipeWire does video too, and when combined with a compatible Wayland compositor, serves as a replacement for remote X11.

Replace "PipeWire" with "PulseAudio" and hey look it's 2010 all over again.

Don't worry, THIS time we got right FOR SURE.

PulseAudio never intended to replace Jack. And in fact, that's one of its biggest failings.

FWIW, I have recently switched from PulseAudio to PipeWire. I remembered how rough the switch from plain ALSA to PulseAudio was, and thus was utterly baffled how smooth the transition to PipeWire is. I just uninstalled PulseAudio, installed PipeWire, rebooted, and everything just worked, down to the Bluetooth headset that I never quite got to work well with PulseAudio.

.... Wait a minute. You got a bluetooth headset working reliably with Linux? Tell me more...

Yeah, I had the same experience. With PipeWire it (mostly) just works, and reliably. The only thing I'm missing is always presenting the microphone as an usable device and only switching codecs/profile when the microphone is being used.

Since I switched to pipewire, my audio is crackling every time the cpu is loaded (a ryzen 7...) not even jack was struggling with that on this machine

Pipewire is not finished at this point. It is being deployed "early" by some distros, apparently in the belief that it will help find bugs and help them being fixed.

Double check that you're running PipeWire with rtkit (this is the default with PulseAudio, AFAIK it is not the default yet on PipeWire).

It is really important to run a sound daemon with realtime privileges. This is the only way to ensure no cracks.

Thanks I'll check that

> At least PipeWire is saner compared to PulseAudio.

In what way?

Pipewire implements both ALSA psuedo-devices, the JACK API and the PulseAudio API. You only need a single daemon to address all possible audio I/O needs, something that PulseAudio could not do.

That doesn't sound like a recipe for sanity.

My experience with pipewire is it works better than pulseaudio, is faster, has lower latency, and fewer bugs. And it gets better all the time!

What I don't like is that audio systems on Linux are too complicated. For example, all that ALSA needs to do is to provide exclusive access to a device (only one program at a time) and send samples into it unmodified (no bit depth change, no resampling, no mixing, no volume adjustment etc). But open source developers cannot do such a simple thing. They added thousands of unnesessary features, hundreds config options and turned ALSA into a monster. When it should be just a dumb backend for PulseAudio.

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