Hacker News Reader

Comment by odiroot | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Pipewire for over a year now. Both for normal desktop tasks and music production. It's just great. So much better than just Pulseaudio or JACK. And at times even better than these two combined.

I have 4 soundcards present on my system (built-in, external webcam, USB audio interface, USB synthesiser) and Pipewire can handle it all at once.

Bluetooth headphones are also handled well. They connect by default with aptX (A2DP mode) but using KDE tray icon, I can easily change it to full-duplex headset mode with mSBC.

And then I can use (not that I would always want to) any of these devices together (e.g. in a DAW).

View on HN

> They connect by default with aptX (A2DP mode) but using KDE tray icon, I can easily change it to full-duplex headset mode with mSBC.

As of wireplumber 0.4.8, they will now automatically switch to the headset profile when an application begins recording audio! It's now almost seamless (though I do still need to manually select the audio device every time in Firefox).

I actually turned that off as I prefer keeping the headphones in A2DP mode and using a separate microphone.

How do you turn this off?

The setting is in 10-default-policy.lua.

> they will now automatically switch to the headset profile when an application begins recording audio

My phone does this and I find it incredibly annoying, because the profile that uses a microphone has terrible sound quality, and a constant low-volume background white noise.

Meanwhile what I want is a way to configure it to never ever, under any circumstances, use the headset profile.

> I've been using Pipewire for over a year now.

Same. I've had a nearly flawless experience so far. I can't praise Wim Taymans and the Pipewire team enough. It's great to see the progress since one of my earliest Linux memories circa 2005 was audio sucking eggs on Ubuntu.

What DAW do you use? I tried Ardour but gave up because MIDI experience wasn't good compared to Cubase.

Not OP, but I use Bitwig. It's well worth the money.

Reaper's also worth a look if you're primarily recording, but it does have some MIDI capabilities.

Ardour does actually not have a good MIDI experience ... this will change with the upcoming 7.0 version. The MIDI experience overall doesn't have anything to do with Jack

What are some of the problems y'all have encountered with its MIDI experience? Seems to be alright for me, though I ain't doing anything particularly fancy with it.

I currently use Bitwig because it's the only Linux-native DAW that I can grasp. If Ableton released a Linux version, I'd probably switch.

Interesting you and others use Bitwig, which I've never even considered using before. Maybe I should pay broader attention.

It is quite pricey (or you can buy the cheaper 16-track version) and still missing some substantial DAW features, so it's not an obvious choice.

  > So much better than just Pulseaudio or JACK. And at times even better than these two combined.

This is great news. Might they write an init daemon next? Pretty please??

Npghnyyl, V _qb_ yvxr flfgrzq.

The irony of your comment is that a huge part of PipeWire being this good is the work of the PulseAudio devs. When PA first came out, the experience was terrible because it exercised drivers in a way that plain ALSA or previous audio daemons had not done. Over the years, the drivers got their shit together, so now PipeWire has competent drivers to work with. That's not to say that PipeWire is not an impressive achievement in its own right (it absolutely is!), but it's not as much of an uphill battle than what PulseAudio had to fight.

No irony at all, I understand the situation that led up to both PA and systemd. That's why I wrote:

  > Npghnyyl, V _qb_ yvxr flfgrzq.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com