I’m glad this works for the author, but the “unfortunate PipeWire from RedHat” (direct quote from the article) Just Works for me with almost none of this thought involved. I plug in a DAC/interface, I maybe add the valid sample rates to pipewire.conf (this isn’t always necessary but I got in the habit of it from reading what I think was the ArchWiki section on bit-perfect audio), and hit play in cmus. Done - DAC changes sample rate to match the source FLAC, and I didn’t have to do any latency tuning, mucking with stuff in /etc, etc. It really Just Works, nothing “unfortunate” about it to me other than its strict dependency on dbus (like almost all desktop Linux software in the past decade or two).
Yeah, that’s quite a surprising take. PipeWire has been incredible for me, seamlessly joining the best of both JACK and PulseAudio with basically zero drawbacks (I’ve been using it since before Fedora made it the default). I’d be curious what led the author to make that comment. I can understand historic dislike of PulseAudio (even though that always worked for me as well), but PipeWire didn’t seem to have the same early teething pains and has solved a lot of real problems while serving as a drop-in replacement for what preceded it.
Sounds like you got lucky then. I haven’t had good working audio since pre-PA times. PipeWire improved a lot of things, but the state of audio on Linux just makes me sad. For a while the killer feature of FreeBSD to me was being able to change to use flags so everything builds without Pulseaudio.
Meanwhile I can only choose between huge latencies, or crackling on Linux and every now and then a video gets stuck somehow (though I am not sure if it’s PipeWire to blame here, or if things just coincided time wise). Linux used to be a lot better in that area when I started out using it. Now I put in days or weeks into this topic and all I can come up with are bad trade-offs. Installing Gentoo never was as messy and confusing as present day Linux audio.
I’m glad this works for the author, but the “unfortunate PipeWire from RedHat” (direct quote from the article) Just Works for me with almost none of this thought involved. I plug in a DAC/interface, I maybe add the valid sample rates to
pipewire.conf(this isn’t always necessary but I got in the habit of it from reading what I think was the ArchWiki section on bit-perfect audio), and hit play in cmus. Done - DAC changes sample rate to match the source FLAC, and I didn’t have to do any latency tuning, mucking with stuff in/etc, etc. It really Just Works, nothing “unfortunate” about it to me other than its strict dependency on dbus (like almost all desktop Linux software in the past decade or two).Yeah, that’s quite a surprising take. PipeWire has been incredible for me, seamlessly joining the best of both JACK and PulseAudio with basically zero drawbacks (I’ve been using it since before Fedora made it the default). I’d be curious what led the author to make that comment. I can understand historic dislike of PulseAudio (even though that always worked for me as well), but PipeWire didn’t seem to have the same early teething pains and has solved a lot of real problems while serving as a drop-in replacement for what preceded it.
Sounds like you got lucky then. I haven’t had good working audio since pre-PA times. PipeWire improved a lot of things, but the state of audio on Linux just makes me sad. For a while the killer feature of FreeBSD to me was being able to change to use flags so everything builds without Pulseaudio.
Meanwhile I can only choose between huge latencies, or crackling on Linux and every now and then a video gets stuck somehow (though I am not sure if it’s PipeWire to blame here, or if things just coincided time wise). Linux used to be a lot better in that area when I started out using it. Now I put in days or weeks into this topic and all I can come up with are bad trade-offs. Installing Gentoo never was as messy and confusing as present day Linux audio.
Not to stray too far off-topic, but I am curious: what distro(s) do you tend to use?
Arch Linux and Ubuntu.
There’s talk of realtime, but unfortunately no measurements.
I’d be interesting to run cyclictest from rt-tests (SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR), and compare behavior with Linux, with and w/o PREEMPT_RT.
Also, the scorn for PipeWire is baseless.