What are the main differences between pipewire and pulseaudio? Which one is better? What are other alternative popular sound servers besides these two?

  • bloopernova@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    Pipewire is the new hotness. I’ve read comments from various audio engineers and programmers that pipewire “gets it right”.

    Pipewire came out in 2017, pulseaudio in 2004.

    “PipeWire has received much praise, especially among the GNOME and Arch Linux communities. Particularly as it fixes problems that some PulseAudio users had experienced, including high CPU usage, Bluetooth connection issues, and JACK backend issues.”

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio

    • Audbol@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Audio engineer here. Anything ALSA inherently does not “get it right”. It’s time for Linux to get HAL audio drivers

      • bloopernova@programming.dev
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        10 months ago

        What sort of problems have you heard of or seen? I’d like to hear your different perspective, if that’s ok with you?

        • Audbol@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Fewer kernel calls between hardware and software for loerw latency processing of audio is a must, there is a minimum amount of latency you can have with audio for anyone performing and that’s debated by a total round trip time frame. From the second someone plays a note on say a guitar to the moment the resulting sound comes out of their speakers and into their ears is rather critical for timing.

          Trouble is to do most anything with digital audio you require a buffer (here we add more latency) so that we can do the things we need to. Your audio device will have it’s own buffer (and in the case of ALSA and Linux) your operating system will implement what’s considered an audio “server” which will add is own buffer to route to whatever you are thinking you need to do and blah blah so on so forth. HAL drivers like ASIO mean you have much higher stability and much lower latency as you now have fewer buffers which is less added latency, fewer interruptus to deal with, and everything just kinda works in harmony. If you want to learn more consider first learning what ALSA is or any of the terms I originally used. I suggested starting with the wiki page where all of this is already explained

            • Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Well if they had actually added something other than “that bad, this good” we might actually know.

              • Audbol@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to explain the entire topic in a simple lemmy comment about something that is so easy to search for and learn about.

        • Audbol@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I answered below, you can also read on any of the ALSA pages as well as the wiki page for it. Wealth of knowledge on the subject is available