PipeWire integration discussion?

[DeepDayze]

IMO - on Debian, wireplumber and pipewire will only be 'reliable' on Debian-12 (forget trying to get it to work on Debian 11).

I used the test pipewire-3.58 and wireplumber 4.12 packages and set them up according to the debian 11 wiki and works for me. Even masked pulse service to keep it from starting, plus installing the pipewire-pulse package as well. YT videos play with no juddering so does audacious, including using a bt headset. So yes PW works on MX :)

Note: Sid has the PW 3.59 and wonder if that would be backported to MX test repo to try out...

Any details or system-wide configs you can provide would be very much appreciated, as a personal example I'm using and testing Enlightenment as a future Desktop Environment and it reportedly requires pipewire-pulse as it doesn't directly work with PW, are you saying you have simply disabled PulseAudio on your system or have you removed it completely? I'm a little unclear if PulseAudio and JACK are still required on the system or if PipeWire completely replaces them with it's own server and clients.

I would concur that any info about performance with sysvinit will be vital to know.

On my MX-21 system I simply disabled the pulseaudio systemd unit but will also disable the autostart one under sysvinit as D-O mentioned. I did not remove any pulse packages yet except for the pulse bluetooth one and installed the ladspa-0.2 bluetooth package.

[dolphin_oracle]

ah, I was starting wireplumber twice under systemd, and it caused issues with managing devices. now to figure out why...

[DeepDayze]

ah, I was starting wireplumber twice under systemd, and it caused issues with managing devices. now to figure out why...

Perhaps the autostart script you set up for WP to run under sysvinit should somehow be inhibited to run under systemd.

[dolphin_oracle]

ah, I was starting wireplumber twice under systemd, and it caused issues with managing devices. now to figure out why...

Perhaps the autostart script you set up for WP to run under sysvinit should somehow be inhibited to run under systemd.

yep, my thinking exactly. the systemd --user stuff is slightly different with the backports versions of pipewire vs. the debian stable. so you don't actually need to create any systemd services, its setup to start already under systemd. masking the services works OK for first boot/login, but subsequent logins the masked services were apparently still processed. which was annoying to say the least since I though I had disabled them.

modifying the script in my post, and here:

Code: Select all

#/bin/bash

INITCHECK=$(ps -p 1 -o cmd -h)

if [ "$INITCHECK" = "/lib/systemd/systemd" ]; then 
	exit 0
fi
#else start them up
pipewire &
pipewire-pulse &
wireplumber &

and now that that's all sorted out, my multple audio outputs/inputs are showing in xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin again! yay! (although autoswitching to the bluetooth headset is gone again, I think that was a product of the wireplumber service using the lone audio source it could find after the conflicting services were started).

[DeepDayze]

That script's pretty elegantly simple and can be useful for any service you want to start only under sysvinit as systemd has its own units for starting them. Perhaps possible to write a sysv init script that's called like any other init script to start and stop PW and WP upon system startup/shutdown in sysv mode and maybe the PA init script might be a good model for it. Of course under systemd these scripts are never called.

EDIT: Did you install the ladspa-0.2-bluetooth package and remove the pulseaudio-module-bluetooth package, @dolphin_oracle ? Now to find how wireplumber can get the correct device to switch to ...

[dolphin_oracle]

That script's pretty elegantly simple and can be useful for any service you want to start only under sysvinit as systemd has its own units for starting them. Perhaps possible to write a sysv init script that's called like any other init script to start and stop PW and WP upon system startup/shutdown in sysv mode and maybe the PA init script might be a good model for it. Of course under systemd these scripts are never called.

EDIT: Did you install the ladspa-0.2-bluetooth package and remove the pulseaudio-module-bluetooth package, @dolphin_oracle ? Now to find how wireplumber can get the correct device to switch to ...

pipewire actually is meant to rn as a user service, so you don't actually want a sysVinit script for it (pulseaudio doens't have one either). systemd has the concept of user services (systemctl --user) so its ok to use service files under systemd as they also are processed on the user level.

I did install ladspa-0.2-bluetooth package and remove the pulseaudio-module-bluetooth and I edited my big how-to post to reflect latest changes, including moving the pipewire-start script to /usr/bin and the autostart entry to /etc/xdg/autostart to make it common to all users.

[dolphin_oracle]

oh @DeepDayze one other thing. you cannot actually remove pulseaudio at the moment unless you also remove firefox...

[DeepDayze]

oh @DeepDayze one other thing. you cannot actually remove pulseaudio at the moment unless you also remove firefox...

Yes can confirm firefox would be removed in MX-21 but was able to purge pulse on my Sid box even with firefox installed, as MX-21's firefox was built to depend on pulse. So all I did on my MX-21 install was to simply mask the pulse service to keep it from starting and left the packages installed.

If somehow pipewire-pulse was added as another option for depends for the MX build of firefox and make pulse suggested maybe then pulse can be completely removed except the pipewire-pulse package.

Gotcha about pipewire/wireplumber to be started as user...makes good sense.

[dolphin_oracle]

I masked it as well, but its not really necessary. the pipewire-pulse plugin replaces it.

[dolphin_oracle]

oh @DeepDayze one other thing. you cannot actually remove pulseaudio at the moment unless you also remove firefox...

Yes can confirm firefox would be removed in MX-21 but was able to purge pulse on my Sid box even with firefox installed, as MX-21's firefox was built to depend on pulse. So all I did on my MX-21 install was to simply mask the pulse service to keep it from starting and left the packages installed.

If somehow pipewire-pulse was added as another option for depends for the MX build of firefox and make pulse suggested maybe then pulse can be completely removed except the pipewire-pulse package.

hmm... they moved pulseaudio to a "suggests" in sid. @mmikeinsantarosa might be something to consider for our firefox packages...