Pipewire-upstream PPA on AVL-MXE

[martibs]

Did anyone try installing Pipewire from the pipewire-upstream PPA on AVL-MXE? I managed to install it via apt, but when I try to launch the service, it fails:

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/pipewire: symbol lookup error: /usr/bin/pipewire: undefined symbol: PW_LOG_TOPIC_DEFAULT

Installed version:

Code: Select all

dpkg -l pipewire
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version              Architecture Description
+++-==============-====================-============-===================================================
ii  pipewire:amd64 0.3.38-2~ubuntu18.04 amd64        audio and video processing engine multimedia server

[LAM]

Don't know if it's a good idea to install PW in a special purpose distro crafted around JACK, but if you like to experiment go for it.

[sunrat]

Installing from PPAs which are intended for Ubuntu on a distro based on Debian is definitely not guaranteed to work. On MX forums it is very much frowned upon. But yeah, experiment all you like.
AVL-MXE is based on Debian Buster which was released way over 2 years ago when PW was basically not working at all. Probably the upcoming MX-21 based on the current Debian Bullseye will be better and GMaq has said he is in development stage of preparing a new release based on it.
There is a video by unfa where he gets PW working in Manjaro (after much faffing around) so that may be a better platform atm for experimenting with bleeding edge software.

[sysrqer]

Not sure about the relation between AVL to ubuntu but it certainly works well enough on KDE Neon so doesn't need to be bleeding edge necessarily if that's not your thing. There is a ppa for up to date pipewire and I use that.

[sunrat]

Not sure about the relation between AVL to ubuntu but it certainly works well enough on KDE Neon so doesn't need to be bleeding edge necessarily if that's not your thing. There is a ppa for up to date pipewire and I use that.

KDE Neon is bleeding edge KDE Plasma on top of Ubuntu. Would be a much better proposition to use PW on that than a Debian Buster (Debian 10) based distro like the current AVL-MXE release.
Also from the Debian wiki PW page:

In Debian 11, PipeWire 0.3.19 is available, and can be experimentally used as a substitute for the ALSA userspace library, PulseAudio, and JACK. This is a documented but unsupported use-case.
Much newer versions are available in Debian Testing and Unstable. For users of these branches, PipeWire should be considerably more reliable, and may be a comfortable drop-in replacement for many use-cases.

So it is still experimental in the latest Debian Stable release. Debian Testing and Unstable come with the associated management foibles of dealing with development versions - eternal upgrades and occasional breakage.

I'm actually really looking forward to being able to use PW replacing PA and JACK, but it's probably still a couple of years of for Debian Stable and Stable-based systems.
It certainly would be more feasible in bleeding edge distros like Arch (or Manjaro), current Ubuntu, probably GeekOS on Tumbleweed, and possibly Fedora as PW is coming mainly from the RedHat camp.

[TheYke]

Also from the Debian wiki PW page:

In Debian 11, PipeWire 0.3.19 is available, and can be experimentally used as a substitute for the ALSA userspace library, PulseAudio, and JACK. This is a documented but unsupported use-case.
Much newer versions are available in Debian Testing and Unstable. For users of these branches, PipeWire should be considerably more reliable, and may be a comfortable drop-in replacement for many use-cases.

So it is still experimental in the latest Debian Stable release. Debian Testing and Unstable come with the associated management foibles of dealing with development versions - eternal upgrades and occasional breakage.

I actually followed the Debian-Wiki to check out if PW works on my Bullseye machine not too long ago. It just worked for me in a quick test (after closely following the respective wiki-page). As I'm currently working on my sound design master-thesis, I nonetheless decided to go the safe route for now and switched back to Jack and PA. But as soon as this is finished, I'm pretty sure I'll try and make the hop on PW.

[sunrat]

I actually followed the Debian-Wiki to check out if PW works on my Bullseye machine not too long ago. It just worked for me in a quick test (after closely following the respective wiki-page).

I'm interested to hear exactly what you ran that worked. Recording with a DAW? How many tracks and plugins? MIDI recording? Was patching inputs and outputs straightforward?
I haven't heard many reports of success apart from unfa's video and maybe a couple here. More reports of partial or complete failure so far including several on Debian forums. Possibly those failures were by users who didn't previously manage to get JACK set up either.

[martibs]

I'm interested to hear exactly what you ran that worked. Recording with a DAW? How many tracks and plugins? MIDI recording? Was patching inputs and outputs straightforward?

I was able to build it from the Pipewire Github source, and run it in uninstalled mode. I usually run Jack with PulseAudio bridged. I played back some music via PA (Spotify), and loaded up an existing Ardour project. Worked out of the box, no routing required. Performance was an issue though, and there was XRUNs on 128/48K, which works without problems on my ususal Jack setup.

What didn't work, however, was running PipeWire as an installed service. It complained that it could not find the libpipewire.so. I'm not competent enough to troubleshoot these kinds of issues. The .so file was actually installed somewhere in the /usr/local folder.

[TheYke]

I actually followed the Debian-Wiki to check out if PW works on my Bullseye machine not too long ago. It just worked for me in a quick test (after closely following the respective wiki-page).

I'm interested to hear exactly what you ran that worked. Recording with a DAW? How many tracks and plugins? MIDI recording? Was patching inputs and outputs straightforward?
I haven't heard many reports of success apart from unfa's video and maybe a couple here. More reports of partial or complete failure so far including several on Debian forums. Possibly those failures were by users who didn't previously manage to get JACK set up either.

I have to admit that I did no heavy testing. Just playing back some music and starting a very small project. Every Port showed up in the Jack patchbay though (That is jack & PA). But I will try it soon, as stated, and then I'll happily share my experiences.

[sunrat]

Spurred on by this thread, Debian wiki saying PW is more advanced in Testing/Unstable, and unfa's video, I installed a fresh siduction (which is Debian Unstable or Sid basically). Followed the wiki using only packages in the repo and it works!
Just basic testing with a 13 track Mixbus 32C session, no plugins, played back for some time with no xruns at 256/2 48kHz. Even played a FLAC file in MPV at the same time with no xruns! Actually I'm playing a loop in MB and one just happened when the loop restarted.
Will test recording a MIDI keyboard tomorrow and a few other things like how low buffer will go. Past my bedtime now.

I was hesitant to try PW in Bullseye as it is unsupported but it seems like it's getting useable in Sid. siduction has PREEMPT kernel by default but I didn't do any optimising. I'll start a new thread for any more reports as it's not about AVL-MXE any more.

Edit: new topic for Debian Sid PW here:- PipeWire on Debian Sid - working (WIP)