Linuxmusician01 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 13, 2022 12:32 pm
First of all: thank you for your clarifying reply. I'm just frustrated that after all these years I may have to learn something new that might make things even more complex for me when I already have a hard time getting my head around "things audio" on Linux as it is. Hence the rant. I'll calm down in a few years, like I always do.
Luckily we do not have to deal with Pipewire
and Pulseaudio at the same time. The way I see it now (I might be horribly wrong) is that Pipewire is some sort of replacement for the Pulseaudio/Gstreamer SnAFU. Pipewire appears to be audio
and video.
What I meant by my "do the Pipewire devs even care" remark was do they care that this makes things harder and makes people shy away from Linux. I now think that it's meant to make things more easy. However, that's only the case if
software will support it. DAW's nowadays rely on Jack for proper routing of stuff. I fear that some of my favorite old not actively developed software will not be updated to use Pipewire and I'm stuck w/ a deprecated Jack version to keep using it etc. I still like the audio players Audacious (not to be mistaken with Audacity) and Qmmp for their clear UI. What's gonna happen to them?
You say everything will be fine. Are you sure everything will work out of the box for new Linuxers? Pulseaudio works out of the box for (new) Linuxers too. But as soon as we want to do anything serious (like something as basic as a DAW) we have to figure out how to permanently disable that auto-spawning PulseAudio and learn how Jack works.
I hope my favorite software (Qtractor) will support Pipewire and that it's easy to understand and to configure.
I understand how you feel, I have to say that when I first heard about it I thought 'oh no, not another layer of complexity' but I have warmed to it considerably. When using it there is very little difference and you might not even know you are using it. One thing I really like is the fact that all of your soundcards show on the qjackctl graph with their names, a very small details admittedly but it's a welcome change.
I don't know much about Gstreamer or pipewire's video capabilities/aims but I think you're right, I'm fairly sure it isn't only audio.
It will make things much easier once there is more adoption. Even now it's pretty easy to set up or even swap between it and pulse/jack. For a lot of people pipewire is good to go with default settings and just works, there's no messing around trying to get sinks to work etc. Of course you can fine tune it in a similar way you can with Jack to adjust latency or sample rates. One neat feature is that these settings can be per application so you don't necessarily need everything running at 256 blocks/44.1khz etc.
So far I have only come across one or two applications that are problematic with pipewire, EmissionControl2 and (I think) Audiostellar. Having read through some reports it seems this is more of an issue with rtkit than it is with pipewire as such.
Audio players will still work. Some are already adding dedicated pipewire outputs (deadbeef, mpd) but if you set it to output to pulseaudio it will still work.
But as was just mentioned, programs don't need to officially support pipewire.