PipeWire 0.3.60 Released With Many Fixes, Improvements

[Audiojunkie]

PipeWire 0.3.60 Released With Many Fixes, Improvements

https://www.phoronix.com/news/PipeWire-0.3.60-Released

Written by Michael Larabel in PipeWire on 10 November 2022 at 08:14 AM EST. 24

PIPEWIRE -- PipeWire 0.3.60 is out today as the newest update to this software used for managing audio and video streams on Linux. With modern Linux distributions PipeWire is increasingly used now as the replacement to PulseAudio in addition to its video capabilities.

PipeWire 0.3.60 contains various fixes and improvements, including around PipeWire camera support for OBS Studio for those doing any screencasting/capturing from the Linux desktop.

PipeWire 0.3.60 also has many Bluetooth improvements, the ALSA plugin will only start playback when there is data, many libcamera and V4L2 improvements, enhancements to various other modules, pw-top has seen enhancements on the tooling front, and a few additions on the JACK side.
Highlights

• The filter-chain now handles errors better and has fixes for many crasher bugs.

• A new RTP module was added with a sender and receiver. It uses SAP to announce and consume RTP streams and is compatible with the PulseAudio RTP modules.

• Many small bluetooth improvements and fixes.

• The alsa plugin will now only start playback when there is data. This results in better sync and lower latency between capture and playback.

• The v4l2 and libcamera plugins have seen a lot of improvements. They support control properties now. Also pw-v4l2 has seen many improvements and mostly passes the v4l2-compliance test now.

• Many more bugfixes and improvements.

See the full list of PipeWire 0.3.60 changes over on the FreeDesktop.org GitLab.

[Audiojunkie]

It just keeps getting better!

[Tapper]

Nice. Very promising project. All the best wishes to you guys. So flexible, so powerful. I hope at least with Pipewire xruns will finally gone someday. Jack (or apps that uses him?) is hopeless, any magic or in the world couldn't make xruns gone.

[folderol]

Nice. Very promising project. All the best wishes to you guys. So flexible, so powerful. I hope at least with Pipewire xruns will finally gone someday. Jack (or apps that uses him?) is hopeless, any magic or in the world couldn't make xruns gone.

Without in any way detracting from the work on pipewire, if you are getting Xruns with Jack you're doing something wrong - or have an under-powered / mis-configured system.
I'm working with a mid range computer, an elderly KA6, and work at 64 frames, 3 periods - giving a 4mS latency. The only time I see maybe one Xrun is if starting up a group of programs at once.

[sysrqer]

Nice. Very promising project. All the best wishes to you guys. So flexible, so powerful. I hope at least with Pipewire xruns will finally gone someday. Jack (or apps that uses him?) is hopeless, any magic or in the world couldn't make xruns gone.

I'm not getting any audible or noticeable xruns with pipewire. What kind of settings are you running?

[Tapper]

I'm not getting any audible or noticeable xruns with pipewire. What kind of settings are you running?

If I do not record audio I don't hear xruns either, but try to record and look at the wave. You will see them, and hear them. No, with pipewire I get a lot better result, but it's not stable. One day it is perfect on 64/48000 with all the blows and whistles and youtube playing in the browser, other day I can't get rid of xruns even on 2048/48000 with bare DAW with one track. Depends on wind, air pressure... I don't know

[Tapper]

if you are getting Xruns with Jack you're doing something wrong - or have an under-powered / mis-configured system.

I hear it all the time. From the beginning of jackd project. I have read all the possible forums and manuals, tried everything on every computer that I had and there was always "You are doing something wrong, I get zero lattency on Commodore 64 with Jack!!!" but I newer had a stable working environment. "Try to disconnect wifi!", "compile new kernel!", "Get rid off the nvidia blob!", "Try to tell your neighbors to turn off their iron!", "try to run computer inside Faraday's cage!", "Just put it on side!" while windows DAWs running on regular computer with wifi, iron, in any circumstance ALL THAT TIME. I am tired of this, I want to make music, not fighting with my computer to make jackd running. Pipewire is a lot closer.

[folderol]

Looks like some rogue program is hogging the CPU. Get gkrellm and run it with individual CPUs showing.
Have it running all the time. This will give you an indication of what is going on, regardless of whether you are running any audio.

If you're seeing suspicious activity, slightly more involved is to run htop from a terminal window. This will show you exactly which programs are loading the processor most.