How hard is life without PulseAudio?

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bluebell
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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by bluebell »

Pulse and JACK can co-exist. On my machine JACK is the main sound system and Pulseaudio uses JACK for input and output(JACK sink, JACK source).

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by asbak »

On my older machines I can switch between Pulseaudio or Jack, and then pipe the Pulseaudio sound through Jack (if required).
On my new machine I disabled Pulseaudio and installed Pipewire as a Pulse replacement.

Scenario 1 - Pipewire acts as a replacement for Pulseaudio and as a poor man's Jack. In many cases the performance with Pipewire is sufficient to use it with Pulseaudio and Jack applications.

Scenario 2 - Kontakt doesn't perform well with Pipewire for some reason on my system (I don't know the exact reasons, my System & Audio & Pipewire configurations may be less than optimal, perhaps Pipewire just isn't as efficient yet and requires more development to match native Jack).

For cases where I need or want better performance and latency I switch to native Jack from Pipewire. Pipewire is stopped. Switching back and forth between Jack or Pipewire is done quickly with a script.

Do I miss Pulseaudio? No, lol. :mrgreen:

Some Focal / 20.04 audio packages and resources https://midistudio.groups.io/g/linuxaudio
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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by Impostor »

asbak wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 2:17 pm

For cases where I need or want better performance and latency I switch to native Jack from Pipewire. Pipewire is stopped. Switching back and forth between Jack or Pipewire is done quickly with a script.

So you actually lose functionality if you can't use Jack and Pipewire simultaneously?

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by asbak »

There isn't really a functionality loss. What there is are solutions that work better for a given scenario.

[1]
I can use Pipewire with its own Jack implementation, it isn't quite as good as native Jack but for many usage cases it is good enough.
When doing "consumer audio" type stuff including playing browser audio etc this arrangement works good enough for me. Mostly.

[2]
For cases where I need better performance (Kontakt seems to struggle with Pipewire, at least for me) I can switch to native Jack, but then I lose Pipewire and browser & consumer audio. I don't regard this as a huge problem, since I already have this working under the first scenario.

With [1] I have full functionality but performance under certain conditions (troublesome plugins, Kontakt etc) is suboptimal in my case.
With [2] I lose consumer audio but gain better audio performance. If I really wanted to, I could still pipe Pulseaudio via Jack but I don't think that for my case it's really required any longer.

There's a tradeoff involved with either option but for my purposes it is acceptable.

Some Focal / 20.04 audio packages and resources https://midistudio.groups.io/g/linuxaudio
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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by revoxs »

Run PipeWire on top of native JACK

Code: Select all

PipeWire can also run as a JACK client on top of the native JACK daemon if desired.

See JACK and PipeWire for more information.

Haven't tied this, but they state it's possible...

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by sunrat »

revoxs wrote: Thu Apr 06, 2023 11:48 pm

Run PipeWire on top of native JACK

Code: Select all

PipeWire can also run as a JACK client on top of the native JACK daemon if desired.

So that's basically the same thing as the Pulseaudio JACK module does now? JACK clients run direct to JACK, non-JACK clients run via PW, I guess. Sounds preferable to using pipewire-jack which emulates JACK in PW afaik.

I think I can wait for Pipewire v1.0 to be released before I seriously attempt to use it. I did a netinstall of Debian Bookworm recently and thought PW was to be the default sound server for Bookworm, but no it set up Pulseaudio. Maybe the full kitchen sink install of Bookworm will have PW. I have no issues running Pulseaudio via pulseadio-module-jack currently anyway.

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by GMaq »

sunrat wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2023 2:11 am

I think I can wait for Pipewire v1.0 to be released before I seriously attempt to use it. I did a netinstall of Debian Bookworm recently and thought PW was to be the default sound server for Bookworm, but no it set up Pulseaudio. Maybe the full kitchen sink install of Bookworm will have PW. I have no issues running Pulseaudio via pulseadio-module-jack currently anyway.

PipeWire is the default for Bookworm Gnome only... Count on Debian to have some restraint and common sense when it comes to something as fundamental as the default sound server.. PipeWire is getting better and better but it is beta software which should have to earn it's place by it's actual performance merits not it's 'newness' in Debian's Stable flagship. In these last few years of unbridled Linux madness this decision by Debian is a rare glimmer of hope to me.

Many current Desktop Environments are still hooking into PipeWire via their existing PulseAudio connections anyway so it's already bridging out of the box to get from the fundamental DE foundations to PipeWire... :roll:

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by sunrat »

GMaq wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2023 4:03 am

PipeWire is the default for Bookworm Gnome only... Count on Debian to have some restraint and common sense when it comes to something as fundamental as the default sound server..

That's good to know. I'm no fan of Gnome. Tried it recently again and wiped it a couple of days later. I seems to want to be pretty but mysterious, hiding many common config options, while being a pig with resources. KDE Plasma for me, more utilitarian, more efficient, and more configurable. And so far, no Pipewire. 8) :wink:

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by asbak »

revoxs wrote: Thu Apr 06, 2023 11:48 pm

Run PipeWire on top of native JACK

Code: Select all

PipeWire can also run as a JACK client on top of the native JACK daemon if desired.

See JACK and PipeWire for more information.

Haven't tied this, but they state it's possible...

Yes that's an interesting reminder thanks. I also came across it but don't know how to implement it. If somebody has the 2 minute tour on setting it up that could be very interesting.

Some Focal / 20.04 audio packages and resources https://midistudio.groups.io/g/linuxaudio
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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by revoxs »

PipeWire can also run as a JACK client on top of the native JACK daemon if desired.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ssues/2860
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ack-bridge
https://docs.pipewire.org/page_spa.html
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ugins/jack

SPA = Simple Plugin API. PipeWire uses SPA to implement the low-level multimedia processing plugins, device detection, mainloops, CPU detection, logging, among other things.
As I understood it, they have made a JACK SPA plugin, and when that is installed, it should just work.
But the developer answering to the issue says its not recommended because nobody touched the code for 2 years, "SPA JACK2 plugin should probably be considered untested at this point"; And that's also why this plugin does not get included by distributions, thus one has to compile it, and put in the spa_plugindir to work.

I asked the pipewire-debian ppa maintainer to include it for us for testing purposes..

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by asbak »

Thank you very much revoxs, that could be interesting to try out.

revoxs wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2023 12:38 pm

PipeWire can also run as a JACK client on top of the native JACK daemon if desired.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ssues/2860
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ack-bridge
https://docs.pipewire.org/page_spa.html
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ugins/jack

SPA = Simple Plugin API. PipeWire uses SPA to implement the low-level multimedia processing plugins, device detection, mainloops, CPU detection, logging, among other things.
As I understood it, they have made a JACK SPA plugin, and when that is installed, it should just work.
But the developer answering to the issue says its not recommended because nobody touched the code for 2 years, "SPA JACK2 plugin should probably be considered untested at this point"; And that's also why this plugin does not get included by distributions, thus one has to compile it, and put in the spa_plugindir to work.

I asked the pipewire-debian ppa maintainer to include it for us for testing purposes..

Some Focal / 20.04 audio packages and resources https://midistudio.groups.io/g/linuxaudio
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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by Audiojunkie »

folderol wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 10:19 am

I've not tried pipewire yet - waiting for an actual release 1.x release.

I think this is probably the best advice we could give to anyone who is not sure about Pipewire or has very specific needs from JACK. There is no reason for anyone to take apart a perfectly good system that is specifically using the JACK server for essential low latency audio duties. I think this is how I'll recommend things in the future:

Pipewire is working great for me. However, if you have any doubt, there's no reason to move away from what works for you. :)

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by oddy.o.lynx »

on a JACK system, I mask pulseaudio and pipewire so neither are running in the background

I use Cadence to start JACK, it can stop/start JACK MIDI and PulseAudio on the fly
for connections I use either Patchage or QJACKCTL (assigned to dummy card not ALSA)

the real question to ask is how problematic PulseAudio is with Linux Audio

the answer is very, no need to uninstall it, masking it is the way to go

viewtopic.php?t=23206

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by sunrat »

oddy.o.lynx wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2023 6:54 pm

the real question to ask is how problematic PulseAudio is with Linux Audio

the answer is very, ...

For me it is no problem. In fact quite an acceptable way to run non-JACK desktop audio applications into JACK using pulseaudio-module-jack.
Don't have to stop/start anything. :wink:

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Re: How hard is life without PulseAudio?

Post by asbak »

I've moved away from pulse now on reinstalled systems, replacing it with pipewire.
I've retained Native Jack for when I need it.

In cases where I need a little bit extra I wrote a dialog script that switches from Pipewire to Jack, or back.
Click click done. Click click undone.

Multimedia stuffs work, Bluetooth Headphones (for listening, not production) work great on PW.

Bub-bye Pulse.

Some Focal / 20.04 audio packages and resources https://midistudio.groups.io/g/linuxaudio
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