PipeWire

PipeWire is a sound server for the linux operating system. It is a fairly new sound server and aims to replace PulseAudio. It is commonly used in Wayland and Flatpak applications.

PipeWire aims to be for every user, where PulseAudio is for consumers and JACK is for audio professionals. To achieve this, PipeWire has the capability to adjust the sample rate as well as the buffer size on the fly. This is very useful for handling different audio applications.

Packages

• pipewire: Basic PipeWire server and user space API
• pipewire-alsa: PipeWire plugin to route applications that use ALSA through PipeWire.
• pipewire-jack: PipeWire plugin to route applications that use JACK through PipeWire.
• pipewire-pulse: PipeWire plugin to route applications that use PulseAudio through PipeWire.
• wireplumber: Session manager for PipeWire
• libspa-0.2-bluetooth: Adds bluetooth support to PipeWire

if you want to install all the packages listed above, install the pipewire-audio metapackage.

Setup

Normally PipeWire doesn't need any additional setup, however you might want to inspect the state of the server in case of some issues with your sound. The following sections will help you troubleshoot issues.

Restarting the server

To restart the PipeWire services run:

systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse

Inspect PipeWire's status

To list all devices that WirePlumber finds run:

wpctl status

To then further inspect a device:

wpctl inspect $ID

If this is still not enough information, you can dump the whole PipeWire state as a json:

pw-dump