Switching my Desktop to PipeWire

Background

While I did setup my new laptop directly with PipeWire back in December 2021, my existing desktop PC did remain with a PulseAudio setup.

What is PipeWire?

PipeWire is a new low-level multimedia framework. It aims to offer capture and playback for both audio and video with minimal latency and support for PulseAudio, JACK, ALSA and GStreamer-based applications.

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire

The reason I wanted to switch was, that I had some troubles with my bluetooth headphones (only the SBC codec was available in the A2DP profile and I had some reliability issues) and I heard that PipeWire should make this better.

Installation

Most of the pipewire packages were already installed as dependencies for other packages:

pacman -Qi pipewire 
Name            : pipewire
Version         : 1:0.3.71-1
Description     : Low-latency audio/video router and processor
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://pipewire.org
Licenses        : MIT  LGPL
Groups          : None
Provides        : None
Depends On      : libpipewire=1:0.3.71-1  libcamera-base.so=0.0.5-64  libcamera.so=0.0.5-64  libdbus-1.so=3-64  libglib-2.0.so=0-64  libncursesw.so=6-64  libpipewire-0.3.so=0-64  libreadline.so=8-64  libsystemd.so=0-64  libudev.so=1-64
Optional Deps   : gst-plugin-pipewire: GStreamer plugin
                  pipewire-alsa: ALSA configuration
                  pipewire-audio: Audio support
                  pipewire-docs: Documentation
                  pipewire-jack: JACK support
                  pipewire-pulse: PulseAudio replacement
                  pipewire-roc: ROC streaming
                  pipewire-session-manager: Session manager [installed]
                  pipewire-v4l2: V4L2 interceptor
                  pipewire-x11-bell: X11 bell
                  pipewire-zeroconf: Zeroconf support
                  realtime-privileges: realtime privileges with rt module
                  rtkit: realtime privileges with rtkit module [installed]
Required By     : lib32-pipewire  obs-studio  telegram-desktop  wireplumber  xdg-desktop-portal  xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
Optional For    : chromium  electron  electron19  qt5-webengine  qt6-webengine  sdl2
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 3.11 MiB
Packager        : David Runge <dvzrv@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : So 21 Mai 2023 15:17:29
Install Date    : Di 23 Mai 2023 22:53:42
Install Reason  : Installed as a dependency for another package
Install Script  : Yes
Validated By    : Signature

But first we install pipewire-audio:

$ sudo pacman -S pipewire-audio

Then we remove pulseaudio-alsa and install pipewire-alsa:

$ sudo pacman -Rs pulseaudio-alsa
$ sudo pacman -S pipewire-alsa

Then we install pipewire-pulse (which will remove pulseaudio and pulseaudio-bluetooth)

$ sudo pacman -S pipewire-pulse
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
:: pipewire-pulse and pulseaudio are in conflict. Remove pulseaudio? [y/N] y
:: pipewire-pulse and pulseaudio-bluetooth are in conflict. Remove pulseaudio-bluetooth? [y/N] y

When trying to stop the (now uninstalled) pulseaudio service to start pipewire I got an error:

$ sudo systemctl stop pulseaudio.service
Failed to stop pulseaudio.service: Unit pulseaudio.service not loaded.

Since I didn't want to invest too much time (maybe I should just have stopped it before uninstalling it?) I just logged out and back in to restart my session.1

Problems

After restarting the session pulseaudio clients seemed to be broken:

$ pactl stat
Connection failure: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

It turns out that for some reason the pipewire-pulse.socket listener wasn't active:

$ systemctl --user status pipewire-pulse.socket
○ pipewire-pulse.socket - PipeWire PulseAudio
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire-pulse.socket; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead)
   Triggers: ● pipewire-pulse.service
     Listen: /run/user/1000/pulse/native (Stream)

Starting it is as easy as systemctl --user start pipewire-pulse.socket and now pactl shows some output:

$ pactl stat
Currently in use: 2 blocks containing 8.0 KiB bytes total.
Allocated during whole lifetime: 2 blocks containing 8.0 KiB bytes total.
Sample cache size: 0 B

Also pavucontrol now shows me LDAC, AAC, and SBC-XQ in addition to just SBC:

pavucontrol showing more codecs

  1. I should probably have used systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service, since these are user units. ↩

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