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Whole home audio and AES67 in Pipewire (beehaw.org)

submitted 3 weeks ago by jcarax@beehaw.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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Is anyone using Pipewire's AES67 support? I'm looking to implement some form of whole home audio for an MPD or some other music server. I've played with a combined airplay sink and a couple Sonos speakers, but it's problematic and cuts out intermittently for a split second.

I'm only really able to use wifi at this point though, and don't want to run cables until I buy a house in the next few months. Though I will run some wired tests over coming months before that, and develop a plan. I've also looked into Snapcast, which is probably preferable to a combined Airplay sink.

And that's because I'm wary of planning to use an open source implementation to a very proprietary protocol long term. When I bought some Genelec speakers for my desk earlier this year, I stumbled across their networked speakers that support POE and AES67. I see Pipewire has AES67 support in the RTP sink, but there's not much out there about people trying to use this.

Has anyone around here gotten a chance to play around with it? How does it work? Any pain points?

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[–] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Ok. This helps. Didn't know you were going for the 4410s. Those are still wired, using RJ45 with POE.

These too are cable only, and if you want wifi to your server, your endpoints will need to be POE capable. As an example, you can't use RPi as the endpoint unless each endpoint also gets a POE capable hub, or skip the RPi and just use multiple POE capable computers. (Reminder that these are still low power devices at 30W for POE+).

A preferred approach would be a NAS for storage, and small light powered headless computer as a server. Then if doing these genelecs everywhere, use a single very good POE+ hub and run POE+ cables from a central location being mindful of cable length limitations.

If doing wifi with these speakers, you'll need endpoints that are POE+ capable for each room. Either bigger computers or small 'puters with powered POE+ hubs.

Either way, the pipewire implementation of AES67 was designed for wired only and is fairly new. Doing wireless is begging for trouble and is experimental at best for the moment. Audio in linux is not a particularly strong suit, though it is finally getting some interest.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 3 weeks ago

Oh no, I know. I'm just limited to wireless right now because I'm renting an old house with massive amounts of insulation. So I had tried to get the Sonos speakers working with a combined sink wirelessly, but it just wasn't able to keep up, leading to intermittent interruptions to the stream. I'm going to play with that wired in a test environment at some point, but I think I'd prefer something like Snapcast over Airplay.

But once I buy a house in the coming months, I'll do some low voltage runs to support the audio network, among other things. I figure I'll probably have a dedicated POE switch so I don't have to worry too much about QoS, probably Mikrotik if Ubiquiti doesn't release some new EdgeSwitch gear.

I'm just not sure if the software is there yet, with Pipewire AES67 support. It was "new" in v1, with I think some PTP patching in the first point release. So I'm trying to see if anyone has cut their teeth on this yet, since it's going to be pretty costly to get gear. I imagine I can just create a combined sink, but I'm not sure if PTPv2 is just automagic within the RTP configuration of Pipewire.

And potentially needing a second server for MPD/Pipewire is something I'm keeping in the back of my head. I'm hoping to run it in a container on the NAS server, probably running Debian (or maybe something more cutting edge if I'm reliant on new Pipewire releases). But RTP and PTP might need something a bit more dedicated to the task. It's not like I'm doing broadcast or some other form of professional audio here, so I'm optimistic that a container will be fine. Just a single 16/44 FLAC decode to combined AES67 sink. And since containers use a shared kernel, I wouldn't need to worry about the clock scheduling issues some hypervisors had with Asterisk and Free Switch in my previous life working on VOIP networks. But I'm also not planning on a ton of cores, 4-8 only in a low voltage CPU, sooooo.... I dunno.