linuxmemes

Pipewire is newer and emulates PulseAudio so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement. There's literally a command called pipewire-pulse related to this.

It makes me wonder if they really have both installed or are mistaking Pipewire's emulation for an active PulseAudio installation, and so it's just Pipewire that's acting up.

I'd say reboot, but being in space might be one of those times where that's a non-starter. In which case, they're going to have to get their hands dirty unpicking system hooks and trying to reattach them all again as and when Pipewire's working again, assuming it doesn't do that automatically.

I never had a problem with either Pipewire or real PulseAudio back when that was current. I had motherboard sound physically pop, requiring the purchase of a separate sound card, but never a driver issue, so I can't even imagine what might be going on.

Yes it’s a joke referencing the two Outlook instances issue, but for Linux people

OSS came first, then got replaced by ALSA after it became proprietary.

PulseAudio is a userspace audio server to which programs connect. It manages audio settings per app, then sends everything to ALSA. JACK is the same but with a focus on low latency.

PipeWire is a modern drop-in replacement for both, and also has support for video on Wayland.

That’s the thing about open source. Someone always thinks they can do better

I'm still waiting for the latency to be viable for playing guitar with an audio interface.

Ohhhhhh the newbies don't remember EsounD (~~Enlightenment~~ Enlightened Sound Daemon). Basically, it was an attempt at doing PulseAudio-esque stuff way back in the OSS era. Which is to say, it just supported software mixing of multiple audio sources, because OSS usually only allowed single process to output audio. EsounD was janky and didn't work well, obviously. Probably the neatest thing about it was that it exposed the mixed output stream to any other app, so that made visualisers much easier to make (edit: another thing that newbies in this day and age don't realise, but I cannot emphasise enough how crucial visualisers were for the late 1990s / early 2000s music experience). ALSA basically supported hardware mixing (if available) out of the box, so of course it immediately became my favourite.

They don’t have the same goals.

JACK is for professional audio.

OSS and ALSA are kernel audio drivers, they’re the most powerful of them all but extremely low level. Everything else, like pulseaudio/pipewire are just higher-level interfaces that feed ALSA audio.

Pulseaudio and pipewire are sound servers.

So really it only took two tries:

OSS -> ALSA

Pulseaudio -> Pipewire

Can't believe Linux would do such a thing

This is a meme, sir.

Being in IT with windows 11 is awful.

"Why isn't my mic/audio working?"

Me: "Idk, restart the computer"

"That fixed it. I don't understand, it was just working yesterday. Why did it stop working?"

Me: "Windows 11 sucks..."

Not to mention how awful it is being in a teams call as the IT guy and my mic isn't working because, again, windows is ass

My pipewire seems to have issues with crackling audio and severely dampening my mic and I have no clue why.

Pipewire's default quantum (buffer size, effectively) is incredibly low, this is good for low latency audio but anytime your system is too busy to keep the buffers filled you get crackling.

If you look at pw-top you'll see all of your devices and nodes. The quant column is probably 1 or a very small number for the devices.

You can increase the quantum with this command. This only lasts until pipewire restarts:

 pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 512

At a sample rate of 48000, this is roughly a 10ms buffer. 1024 is 20ms, etc. You want it as low as possible without getting crackling. Start with 512 and adjust from there (you don't have to use a power of 2, a quantum of 1234 works just as well).

severely dampening my mic and I have no clue why.

By default pipewire doesn't do any 'mic boost', as Windows calls it. You can get the same effect by raising the maximum volume.

In your sound control panel you should be able to turn the mic up higher than 100%. In KDE Plasma, you can do this in System Settings -> Sound -> Configure Volume Controls... [top right button] -> Raise maximum volume.

Alternatively, you can use EasyEffects to add a compressor. This will boost your mic volume and also prevent it from getting too loud

Compressors basically reduce the dynamic range of an audio signal by attenuating loud sounds and boosting quieter ones, this would provide a better mix.

Other useful plug-ins are noise canceling, (kills background noise) and echo canceling (lets you play sound out of your speakers which won't get picked up by your mic). Sometimes apps, like Discord, will do this signal processing for you while others, like Signal, do no signal processing.

For we all live underground

That's not a pipewire problem, that's a systemctl problem.

Failed to connect to user scope bus via local transport: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined

The error means systemctl --user can't reach your user's D-Bus session because the required environment variables aren't set. This typically happens when you've switched users via su or sudo rather than logging in directly, because htose don't initialize a full systemd/PAM session. It could also be that your session wasn't properly initialized by systemd-logind or a number of other things. Try spawning a proper user session:

sudo machinectl shell your_username@

and try the systemctl command again.