Pipewire works!

It does! It’s pretty neat, even at version 0.3, and it makes this whole “setting up JACK” thing actually possible for me.

As you may recall, getting JACK to work is a bit of a trial on a good day. So much so, that I did not use it at all, even after getting it to work, because turning it on pretty much means turning off PulseAudio [^1].

So, I didn’t.

Enter Pipewire. (🎉)

It installs pretty neatly on ArchLinux:

1. basics: pacman -S pipewire pipewire-alsa pipewire-pulse pipewire-jack
2. drop-in JACK support: AUR/pipewire-jack-dropin (without it it would be pw-jack $my_jack_program)
3. systemctl --user start pipewire pipewire-pulse
4. the giggles!

(The wiki all the details if that does not work.)

You now have pipewire up and running. Applications should pick it up, but if they don’t restart them once and you should be good to go.

The awkward

There are bugs. Here are some I have encountered:

• (fixed) ardour would crash whenever firefox would play sounds
• sometimes I need to restart pipewire because it would not correctly detect my usb webcam (???)
• yesterday I needed to restart pipewire because I got lots of cracks and overruns from pipewire-pulse

There are probably more bugs.

But! But:

The awesome

You can now run any JACK application without setting up anything (no qjackctl, no carla, nothing!)!

You can reroute your pipe organ to your Very Serious meetings and play them a little song.

You can put a reverb or a delay on all incoming sounds, making those same meetings much more entertaining.

There are kind of no limits. You start up carla or catia, reroute audio at will, and then off to the giggles again.

Fin

So, pretty neat! It’s still quite buggy sometimes, but also quite awesome. I really like it, and the exciting part is that it makes me want to do more music things, actually record something, just play around, …

🎶

[^1]: Yes, I know it’s possible to combine them, but it was still a hassle to get to work every time. It’s possible, but was too much for me.