> On 13. Mar 2023, at 14:41, Simon Perry <arch@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I'm not even sure why pipewire exists, another layer on top of the hot mess
> that is Linux audio.
Pipewire is meant to replace the "hot mess" that is Linux audio. I just made the switch last week on two machines, and honestly, it's much better than before. Previously, I had a weird mess of Pulseaudio and ALSA for regular audio through internal speakers and video conferencing. But when I use my professional audio interface with ardour, I had to start a jack server manually which often didn't work, and even then it was difficult to get System sounds through jack as well, or even route jack input into a video conference.
Now, I simply installed all the packages mentioned on the arch wiki pipewire page, including pipewire, wireplumber, pipewire-{alsa,pulse,jack}, which removed the corresponding jack and pulseaudio packages automatically, rebooted, and everything was fine. Now I can use my audio interface and my regular soundcard in parallel and even route audio between them without having to start my own jack server or something, ardour automatically detects that a jack server is already running, and is able to use all the sources and sinks, even the system ones.
This worked on two machines out of the box without manual configuration, so I have hopes things are getting easier with pipewire ;)
