pipewire: anyone using it on TCL?

[GNUser]

I see that pipewire.tcz is in the TCL13 x86_64 repository. Does any TCL user run PipeWire? If so, what has been your experience? Was it easy to set up? Does it work well with TCL? Most importantly: Is it easier to understand and control than ALSA and PulseAudio?

I recently wasted many hours fiddling with ALSA and PulseAudio trying to do something relatively simple. Audio on GNU/Linux makes me feel defeated.

[gadget42]

haven't used pipewire but found this an interesting read:
(not to mention the additional links)
https://wiki.debian.org/PipeWire

[GNUser]

Thank you, gadget42. It was quite the interesting read! So it seems PipeWire can replace PulseAudio completely, but still requires ALSA to be present (for those parts of ALSA that interface with the kernel).

I would like to try PipeWire sometime. I'll try to get it to work with TCL when I have time. If a more knowledgeable user than me is already using PW with TCL and feels inclined to share configuration instructions, they would be most welcome. (The instructions on Debian are nice but they assume systemd and example files which may only be available on Debian.)

[patrikg]

Sorry to say my daily driver is arch, i like it a lot, that because of very good wiki.
But then i comes to the best os for raspberry pi it's for sure picore.
 
May you find more interesting things in this wiki to read about pipewire like debian wiki.

Here you go: Happy reading

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

[Juanito]

I seem to remember using pipewire to get gnome-display (screen mirroring) to work on CorePure64 - as I recall, pipewire was used to start pulseaudio…

[gadget42]

was poking around the devuan forum and stumbled on this thread:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=4986
and specifically this post within that thread:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=36253#p36253
which then referenced:
https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html
(commenting on wayland mostly but mentions pipewire)

[GNUser]

Thanks, gadget42. That was a fun read. The Devuan folks obviously don't like shiny new things that are complicated and appear to solve manufactured problems I can appreciate that.

I'm a big fan of minimalism, conservatism, and UNIX principle in computing. That's why I'm a die-hard TCL fan and use other distros (usually Devuan) only when I'm trying to understand things so that I can a missing functionality to my TCL machines.

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and study ALSA to learn how it works and to become a competent user. To dive into PipeWire in the hope that it will magically make audio-on-linux intelligible to me is obviously just a pipe dream

[tacpilot2]

Luckily the world of Linux audio is a whole lot better than
the train wreck it use to be. I have not used pipewire, nor
have I needed to doing any ALSA hand configs in many years.

The modern sound servers provide a stable solution for most
situations, but they still can't compete with the robustness of
modern ALSA tools. Which is why its still the only real option
for Linux sound engineers, and as you have found, is still required
as a low level interface regardless.

There are a ton of tedious how to's out there, many of which are rather
dated, but sometimes getting your hands on a working example makes all
the difference.

If you feel like playing around with a live cd, I believe AVLinux will be an
ideal working example of a running full blown feature rich modern ALSA
environment. It is truly geared for professional audio engineers with low
latency kernel right out of the box .. many many years ago they used
Arch .. then the switched to Debian ... as of late they are using MXLinux..

http://www.bandshed.net/avlinux/

Hope this helps .. Cheers

[patrikg]

Don't know what Linux audio system is used in picoreplayer, but you can also read little about it and Greg Erskine on this forum know more about this. I think picoreplayer uses some kind of dac. but don't know if you can use alsa, pipewire, pulseaudio.

Here Gregs posts on this forum.

http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=15044

[Greg Erskine]

piCorePlayer uses ALSA, and whatever sound card is available. It only works on the Raspberry Pi so not really relevant.

[Juanito]

See pipewire03.tcz.info and gnome-network-displays.tcz.info for a few notes on how to use pipewire to control pulseaudio

[GNUser]

Thank you all. It seems that PipeWire is not the clean solution I was looking for. When I began the thread I was under the impression that it could replace both ALSA and PulseAudio. Then it turned out that it requires ALSA. Then Juanito mentioned some configurations where ALSA, PulseAidio, and PipeWire are all present.

Using all three is definitely not what I was hoping for. If I need a minimum of two systems to make all applications work as intended, I'll stick with ALSA + PA for now because it seems that ALSA + PW is still somewhat  experimental and has neither the user base nor documentation that ALSA + PA has.

[gadget42]

re: pipewire
https://www.figuiere.net/hub/wlog/rtkit-portal-pipewire/
sharing is caring

[aus9]

Hi GNUser
I know this is an old post, but I and I am sure others use alsa only, not all on TC64
and I compiled TC64/qmplay2 as alsa only if interested.

If you have time, what is your preferred output hardware sound device?
BT headphones/speakers
hdmi monitor
hdmi TV
analog speakers
analog (wired) headphones
etc?

then post your

Code: [Select]

aplay -l
and post any config you are using like /etc/asound.conf or $HOME/.asoundrc or any boot code and
any /etc/modprobe* config file

cheers

at the moment my RPi is in storage so I am referring to TC64 above