> On 13. Mar 2023, at 14:41, Simon Perry <a...@sanxion.net> 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 ;)
