Comment by bee_rider

11 days ago

PipeWire is like 10 years newer than PulseAudio. It probably had a chance to learn some lessons!

IIRC before PulseAudio we had to mess around with ALSA directly (memory hazy, it was a while ago). It could be a bit of a pain.

10 comments

bee_rider

Reply
ahartmetz  11 days ago

PipeWire was also made by a guy with a lot of multimedia experience (GStreamer).

ALSA was kind of OK after mixing was enabled by default and if you didn't need to switch outputs of a running application between anything but internal speakers and headphones (which worked basically in hardware). With any additional devices that you could add and remove, ALSA became a more serious limitation, depending. You could usually choose your audio devices (including microphones) at least at the beginning of a video conference / playing a movie etc, but it was janky (unreliable, list of 20 devices for one multi-channel sound card) and needed explicit support from all applications. Not sure if it ever worked with Bluetooth.

fao_  11 days ago

I remember ALSA. Sure, it was finnicky to use `alsamixer` to unmute the master channels now and then, but I personally never had any trouble with it.

  • account42  11 days ago

    I still need to use alsamixer to unmute my headphones after accidentally unplugging them and plugging them in again fails to do so. That's with PipeWire - never had that problem with just ALSA.

    • fao_  10 days ago

      Eh, I had to do that with pulseaudio too, but constantly, across all distros and headphones. Pipewire is shonky, I have to restart now and then on my steam deck (I'm using it as a desktop), but it's still much better than pulseaudio. Even ALSA was better than pulseaudio lol

      1 reply →

jjmarr  11 days ago

I installed Gentoo in 2014 and getting PulseAudio working was much easier than ALSA. It was also much better.

I get ALSA followed the Unix philosophy of doing one thing but I want my audio mixer to play multiple sounds at once.

  • account42  11 days ago

    Gentoo in 2014 had dmix enabled by default without the need for any user configuration. I know because I was using it.

    • jjmarr  10 days ago

      I got stuck for two weeks installing the kernel because I forgot to mount /boot. Perhaps I disabled it by accident when goofing around in alsamixer? Or my card did or didn't have hardware mixing?

      I didn't actually know anything about Linux at the time and started with Gentoo because I saw a meme saying "install Gentoo" and people told me not to start with that distro. So it's possible I messed up the default config by accident.

      Either way PulseAudio worked after I emerged it.