Pipewire - The tech behind the sound in Linux

For the last many years, the sound "engine" for Linux devices was Pulse Audio. It replaced Alsa. It served Linux for many years. We are on the cusp to have Pulse Audio replaced by Pipewire .

PipeWire is an open-source server and framework for handling multimedia on Linux-based operating systems. It is designed to provide a modern and flexible infrastructure for managing audio and video streams within a system.

Traditionally, Linux systems used separate frameworks like PulseAudio for audio management and JACK (JACK Audio Connection Kit) for low-latency audio tasks, while relying on GStreamer for video processing. PipeWire aims to replace these disparate components and unify them into a single multimedia framework.

PipeWire provides a server that acts as a central hub for handling audio and video streams, as well as their processing and routing. It offers low-latency and high-quality audio processing capabilities and supports advanced features such as per-application volume control, time synchronization, and device sharing.

One of the key goals of PipeWire is to provide compatibility and integration across different multimedia frameworks and applications. It supports the JACK and PulseAudio APIs, allowing existing software that relies on these frameworks to work with PipeWire seamlessly. Additionally, it provides a GStreamer plugin, enabling applications that use GStreamer for multimedia processing to utilize PipeWire as the backend.

PipeWire has been adopted as the default multimedia framework in several Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch Linux. It aims to improve the overall multimedia experience on Linux systems by offering a more modern, efficient, and flexible infrastructure for handling audio and video streams.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model