Pipewire on Arch Linux (Gnome)

pipewire-on-arch-linux-gnome.md

Those are the only instructions I need to run to have a fully working Pipewire setup that is compatible with PulseAudio, Jack and ALSA:

$ yay -Rcns pulseaudio-jack
# note that pipewire-jack-dropin is an AUR package
$ yay -S pipewire-{jack,jack-dropin,alsa,pulse}
$ systemctl --user enable pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-media-session
$ systemctl reboot
# done

If you had told me a day ago that replacing pulseaudio and jack would be that smooth I would have never believed you.

Jack

Bitwig 3.3 will not work out of the box with pipewire-jack-dropin, except I manually set a buffer size like this PIPEWIRE_LATENCY="256/48000" pw-jack bitwig-studio.

2021-04-03

To get reasonably good call quality:

$ rg -i msbc /etc/pipewire/media-session.d/bluez-monitor.conf
36:                # MSBC is not expected to work on all headset + adapter combinations.
37:                bluez5.msbc-support   = true

ftr,

systemctl --user start pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-media-session

Should be enough, no need to reboot.

Should be, yes, but somehow it did not work for me. Maybe there was some zombie pulseaudio process or something.

what pulseaudio packages are safe to remove?

I have removed pulseaudio-alsa package, and don't seem to notice any issues.

Also what config files are safe to remove (yes, I am a neat freak)?
Is it safe to remove /etc/pulse/default/client.conf?

Thank you Andreas and contributors.

Would you like to add a comment/clarification as not to run systemctl --user enable ... (or systemctl --user start ...) as root, but as the normal user? Otherwise the user (running it via su) gets a confusing error Failed to connect to bus: Operation not permitted. As per https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=223737: "Don't run systemd services as root, run them as a regular user."

@peter-kehl Thank you for the suggestion but I think the instructions are clear, since commands should always assumed to be run as a regular user unless otherwise noted.

When i try to enable the services i get this error message: Failed to connect to bus: No medium found. I try to install pipewire-media-session but it conflicts with wireplumbler and if i try to replace it, i get:

:: pipewire-media-session and wireplumber are in conflict. Remove wireplumber? [y/N] y
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing wireplumber breaks dependency 'wireplumber' required by pipewire-alsa
:: removing wireplumber breaks dependency 'wireplumber' required by pipewire-pulse

Can anyone help me?