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Pipeware as drop-in replacement of pulseaudio on Artixlinux

2021-04-15

Pipeware as drop-in replacement of pulseaudio on Artixlinux

Introduction

As I said in the ncspot post I hate pulseaudio, It just goes wrong in my machine but I have to recognise that Bluetooth goes a lot of better than using alsa directly, for example thinks like routing audio are much easier on pulseaudio. So, looking for different options I have been checking pipewire which aims to be the drop-in replacement of pulseaudio.

Process

As many of you know Artixlinux is a distro base on ArchLinux without systemd. If you have ask any “how to” on Artix forum the most common reply would be, follow the steps from archwiki but just ignore the systemd parts. So I just followed this article and this one from Gentoo’s wiki to write this small tutorial.

Just keep in mind that many things on pipewire are in testing, in my case I haven’t had any issue but I can’t guarantee that you won’t.

Install the packages:
```
 pacman -Sy pipewire pipewire-pulse
```

This automatically delete pulseaudio and pulseaudio-bluetooth in case you have installed.

Edit /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and uncomment the line “/usr/bin/pipewire” = { args = “-c pipewire-pulse.conf”
In the section “Starting PipeWire with various non-systemd setups” from Gentoo wiki are the steps to start pipewire on non-systemd distros. In my case I just edited the .xinitrc and I added the following lines:
```
 pipewire &
 pipewire-media-session &
```
Restart the session.
For testing purposes just execute:
```
 pactl info
```

And check you have something like “Server Name: PulseAudio…” on the exit. Then you should be able to enjoy pipeware.

Conclusions

Pipewire aims to be the drop-in replacement of pulseaudio so it’s nice to try it now. One of the advantages is that not only works with audio but with videos and allow things like sharing screen through Wayland, thing that it was impossible in the past.

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