PipeWire

PipeWire is a multimedia processing engine that aims to improve audio and video handling on Linux. Pipewire can act as a replacement for both PulseAudio and ALSA servers.
== Prerequisites ==
=== Device access ===
PipeWire needs proper permissions to access devices. If you do not use elogind, your user should be in audio (to access audio devices) and video (to access webcam devices) groups:
See pre-systemd groups for more info.
Make sure to re-login for these changes to take effect.
=== D-Bus ===
PipeWire requires a running D-Bus system and/or session bus for most of its functionality. If you start session-wide dbus instance, make sure to start PipeWire in that same session.
=== Environment ===
Ensure that XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is configured correctly. If this is not set, pipewire will create a directory in your home folder instead, called , and on attempting to run Pavucontrol or pactl, you will get the following error:
$ pactl list
Connection failure: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused
Under Sway, in order for xdg-desktop-portal-wlr to work it may also be necessary to set XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP and XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP to sway
== Installation ==
Install the following , a session manager and , so Pulseaudio applications could use PipeWire as backend. By doing this, PipeWire acts as an audio server, similar to PulseAudio server. 
 package by itself will install the above package and automatically.
=== JACK compatibility ===
Since Pipewire aims to replace JACK Install package, so it provides ABI-compatible libraries for JACK applications.
=== ALSA support ===
Install package.
=== GUI Tools ===
You might want to use or to have a simple GUI app for controlling sound, outputs, etc.
 is a graph manager dedicated to PipeWire with Qt GUI Interface.
Install XFCE Audio Mixer Plugin to help control volume:
== Configuration ==
PipeWire and WirePlumber store their default configuration in and respectively. If you want to edit the configuration, you need to move it to :
=== pipewire-launcher ===
Start the PipeWire media server. You'll probably get quite a few errors but just ignore them for now.
A D-Bus session service must be running unless dbus support is disabled.
If .xinitrc is used, add to your .
If you do not use GUI by default and have D-Bus enabled in configuration, add the following stanza to your shell configuration file:
=== Screen sharing on Wayland ===
You will need the right xdg-desktop-portal backend for your desktop environment. Screen sharing is known to work on:
* GNOME with xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
* KDE Plasma with xdg-desktop-portal-kde and Firefox
* Sway with xdg-desktop-portal-wlr and Firefox, see Sway for details
=== Bluetooth audio ===
* Enable PulseAudio support as described above
* Install bluetooth service packages: bluez bluez-openrc pipewire-spa-bluez
* Optional: install GUI manager for bluetooth blueman
* Enable and start bluetooth service: rc-update add bluetooth; rc-service bluetooth start
* Restart PipeWire
* Use commandline program bluetoothctl or GUI program blueman-manager to scan and pair bluetooth audio devices.
* Use pavucontrol to adjust volume and manually select high definition bluetooth codecs.
=== Video ===
Video should work out-of-the-box with v4l2 devices (e.g. a lot of webcams) and GStreamer applications.
=== Realtime scheduling ===
For realtime scheduling, it is recommended to use . Add your user to the rtkit group.
Alternatively, ensure your user has the right ulimit permissions. Since pipewire 0.3.66, you can add yourself to the pipewire group. You generally need (e.g. in ):
@pipewire - memlock 4194304
@pipewire - nice -19
@pipewire - rtprio 95
This allows a member of the pipewire group to have the right permissions for PipeWire to use realtime scheduling without rtkit. This same snippet comes with pipewire since 0.3.66, so if you have a PAM login session and add yourself to the pipewire group, you don't have to do anything else.
Note that the above limits.conf will only work if your session is using PAM.
=== Disable D-Bus support ===
For certain configurations (e.g. only audio playback and recording) D-Bus setup is not necessary and it can be disabled as follows. 
Edit the following configuration parameters:
== Testing ==
In a different terminal window check the default output device. I don't yet know how this default can be changed for all applications, so you'd better hope it's right!
=== WirePlumber ===
=== pw-cat playback ===
Test sound is working using an audio file in a format supported by libsndfile (e.g. flac, opus, ogg, wav). Use pw-cat utility from :
=== pw-cat recording ===
If you have a microphone test audio recording is working.
=== PulseAudio ===
Test PulseAudio clients using a media player, as most use PulseAudio.
=== JACK ===
Use jack_simple_client from :
You should hear a sustained beep.
== Troubleshooting ==
=== `wpctl status` shows no targets ===
First, check whether ALSA knows about your sound card:
If sound devices are found, the issue is with your pipewire configuration. Consider double-checking the instructions above.
Otherwise, your sound card may not be supported in the version of the Linux Kernel you're running. You should search online for fixes relating to your current kernel version and the codec of your sound card. You can find each of these with:
Modern devices might require , which is the case if you get sof firmware file is missing errors in dmesg.
=== Error acquiring bus address: Cannot autolaunch D-Bus without X11 $DISPLAY ===
This means D-Bus session bus is not started and GUI is not active (i.e. you are in a tty). Use dbus-run-session as outlined above. Alternatively, disable D-Bus support.
=== Bluetooth connect failed: br-connection-profile-unavailable === 
Ensure that Session Manager is running.
=== Play/Pause buttons not working on bluetooth headphones ===
Check . If you see something like this:
bluetoothd[3463]: profiles/audio/avctp.c:uinput_create() Can't open input device: No such file or directory (2)
bluetoothd[3463]: profiles/audio/avctp.c:init_uinput() AVRCP: failed to init uinput for WH-1000XM5
Then bluez is trying to register the headphones buttons as an input devices, but uinput is not loaded. Try modprobe uinput. If this works, see Architecture#Module_Loading for instructions on how to make sure this module is loaded automatically on each startup.
== See Also ==
* PipeWire source repository
* PipeWire Wiki
* PipeWire on the ArchWiki
* PipeWire on the Gentoo Wiki
Category:Desktop
Category:Multimedia
Category:Sound