Using PipeWire with Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri”

Many thanks to Ji Mingkui (“How to Enable PipeWire Audio Service to Replace PulseAudio in Ubuntu 21.10 & 21.04”), Unfa (“I've replaced JACK and PulseAudio with PipeWire and this is what happened”) and Alecks Gates for showing the way. 🙏

The beauty of switching to PipeWire is that, although it replaces ALSA, Jack Audio Connection Kit and PulseAudio, it is compatible with them: your usual application (such as Ardour…) will probably not see any difference and think, for instance, that it is connected to Jack Audio server. 🪄

Pipewire has many advantages over Alsa / Jack Audio / PulseAudio:

• It works for both audio and video (Hello OBS!).
• It is supposed to be more consistent.
• It provides lower latency.
• It works with sandboxed Flatpak applications.
• It natively allows you to work with several sound cards simultaneously! 🥳

Please note that PipeWire is still experimental and unstable. 👶
⚠️ Use at your own risks.

Let's do the switch!

(Take me by my little hand)

First make sure that your computer is up-to-date:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Reboot if necessary.

We will use the Personal Package Archives to get the latest ready-to-use and available version:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipewire-debian/pipewire-upstream

Now we will install PipeWire's latest version:

sudo apt-get install pipewire

Now execute the following command in order to get GStreamer, JACK and Bluetooth support:

$ sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-pipewire libpipewire-0.3-{0,dev,modules} libspa-0.2-{bluetooth,dev,jack,modules} pipewire{,-{audio-client-libraries,pulse,media-session,bin,locales,tests}}

Rince and reboot. 🚿

Now run:

$ pactl info

You should see PipeWire.

That's it!

Install Helvum

Helvum is a GTK-based patchbay for pipewire. 🎛️

From a Terminal run the following:

$ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/ryuukyu/helvum.git
$ sudo apt-get install flatpak-builder
$ flatpak install org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable//21.08
$ flatpak install org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.llvm12
$ flatpak-builder --install flatpak-build/ build-aux/org.freedesktop.ryuukyu.Helvum.json --user

You are now ready to plug some streams!

Of course you can still use QJackCtl or Carla (as they will think Jack Audio is up & running):

Now you can easily record from several sound cards: