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List:       gentoo-user
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Pipewire not a dependency?
From:       Michael <confabulate () kintzios ! com>
Date:       2022-10-01 18:29:17
Message-ID: 1781276.8hzESeGDPO () lenovo ! localdomain
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On Saturday, 1 October 2022 18:11:19 BST Wol wrote:
> On 01/10/2022 17:56, Michael wrote:
> > Anyway, I ventured into pipewire because I wanted to see if Skype would
> > work without pulseaudio and in this system it won't.  After I manually
> > installed pipewire Skype won't access the microphone.  🙁
> 
> I've got some vague feeling that pipewire is designed to happily sit
> under pulseaudio. The design aim was to replace both Jack and pulseaudio
> but it basically just presents a sound device to the layers above, so
> just like you can stack block devices for disk access, you can stack
> jack, pulseaudio and pipewire for sound.
> 
> The big difference between a sound stack and a block stack is that a
> block stack is asynchronous and latency is (relatively) unimportant. In
> a sound stack some applications *demand* synchronicity, and latency is
> everything. Jack is extremely latency sensitive, pulseaudio buffers and
> doesn't care, and pipewire is intended to satisfy both.
> 
> So the intent was clearly to install pipewire underneath a working
> pulseaudio, and just move applications across as and when.
> 
> Cheers,
> Wol

My very limited understanding is pipewire is meant to replace pulseaudio and 
jack, rather than become part of an audio/video stack:

https://docs.pipewire.org/page_overview.html

I think applications will gradually be coded to work with pipewire, until then 
suitable pipewire plugins would be required.  Perhaps for Skype to work today 
I will also have to enable pulseaudio, at which point it will not need 
pipewire itself.  The strange thing is audio playback works great with 
pipewire, it's the microphone which does not appear to be capturing anything 
and causes Skype to disconnect.  :-/

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