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Old 09-28-2021, 10:18 AM   #1
Sitruc55
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Default Fedora Jam 35 w/ Pipewire and wirePlumber

I've been using Fedora Jam 34 with pipewire ever since it was released and have been generally happy with it. One thing that bugs me though is that when I start Reaper it reconnects randomly to my audio sources and sinks and I have to re-wire it through Carla every time. WirePlumber is an advanced pipewire session manager that 'may' solve this reconnect issue.

ANNOUNCEMENT:
Fedora has just released the Fedora 35 Betas (including JAM) that now includes both pipewire and wirePlumber by default. I don't recommend anyone besides the truly brave and curious to install the beta, but the final release is expected in Oct. Here's some highlights from their website:

------------------------
New in this release is Fedora Kinoite—a KDE Plasma environment based on rpm-ostree technology. Like Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite provides atomic updates and an immutable operating system for increased reliability.

Fedora Linux 35 builds on the switch to PipeWire for managing audio by introducing WirePlumber as the default session manager. WirePlumber enables customization of rules for routing streams to and from devices.

Of course, there’s the usual update of programming languages and libraries: Python 3.10, Perl 5.34, PHP 8.0 and more!
--------------------------

Once I install the final release (~Oct) I'll report on my experience in solving the Reaper reconnection issues.
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Old 09-28-2021, 03:30 PM   #2
audiojunkie
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Cool! I've known about Wireplumber, but wasn't aware it had become advanced enough to be usable. Very cool!
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Old 09-30-2021, 07:04 AM   #3
Matt Mayfield
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I tried a live image of Fedora Jam 35 Beta, and in my limited testing, I noticed audio performance at least as good as regular Fedora 34 (I did not test at lower latencies than I used with 34).

However there is a showstopper bug due to the combination of

- kernel 5.14 prior to this commit and
- ALSA libraries prior to this commit.

Apparently...

- Kernel versions prior to 5.14 work fine with all ALSA library versions
- The very latest kernel builds with that one patch work fine with all ALSA library versions
- The very latest ALSA library builds work fine with all kernel versions

...but for this specific combination, accessing MIDI devices causes applications to crash with

Code:
ALSA lib rawmidi_hw.c:100:(snd_rawmidi_hw_params) SNDRV_RAWMIDI_IOCTL_PARAMS failed: Invalid argument
amidi: rawmidi.c:256: snd_rawmidi_open_conf: Assertion `err >= 0' failed.
which is exactly what I saw in Reaper when I tried to open a MIDI device, and led me to the bug report here.

My guess is that a future beta, and almost certainly the final version, of Fedora Jam 35 will have fixed this with an update to one or both of alsa-lib and/or the kernel. (I hope!)

Last edited by Matt Mayfield; 09-30-2021 at 07:07 AM. Reason: typos
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Old 09-30-2021, 07:41 AM   #4
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Thanks for the news, Matt! I'll hold off any testing with Pipewire for a bit. I've been considering over and over the move from EndeavourOS to Arch, but I don't feel like I'm quite ready yet. The last time I tried, Archinstall gave me choice (Y/N) of installing Pipewire. I said "Y", but couldn't get it working. I went back to EndeavourOS. My eventual goal is to be on straight Arch and not an in-between like Endeavour (as good as it is). That's just a personal preference, just like I like Debian over Ubuntu (but I digress). I appreciate this info, and I'm sure I'll test it again in the future, but I'll hold off for now.

Since you've been playing with Pipewire, I have a question for you that I can't seem to find an answer on:

What is your take on Wireplumber vs Helvum? Aren't they exactly the same type of tools (ie session managers for Pipewire)? Helvum seems to be the "Official" app, but Wireplumber seems to be getting the most attention, so I'm curious and information seems to be very limited.

Best!
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Old 09-30-2021, 08:17 AM   #5
s wave
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Yea I have not had a problem with FEDORA (love it) have it on a secondary PC. I know the older versions work fine. I would just run / open it in a terminal and have 'syslog' running you can trouble shoot the boot up process etc... and just look where it fails?
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Old 09-30-2021, 11:02 AM   #6
Sitruc55
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Quote:
Originally Posted by audiojunkie View Post
Thanks for the news, Matt! I'll hold off any testing with Pipewire for a bit. I've been considering over and over the move from EndeavourOS to Arch, but I don't feel like I'm quite ready yet. The last time I tried, Archinstall gave me choice (Y/N) of installing Pipewire. I said "Y", but couldn't get it working. I went back to EndeavourOS. My eventual goal is to be on straight Arch and not an in-between like Endeavour (as good as it is). That's just a personal preference, just like I like Debian over Ubuntu (but I digress). I appreciate this info, and I'm sure I'll test it again in the future, but I'll hold off for now.

Since you've been playing with Pipewire, I have a question for you that I can't seem to find an answer on:

What is your take on Wireplumber vs Helvum? Aren't they exactly the same type of tools (ie session managers for Pipewire)? Helvum seems to be the "Official" app, but Wireplumber seems to be getting the most attention, so I'm curious and information seems to be very limited.

Best!

Pipewire comes with a basic session manager that has a lot of default settings pre-defined. wirePlumber is an advanced session manager for pipewire that allows more control and policy settings for pipewire.

None of these tools have a specific GUI. A GUI would most likely be a separate program that used wirePlumber.

Helvum is not a session manager, its a GTK patchbay for pipewire similar to Carla. Allows you to connect nodes (which granted is "some" control)
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Old 09-30-2021, 11:37 AM   #7
audiojunkie
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sitruc55 View Post
Pipewire comes with a basic session manager that has a lot of default settings pre-defined. wirePlumber is an advanced session manager for pipewire that allows more control and policy settings for pipewire.

None of these tools have a specific GUI. A GUI would most likely be a separate program that used wirePlumber.

Helvum is not a session manager, its a GTK patchbay for pipewire similar to Carla. Allows you to connect nodes (which granted is "some" control)
Thank you for the information! I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of it, but I think I understand what you are saying:

I was combining the concepts of patchbay and session manager.

Pipewire has a basic (CLI) session manager, and Wireplumber is an advanced (CLI) session manager. Helvum is a graphical patchbay for patching the connections together, and is based of of FalkTX's Catia patchbay for JACK.

Thank you for clarifying this! I had assumed that Wireplumber was more like QjackCtl, and handled everything (patching, session management, start/stop, etc) like the QjackCtl front end does. Now, I'm seeing that we are having to use multiple programs to handle each of the use cases (ie session management, patching, etc, start/stop). I hope at some point there will be an all-in-one GUI-based front end to manage everything like QjackCtl can for JACK currently. I guess we'll just have to hope and wait for the technology to mature.

I don't currently use JACK-based applications in my current workflow, but I can see how it would be nice to be able to run something like Guitarix or a looper standalone app and be able to route it into Reaper.
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Old 09-30-2021, 08:32 PM   #8
Matt Mayfield
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Quote:
Originally Posted by audiojunkie View Post
Since you've been playing with Pipewire, I have a question for you that I can't seem to find an answer on:

What is your take on Wireplumber vs Helvum? Aren't they exactly the same type of tools (ie session managers for Pipewire)? Helvum seems to be the "Official" app, but Wireplumber seems to be getting the most attention, so I'm curious and information seems to be very limited.

Best!
I am a bit sheepish to admit that I haven't tried either! My main experience with PipeWire has been with trying to run an application like Firefox (which would access PipeWire as if it were PulseAudio) at the same time as something like Reaper (which thinks it's addressing JACK) and hoping that it all works.

So unfortunately I don't have an answer for you as far as that goes - most of the time, with the exception of the situation above, I've done all my audio stuff in one application (as a DAW, with plugins) at a time and haven't really gone with the session manager paradigm of multiple separate applications working together.

Good luck though! It's an exciting time for Linux audio!
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