Re: [orca-list] pipe wire

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

I tested Pipewire here. It was very easy to install it, and just 
installing pipewire-pulse completely replaced Pulseaudio automatically, 
which was very nice indeed. In fact, it even told me that my pulseaudio 
and pulseaudio-bluetooth packages were in conflict and allowed me to 
remove them. I didn't have any problem with speech-dispatcher not being 
interruptable, and a rec/play pipe echo test gave me much lower latency 
than Pulse. However, after a while, my USB sound device started 
glitching just a bit after recording. It sounded much like a scratched 
CD that is not scratched enough to skip, but scratched enough to click 
click click rhythmically with varying volume. My bluetooth headphones 
were also completely unintelligible with speech-dispatcher running. I 
tried playing a song using sox, and the sound came to my headphones 
without issue, but then as soon as I started orca and speech-dispatcher, 
both the speech and the song I was playing became unintelligible. My 
tests with my USB device using Audacity resulted in increasing latency 
every time I recorded a new track. It's possible this had much to do 
with the clicking I was hearing, but it could have also had a lot to do 
with the fact that I was testing a rather involved set of short tracks 
on top of a longer track, which introduced more latency each time a new 
track was recorded. It seems Pipewire, at least the Pulseaudio 
replacement portion, could use a bit of work especially on USB and 
bluetooth devices. Otherwise, it's a good start, and is actually better 
than many onboard sound chips have been with Pulseaudio, especially in 
the beginning when it became the default in Ubuntu back about 12 years ago.

~Kyle