[LAD] Is Piperware a successor to Jack/Pulseaudio?

[Len Ovens]

On Sat, 3 Jul 2021, John Murphy wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Jun 2021 16:11:47 -0700 M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>
>> The biggest issue with Pipewire IMHO is that it does not support
>> Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. That will be a big obstacle to growth until 18.04 is
>> no longer supported, which is still about two years away. I don't know
>> what's involved in doing a backport, but I for one would use Pipewire
>> if it was working on 18.04.
>
> I've just seen a response from SOURAV DAS posted on 11 May to:
>
> https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/05/install-latest-pipewire-ppa-ubuntu-20-04/
>
> Saying "Hi, the PPA maintainer here. Now added supports for Ubuntu
> 18.04 also."
>
> Linux Mint 20.1 (Ubuntu 20.04) here, so haven't tested it.

18.04 is of interest because... after that Ubuntu drops 32 bit ... 
everything they could get away with. It is for this reason I have switched 
at least one of my computers to debian. Not of interest to linux audio in 
general, except this 32bit laptop did save a recording session when the 
"recording machine" with win 10 showed up without the proper driver for 
the interface which worked just fine on this linux box because the 
interface was usb 2.0.

However, to be more inline with the topic: beware that if you wish to use 
pipewire on ubuntu, the above ppa is required because none of the releases 
keep up with this quickly changing software. Also, be aware that (last I 
heard) the ffado backend is not supported. The expectation is that the 
alsa drivers will just work. If the current kernel will actually load the 
snd-<fwcardtype> (mine does not right now), the performance is even worse 
than usb boxes. So for firewire, jack is still king and usb 2.0 audio can 
still not match most firewire devices despite their age. With a properly 
setup pipewire, pipewire should auto bridge to jackd... I have not 
achieved this yet but I have not had time really either. Getting a boat in 
the water so the family could spend last week "messing about with boats" 
has been more important ;)

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net