Pipewire started life as a way to handle the gaps left in Wayland for stream capturing with v4l2 and dma-buff, zero copy screen sharing, audio/video sync, etc. They ended up recreating the pulseaudio server as a plugin and reimplementing the JACK interface with a focus on latency. It really is a wonderful project.

Great info! Thanks!!! Have been using Linux for over 15 years, never gave a second thought to how audio works on Linux. After watching this, I uninstalled PulseAudio and installed PipeWire. I have a large living room, and used to get "crackling" when using my Bluetooth headsets. This is no longer the case with PipeWire!! Have only had it installed for an hour though, so will see how it goes.

An update to this video, taking into consideration the recent audio technology updates (using ALSA and PIPE WIRE only), would be very welcome. Tank you for this video anyway.

Thanks for doing such a nice rundown. I have been using PipeWire for a good few months now without any major issues. I had major issues about half a year ago (I know this video was released even before that time). In my experience so far, BT headphones work better with PipeWire than they did with PuldeAudio, though I don't use them that much. An amazing thing is that using PipeWire I can record audio from my BT headset right into Ardour, like any regular audio input. Plus I can work on my music using them in playback only profile. It's pretty amazing.

Really excellent explanation and exactly the kind of patient, thorough guide through linux audio that I never knew I wanted. I recently had some trouble switching my audio output from the hdmi port on my video card to a usb out connected to my headphone amplifier and suddenly I needed to learn about how sound worked. You seem really knowledgeable and did a great job explaining the full stack of technology powering audio. I would absolutely tune in for more videos like this (even if they take a year to put together :-)). Thank you!

This is exactly what I was looking for- not a tutorial but an explanation of how everything fits together. You rock!!

great explanation complete from input to output

Really appreciate you putting this together. This is a great overview / intro to understanding the ecosystem

This was a really great explainer. I never got how ALSA worked until now. I'm still unsure about Pipewire since it seems so buggy, but hopefully it will be stable enough to try on the next Mint LTS. After all those Ubuntu users test it for us, lol.

I've researched a lot about this topic and this was the best explanation I saw on how sound works on linux, thanks a lot for this video.

I'm a total noob when it comes to linux however If I understand this correctly: Pipewire has the potential to give us pro audio users the ability to route multiple sources to the same and/or different outputs simultaneously. If this is the case, this would be game changing for those looking for advanced audio routing solutions. It would also be much more affordable than using Dante where you would require something like a CTP DIO88 Analogue to Dante Converter upwards of ($1000/£1000 give or take) to convert your devices and send them where you need to.

great work, very informative! just a footnote: the minimum sampling frequency must always be at least 2x the max frequency being "recorded", otherwise spectral info could be lost, as stated by the Sampling Theorem (Nyquist-Shannon). so even if we can only hear up to ~20kHz we actually need at least ~40kHz in sampling frequency. in reality the distortion caused by the sampling process is almost imperceptible to most people but it exists, and human hearing ranges may vary as well

You have a talent for explaining things clearly. Thanks.

Thank you for keeping this up over the years. It's people like you and content like this that made KZfaq the beautiful place it once was and make me reminisce. Thanks for making me feel nostalgic AND giving me the high level overview I was looking for. Keep on tinkering my friend.

This video helped me grasp things that I wouldn't have known how to search or troubleshoot. I've been able to solve a problem on my PC thanks to you! Appreciate the info 👍

You are an amazing teacher! It is extremely rare to have capacity for knowledge and a great personality. If only grade school was full of interesting people, everything might be different. Thanks for sharing this knowledge strangely two months before I needed it.

Linux Audio is why I daily drive a hackintosh, despite being very keen to switch to Linux. I'm hoping that as Pipewire matures everything gets a lot simpler and easier. Thank you for the video, at least I now have a better grasp of the issues.

Everytime I am going to explain this to anyone I am going to remember you !!! Thanks for this consolidated information.

That was a first class system overview; your video really helped me to picture how it all 'bolts together'. Using qpwgraph, I've just set up the laptop microphone -> EasyEffects (so I can use eq, multi-band compression, etc) -> wfview (which then 'feeds' audio to and controls an Icom IC-705 transmitter on my network) and it's all working an absolute treat. All I have to do now is spend a ludicrous amount of time setting up all the EasyEffects components in an attempt to make it sound good(ish). 🙂 Assuming it sounds okay (long story about Icom codecs omitted to save space), the next stage will be to set all this up in a headless Linux box (with a decent audio interface and microphone) and try to emulate an Orban 9105A Optimod-HF using EasyEffects; I might be gone for quite some time! 😀

Finally I understand how alsa and pulseaudio interact, and how they relate to OSS! Thanks for the excellent video! Tips for future vids - more b-roll and perhaps slow down a bit

Wow! I did not expect this to be so informative. By the end of the video, you have put every concept, you had introduced in the beginning, together so clearly. Thank you, really.

Thanks man. It's the only video on Linux audio explained in much detail.desperately required video.

10:03 One reason PulseAudio makes things easier is it basically slots in under the ALSA API. So apps that know about ALSA automatically work with PulseAudio, without noticing the extra PulseAudio layer between them and the actual hardware.

Stumbled upon this video while searching for a way to get pipewire to output 5.1 surround audio via S/PDIF. Very informative and while it didn't solve my problem, at least I now know more about PulseAudio and Pipewire. Researching resumes...

You are the man!!! You finally helped me understand how all these different processes work on my Linux machine. Your approach to explaining everything was genuinely balanced with simplicity --yet covering all the nuances of the interplay. Bravo!!

Great to have all those technologies, their pros and cons and the relation between them explained in one video - thank you!

TNice tutorials is actually a very good and straight forward tutorial. No having ask questions or guess, no over-explaining elents, and brings

Your voice is so calming I always drift off! Had to reattach this video couple of times

Thanks for taking the time to explain this!

Wow! You covered a lot of ground in one video, Tony--my head nearly exploded! Thanks for an informative march through the sordid history of Linux audio, most of which I have battled with at one time. Linux audio can be quite powerful, a Swiss Army Knife with 99 blades; just be careful when using a blade you don't cut yourself on one of the other 98 blades. Cheers!

I love you, so cool how you know so much and are this passionate about the topic, it seemed so confusing it has been giving me headaches since I switched to linux

ALSA can do software mixing. PulseAudio is not required for that. I listened to "podcasts"[1] while playing SNES emulators on Linux before there was PulseAudio. What PulseAudio can do is to give each program a different volume, resample, and route different programs to different output devices. And what PulseAudio actually did when it first arrived was to add such a huge audio latency that gaming and watching videos under Linux became impossible. Well, I had to uninstall PulseAudio to fix it. [1]: Wasn't called a podcast back then. Was mp3 files of Chaosradio manually downloaded from an FTP server.

This actually expained why I'm having so much trouble with setting up VBAN. Now if I could figure out how to work around the problem..

Thank you! Very well explained. I have a small music studio and Linux has become my OS of choice in the past year. My Linux skills have not yet been up to the task and I have had to use ALSA exclusively. Pipewire is intriguing me and I will give that a shot. I have one small suggestion for you. If you put a foam pop filter over that mic, your audio would be much improved. Have an awesome day!

I just Probed my machine Apple product: MacBookPro9,2Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia Ubuntu 22.04 jammy Desktop: Xfce 4.18.1 hoping to work in Katana 50 BOSS Tone Studio OMG! Wish me luck! Thank you for a very Streaght to the point instructional loved the pace of the info you covered. I have sndio , PulseAudio, ALSA, and PipeWire all running now JACK is not running. Working on it keep on keeping on! Thank You Very Much ~ Samuel 🙌💻

Very good explanation. Thanks Tony.

This is such a good video holy shit! I have been losing my mind over what these software were and briefly explained all their purpose holistically. Thanks!

Worth every second of my life listening to this. Thumbs up for quickly orienting me on one piece of this confusing morass that is Linux audio technology.

This is a really great explainer on a rather confusing subject.

Excellent video bro! I been doing Linux Audio off an on for a couple decades now and only learned enough to navigate and utilize these various apps you mentioned without ever really understanding their interactions. Just getting ready to give it a try again since winter is upon us already. That was super cool! Thanks!

I’ve noticed some sound quality issues on my Debian 12 install so I started researching how audio even works on Linux and which sound server to use. So the gist of everything is to use alsa + pipewire, gotcha.

thanks so much for this overview! there aren't that many beginner-friendly explanations of how linux's audio backend works!!

Finally, ... I have been waiting so long for a explanation of this. Thanks Tony!

Lovely vid Tony, quite clarifying.

Great video, thank you!!

@10:17 , i have just learnt that i could sync all my daws thanks to jack. This was the best take away from this video for me. Mükemmel!!!

thank you brunnette ed sheeran

Dude, you cleared a bunch of doubts I had in just 20 minutes! I bought an old Makie Onix-i 16 channel mixer that only works (so they say - I haven't tested) in linux. Also, the UbuntuStudio distro with the low latency driver is wonderful! A curiosity: in the old days of 100MHz CPUs, mixing audio was heavy for the processors and digital telephone switchers were built with those processors and requried not low-latency but real-time OS and programming. It was so difficult only 8 countries managed to design and produce them.

I use JACK for everything on my main desktop. It's really easy. Most distros provide a package that helps Pulse and JACK to work together.

Using PipeWire for almost two years now and I'm happy to announce that the BT device being "there" but not outputting any beep at all is back again :D Usually resolved by restarting the headphones 😩 From a gut feeling it's probably some chip going into energy saving mode after the last stream closed and it may be related to the headphones themselves. They did start to develop weird glitches over the time (especially the ANC feature) so there's that. Anyway, will totally stick with PipeWire. It really changed everything for me. And that's coming from someone who remembers how to echo "magic integers" into OSS device nodes to get sound going for some really odd native Linux PC games back in the days :D

This video was exactly what i searched for, thank you, it was very informative

Keep up the good work!!! There's a lot of information out there. Few people are able to dive deep into it and explain the way you did! Regarding a few comments about your hair... Embrace it!!! If i were you, i'd even hang an Einstein poster in the background. Awesome people try to help other's succeed. Hater's try to stop other's success! You're awesome!!! Keep it up Boss!!!

Thanks man. I'm strating on linux and your talk opened my mind. Thanks a lot!

Many thanks for the explainatiom - thorough and easy to follow! 👌

This is the best free software Ive seen. Respect.

@Tony Tascioglu : As a newbie, trying to familiarise with Linux with a hope to switch over permanently from Windows, I was trying to figure out how to edit video in Linux and make my external mic work to record audio at the same time and I stumble upon this video. I should confess that most of the things went over my head and I couldn’t figure out which one of these programmes should I use to make my mic work. I don’t know what to do. 😢

A lot of ppl have over the years commented on the messiness and confusion around linux sound and could there be an easier way to deal with it. I have used alsa from the command line and pulseaudio via a gui. Not used Jack as I don't mix sound. Pipewire I've not heard of prior to watching this video. An instructive video which explains the basic differences between the various pieces of software and how they interact to provide sound capability for Linux which can be a bit overwhelming for Linux newbies. Keep up the good work.

I'll second the "great job" comments. This vid is a great place to start for those folks (like me) trying to understand those topics and how they fit together...

Thanks man!!! Never saw somebody explain that so well

Hi Tony, thanks for all the info you've put together here. I've been editing and recording for over a decade on mainstream platforms, and only recently have started to delve into the Linux side of audio. All these bits and pieces of info are of great help! :D

That was very informative. I came here because I recently bought a Hyperdrum virtual drum kit which allegedly connects via MIDI over Bluetooth to a PC running a DAW. I run Ubuntu Linux and discovered that MIDI over Bluetooth on Linux is troublesome at best and I haven't got it working yet with QTractor. One suggestion was to install Ubuntu Studio which they say comes with all the required audio stuff, eliminating the need to find pieces separately and potentially missing things and generally screwing the system up. Still haven't got it working. But we will persevere. I now have a better understanding of Linux audio and the relationships between all the different parts which hopefully will help. Any suggestions from anyone are most welcome. Thank you. P.S. Can't get it working on a Windows machine either... no that I really want to.

Man this was a great and comprehensive explanation. And also very fun to watch. Thanks !

Thank you Tony I really needed a video like this

Great video, transferred to Linux not long ago, and all of that information was messed up in my head. Thanks.

Harika! Sunum için teşekkürler. :)

Brilliant explanation. Thanks!

Great explanation, thank you for the information you've provided! 😎

Thanks a lot Tony.. I worked in pulseaudio and I really loved this piece of software... It's just a bit heavy for embedded systems... for eg: AudioFlinger is not as heavy as PA

thanks man, finally a complete overall look at linux audio systems. keep it up!!

Excellent! Thank you.

Very informative, thank you!

Thank you for the clear and easy to understand breakdown. I am new to Linux audio, and I'll need to learn a lot because I'm also building a Linux recording setup with Ardour as my centerpiece.

Thanks a lot for this introduction

The Same Bluetooth problem happened with me... But on pulseaudio.... And I was hearing about pipewire from many different source.. I decided to give it a try... Now my Bluetooth devices works flawlessly....

Nice. Finally getting around to moving from xorg to wlroots and pulseaudio to pipewire... I'm a bit of a dinosaur haha so the time has come, been, gone and come again. This was really useful for clarifying some assumptions I'd made about... stuff. Cheers!

Interesting overview of everything! I'm also using pipewire, which when finally properly set works fine. Only the latency is high for my card when compared to the same device in Windows. For example, sending audio to a hardware fx en receiving the signal back takes about 5.5ms in windows, and the lowest I've seen this in my linux setup is 13.6ms (tested using Bitwig). Using a buffer size of 256 @ 48000. I got the RME HDSPe AIO & RME HDSPe RAYDAT used in conjunction, both excellent cards. Also properly configured everything using a realtime kernel. And for hardware I have a Ryzen 3950X, 16gb ram, running from a 7GB/s SSD. All in all aside from losing a lot of plugins (where I can live with), the latency remains something I'm really bothered by. Anyway thanks!

This video was super helpful. Thank you a lot for making it!

Excellent video thanks !

Amazing video, Thank you very much for your effort!

Great video! First time seeing your channel, subscribed! I'm definetly the audience for this type of videos.

Thanks for this video! Been having a ton of audio issues, and this should help me fix them, once I understand it a bit better. Much appreciated! Deserved sub!

that was a really great overview. thanks for making this

Great explanation. Thanks!

Thank you for these interesting explanations!

ABSOLUTELY... EXcellent!!! thanks

Thank you so much for the video. I’m running a development desktop with Ubuntu 20.xx. All my standard devices are working, but I’m trying to test some USB audio output and work with the latency. This really helped with your explanation of the audio servers etc. Thanks again

Worked! What an absolute genius mad lad! Was so easy

13:30 I think the rapidly repeating audio pattern is caused by x-runs (failure to update the sound buffer before the deadline) instead of sampling issues. Sampling issues typically introduce noise to the highest frequencies only. As a software developer, Pipewire seems to be pretty well designed except that the design opted for timer based loop to read/write the actual audio hardware instead of interrupt based approach that most audio devices do natively. I would have expected the actual hardware interface to always use interrupt based approach and then use timer based loop for the software interface. Traditionally the way to fix x-runs problems was to run low latency Linux kernel (PREEMPT config or RT patches, in case of Ubuntu you just install package that's called linux-lowlatency-hwe-20.04 where the number matches your distribution and reboot to new kernel) but according to some user reports the above mentioned timer based hardware handling, some audio hardware has now more x-runs with low latency kernel. I don't understand the rationale for this but I have to trust the user reports about it.

Thank you for the excellent explanation. Greatly appreciated.

Linux Audio is a headache and not easily described how things work out of the box. The documentation isn't helpful as there are so many things, but you explained it very clearly and the main features or fundamental functions of each system.

Though you made some mistakes while you were speaking but then correcting those by providing text was the best thing. Thanks for the video and for the corrections. Thanks bro..

This was super useful, thanks

thx buddy for the explanation, it helped me!

Great video, thanks for that!

Pipewire has good sound quality, it finally fix my audio problem on linux !

wow this is such a informative video! thanks

thanks i learned something new today

Thanks for reminding me of EMU10k1

I got into Linux recently with Arch+KDE Plasma. And I didn't realize that the KDE suite probably came with pipewire packaged with it. I wasn't getting sound at first, so I assumed I didn't have a sound server at all. I installed pulse without noticing pipewire was already there and probably needed some more configuration done to it. Somehow for 3 months those have been running at the same time with pulse taking over all audio from devices, and of all the times a .exe of Dark Souls Remastered might finally have caused a sound issue in the form of muted center sounds (which is the absolute most bizarre error I have seen). It fascinates me. Even then I got Pro Audio stuff to setup eventually too, but each bit is it's own tinker session...

Loved your explanation! Thank you!