Pipewire

https://pipewire.org/

Up from the 4th release in 2021 called Atlantis new installs will have pipewire enabled per default.

If you are on older installs you can easily switch to pipewire from pulseaudio:

Installation:

sudo pacman -S --needed pipewire-pulse pipewire-alsa pipewire-jack wireplumber

You can also stay with pipewire-media-session but it is recommended to use wireplumber as pipewire-media-session is/was only there to start creating Session managers like wireplumber:

PipeWire#Session_manager (archwiki)

Switching between pipewire-media-session and wireplumber:

In case you want to do so, it is recommended to remove old created configs from using pipewire-media-session, inside your user’s configurations:

rm -R ~/.config/pulse ~/.local/state/wireplumber ~/.local/state/pipewire

In addition to clean of stuff not needed under pipewire:

You may need to remove pulseaudio-alsa and pulseaudio-jack packages before that.

The main pipewire package is installed already.

Pipewire uses systemd on userlevel not systemwide for management of the server and automatic socket activation

• pipewire-media-session.service
• wireplumber.service
• pipewire-pulse.socket
• pipewire.socket
• pipewire-pulse.service
• pipewire.service

• pipewire-pulse.socket
• pipewire.socket
• pipewire-pulse.service
• pipewire.service

So nothing else is needed to enable manually it will get enabled automatically on the next boot or if you want to run it without rebooting your system run:

systemctl --user start pipewire-pulse.service

Check if pipewire is running:

pactl info

Server Name should show this:

Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.35)

or with inxi:

inxi -Aa

Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.0 running: no
Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.51 running: yes

To complete for different use cases there are these packages that could be needed in addition:

Automatic switching Bluetooth Headphone into Headset mode if you need Headset mode for microphone usage:

https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/pipewire-stable-enough/16944/29?u=joekamprad

it will not switch automatically, this needs to be enabled..

This will only work if pipewire-media-session is installed for wireplumber you need to use a different setup.

mkdir -p ~/.config/pipewire/media-session.d

cp /usr/share/pipewire/media-session.d/bluez-monitor.conf ~/.config/pipewire/media-session.d/bluez-monitor.conf

nano ~/.config/pipewire/media-session.d/bluez-monitor.conf

and uncomment the line bluez5.autoswitch-profile = true and set it to true ….

save the file .. restart system or services:

systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse

Working exactly as it says… if you start recording it enables Headset profile and seamlessly turns it back of, when you are stop recording…

Switch from pipewire to pulseaudio:

Pulseaudio