PipeWire
More info
- Creator
- Wim Taymans (Red Hat)
- Released
- 2015
- Type
- Multimedia server
- License
- MIT
- Website
- pipewire.org
The Linux multimedia server that replaced both PulseAudio and JACK by pretending to be both — and which started life as a video project.
Wim Taymans, one of the creators of GStreamer, started PipeWire at Red Hat in 2015 so that sandboxed apps and Wayland desktops could share cameras and screens safely. Along the way it turned out the same graph of nodes and ports worked just as well for audio, and in 2021 Fedora 34 became the first major distribution to route all sound through it.
The trick was compatibility. PipeWire implements both PulseAudio's protocol and JACK's library, so existing programs notice nothing, yet desktop audio and studio audio share one server for the first time. Latency is negotiated per client: a browser gets large buffers, a soft synth small ones. What connects to what is decided by a separate session manager, WirePlumber. The migration went oddly smoothly compared with PulseAudio's — perhaps because it had seen how not to do it.