On 01/10/2022 17:56, Michael wrote:
Anyway, I ventured into pipewire because I wanted to see if Skype would work without pulseaudio and in this system it won't. After I manually installed pipewire Skype won't access the microphone. 🙁
I've got some vague feeling that pipewire is designed to happily sit under pulseaudio. The design aim was to replace both Jack and pulseaudio but it basically just presents a sound device to the layers above, so just like you can stack block devices for disk access, you can stack jack, pulseaudio and pipewire for sound.
The big difference between a sound stack and a block stack is that a block stack is asynchronous and latency is (relatively) unimportant. In a sound stack some applications *demand* synchronicity, and latency is everything. Jack is extremely latency sensitive, pulseaudio buffers and doesn't care, and pipewire is intended to satisfy both.
So the intent was clearly to install pipewire underneath a working pulseaudio, and just move applications across as and when.
Cheers, Wol
