Sound

PipeWire is a new low-level multimedia framework. It aims to offer capture and playback for both audio and video with minimal latency and support for PulseAudio, JACK, ALSA and GStreamer-based applications.

The daemon based on the framework can be configured to be both an audio server (with PulseAudio and JACK features) and a video capture server.

PipeWire also supports containers like Flatpak and does not rely on the audio and video user groups. Instead, it uses a Polkit-like security model, asking Flatpak or Wayland for permission to record screen or audio.

Additionally, WirePlumber is more powerful manager and the current recommendation for a session manager. It is based on a modular design, with Lua plugins that implement the actual management functionality.

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

PipeWire handles Bluetooth audio devices if the pipewire-pulse package is installed. The package includes the /etc/pipewire/media-session.d/with-pulseaudio file, whose existence prompts the media session daemon to enable the bluez5 module.