Sound

For audio handling on Linux, PipeWire is the currently recommended framework.

PipeWire is a server and user space API that provides a platform to handle multimedia pipelines. It is a modern, low-latency audio and video server designed to work with the latest audio use cases and handle professional audio interfaces and applications.

PipeWire was created as a replacement for both the PulseAudio sound server and the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) server. It provides a unified interface for handling video and audio streams and is intended to be flexible and extensible, allowing it to address not only audio but other multimedia tasks as well, such as video conferencing, screen capture, and other multimedia applications. It can also work with different hardware devices, including webcams, microphones, and professional audio devices.

Additionally, it integrates better with the security models of Flatpak and Wayland. It does so via sandboxing processes from one another, preventing an application from snooping on other applications' audio streams. Before allowing an application to record audio or sharing the screen(e.g. in a browser over WebRTC) it will ask the user for permission to do so.

PipeWire implements no connection logic internally, that is the responsibility of a program called a session manager. It watches for new streams and connects them to the appropriate output device or application.

There are two session managers to choose from:

• PipeWire Media Session: A very simple session manager that caters to some basic desktop use cases. It was mostly implemented for testing and as an example for building new session managers.
• WirePlumber: A more powerful manager and the current recommendation. It is based on a modular design, with Lua plugins that implement the actual management functionality.

WirePlumber is the recommended choice, as it is better maintained, receives regular updates and is more feature-rich.

Installation

The most basic PipeWire setup includes the following packages:

NOTE: PipeWire handles Bluetooth audio devices if the pipewire-audio package is installed.

pacman -S pipewire pipewire-audio wireplumber

Additional packages can be installed to extend PipeWire's compatibility and capabilities:

Package	Description
pipewire-alsa	Support for routing ALSA clients through PipwWire
pipewire-jack	Support for JACK clients
pipewire-pulse	Support for PulseAudio clients (recommended)
pipewire-v4l2	Support for handling video devices, e.g. webcams, tuners, etc.
pipewire-zeroconf	Support for streaming audio over the network, e.g. an AirPlay receiver