PipeWire

To use PipeWire, install the pipewire package.

pipewire(1) should be started as a user. Run the pipewire command in a terminal emulator in your session.

$ pipewire

When pipewire works as expected, use the autostarting mechanism of your desktop environment or startx. The pipewire package provides pipewire and pipewire-pulse system services, but they are not recommended for a typical setup.

PulseAudio replacement

Before starting pipewire-pulse, make sure that the PulseAudio service is disabled and that no other PulseAudio server instance is running.

Start the PulseAudio server by running pipewire-pulse in a terminal emulator.

To check if the replacement is working correctly, use pactl(1) (provided by the pulseaudio-utils package):

$ pactl info

[...]
Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.18)
[...]

Once you confirmed that pipewire-pulse works as expected, it's recommended to autostart it from the same place where you start PipeWire. It is possible to modify pipewire.conf(5) for auto-starting the PulseAudio server, but it's not recommended keep the PipeWire configuration file unmodified for smoother future upgrades.

Bluetooth audio

For bluetooth audio to work, install the libspa-bluetooth package.

ALSA integration

Install alsa-pipewire, then enable the PipeWire ALSA device and make it the default:

# mkdir -p /etc/alsa/conf.d
# ln -s /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/50-pipewire.conf /etc/alsa/conf.d
# ln -s /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/99-pipewire-default.conf /etc/alsa/conf.d

JACK replacement

Install libjack-pipewire.

Use pw-jack(1) to launch JACK clients manually:

$ pw-jack <application>

Alternatively, override the library provided by libjack (see ld.so(8)). The following approach will work on glibc-based systems:

# echo "/usr/lib/pipewire-0.3/jack" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/pipewire-jack.conf
# ldconfig

Troubleshooting

The Pulseaudio replacement requires the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable to work correctly.