PipeWire: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 05:23, 1 November 2025

PipeWire is a multimedia processing engine that aims to improve audio and video handling on Linux. Pipewire can act as a replacement for both PulseAudio and ALSA servers.

Prerequisites

PipeWire requires D-Bus session bus for most of its functionality.
Ensure that your non-root user account has appropriate groups for desktop usage.

Installation

The following packages i.e pipewire and wireplumber a session manager are the minimum required packages for getting pipewire to work.

# apk add pipewire wireplumber

Pulseaudio interface

The package pipewire-pulse allows pulseaudio applications and GUI tools to use PipeWire as audio server in the backend.

# apk add pipewire-pulse

JACK compatibility

Since Pipewire replaces JACK, Install pipewire-jack package, so it provides ABI-compatible libraries for JACK applications.

# apk add pipewire-jack

ALSA support

Install pipewire-alsa package to provide support for Alsa applications.

# apk add pipewire-alsa

GUI tools

Pulseaudio Interface is mandatory for pavucontrol to work with PipeWire.

pavucontrol tool from pavucontrol provide a simple GUI app for controlling sound, outputs, etc. Consider using pavucontrol-qt for Plasma, if not installed already.

The XFCE Audio mixer can also be used to help control volume by installing the package xfce4-mixer which is currently in available in testing repository.

qpwgraph' is a graph manager dedicated to PipeWire with Qt GUI Interface.

Launch Pipewire

Most desktop environments launch Pipewire automatically in Alpine Linux upon relogging( i.e logging out and logging in) after installing the above packages. Proceed with section below only if Pipewire is not launched after a relogin/reboot.

Pipewire user service is the recommended method to launch Pipewire and will replace pipewire-launcher. Do NOT use both methods to avoid running multiple instances of Pipewire.

Pipewire user service

Since V3.22, Pipewire can be launched as a user service.

User service prerequisites

Ensure the OpenRC User service Prerequisites are met and environment variables are configured.
Issue the command $ rc-status -Ur to view and verify the current user runlevel as gui and default for Wayland and Xorg respectively.

User service management

To start the PipeWire user service and its wireplumber session manager:

$ rc-service -U pipewire start
$ rc-service -U wireplumber start

To enable the PipeWire and wireplumber user services in Wayland, issue the following commands; omit the term gui/swap it for default for Xorg sessions:

$ rc-update -U add pipewire gui
$ rc-update -U add wireplumber gui

The above steps may be repeated for pipewire-pulse user service.

Note that the pipewire-pulse user service would be required to enable various functions, including setting audio levels with pactl, when running pulseaudio with pulseaudio-utils and to enable associated volume user keys.

pipewire-launcher

Note: The pipewire-launcher script will be removed in the future to be replaced with Pipewire User service.

Launch PipeWire by using the pipewire-launcher script. You'll probably get quite a few errors but just ignore them for now.

$ /usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher

If .xinitrc is used, add /usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher to your ~/.xinitrc.

If you do not use GUI by default, add the following stanza to your shell configuration file:

export $(dbus-launch) /usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher

Configuration

PipeWire and WirePlumber store their default configuration in /usr/share/pipewire and /usr/share/wireplumber respectively. If you want to edit the configuration, you need to move it to /etc:

# cp -a /usr/share/pipewire /etc # cp -a /usr/share/wireplumber /etc

Screen sharing on Wayland

Applications which don't implement native Wayland screensharing rely on xdg-desktop-portal plus the correct backend for your compositor. Screen sharing is known to work on:

GNOME with xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
KDE Plasma with xdg-desktop-portal-kde and Firefox
Sway with xdg-desktop-portal-wlr and Firefox, see Sway for details

Bluetooth audio

Enable PulseAudio support as described above
Install bluetooth service packages: bluez bluez-openrc pipewire-spa-bluez
Optional: install GUI manager for bluetooth blueman
Enable and start bluetooth service: rc-update add bluetooth; rc-service bluetooth start
Restart PipeWire
Use commandline program bluetoothctl or GUI program blueman-manager to scan and pair bluetooth audio devices.
Use pavucontrol to adjust volume and manually select high definition bluetooth codecs.

Video

Video should work out-of-the-box with v4l2 devices (e.g. a lot of webcams) and GStreamer applications.

Realtime scheduling

For realtime scheduling, it is recommended to use rtkit package. Add your user to the rtkit group.

Alternatively, ensure your user has the right ulimit permissions. Since pipewire 0.3.66, you can add yourself to the pipewire group. You generally need (e.g. in /etc/security/limits.conf):

@pipewire - memlock 4194304
@pipewire - nice -19
@pipewire - rtprio 95

This allows a member of the pipewire group to have the right permissions for PipeWire to use realtime scheduling without rtkit. This same snippet comes with pipewire since 0.3.66, so if you have a PAM login session and add yourself to the pipewire group, you don't have to do anything else. Note that the above /etc/security/limits.conf will only work if your session is using PAM.

Testing

Use the wpctl utility from WirePlumber to test the working of pipewire:

$ wpctl status

pw-cat playback

Test sound is working using an audio file in a format supported by libsndfile 🔓 (e.g. flac, opus, ogg, wav). Use pw-cat utility from pipewire-tools:

$ pw-cat -p test.flac $ pw-play /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

pw-cat recording

If you have a microphone test audio recording is working.

$ pw-cat -r --list-targets $ pw-cat -r recording.flac (Speak for a while then stop it with Ctrl+c) $ pw-cat -p recording.flac

PulseAudio

Test PulseAudio clients using a media player, as most use PulseAudio.

JACK

Use jack_simple_client from jack-simple-clients:

$ jack_simple_client

You should hear a sustained beep.

Troubleshooting

`wpctl status` shows no targets

First, check whether ALSA knows about your sound card using the aplay utility from alsa-utils package:

aplay -l

If sound devices are found, the issue is with your pipewire configuration. Consider double-checking the instructions above. Otherwise, your sound card may not be supported in the version of the Linux Kernel you're running. You should search online for fixes relating to your current kernel version and the codec of your sound card. You can find each of these with:

uname -r cat /proc/asound/card0/codec*

Modern devices might require sof-firmware, which is the case if you get sof firmware file is missing errors in dmesg.

Error acquiring bus address: Cannot autolaunch D-Bus without X11 $DISPLAY

Check and ensure that D-Bus session bus is started along with your GUI session i.e. you are in a tty.

Connection failure: Connection refused

When using Wayland, ensure that XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is configured correctly. If this is not set, pipewire will create a directory in your home folder instead, called ~/pulse, and on attempting to run Pavucontrol or pactl, you will get the following error:

$ pactl list
Connection failure: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

If you are running Alpine 3.22+ and continue to experience this error after verifying that XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is correctly set, ensure that the pipewire-pulse user service is running.

Bluetooth connect failed: br-connection-profile-unavailable

Ensure that Session Manager is running.

Play/Pause buttons not working on bluetooth headphones

Check /var/log/messages. If you see something like this:

bluetoothd[3463]: profiles/audio/avctp.c:uinput_create() Can't open input device: No such file or directory (2)
bluetoothd[3463]: profiles/audio/avctp.c:init_uinput() AVRCP: failed to init uinput for WH-1000XM5

Then bluez is trying to register the headphones buttons as an input devices, but uinput is not loaded. Try modprobe uinput. If this works, see Architecture#Module_Loading for instructions on how to make sure this module is loaded automatically on each startup.

RTKit error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown

mod.rt ../src/modules/module-rt.c:330:translate_error: RTKit error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown
mod.rt ../src/modules/module-rt.c:995:do_rtkit_setup: RTKit does not give us MaxRealtimePriority, using 1
mod.rt ../src/modules/module-rt.c:330:translate_error: RTKit error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown
mod.rt ../src/modules/module-rt.c:1000:do_rtkit_setup: RTKit does not give us MinNiceLevel, using 0
mod.rt ../src/modules/module-rt.c:330:translate_error: RTKit error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown
mod.rt ../src/modules/module-rt.c:1005:do_rtkit_setup: RTKit does not give us RTTimeUSecMax, using -1

Installing the rtkit package as mentioned in Realtime scheduling section resolves the above error message.

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 * PipeWire requires [[D-Bus#D-Bus session bus|D-Bus session bus]] for most of its functionality.
-*  PipeWire needs proper permissions to access devices. If [[Elogind|elogind]] is used, no further configuration is required. Otherwise, the [[Setting_up_a_new_user#Group_management|user should be added]] to <code>audio</code> (to access audio devices) and <code>video</code> (to access webcam devices) groups.
+* Ensure that your [[Setting_up_a_new_user#Creating_a_new_user|non-root user account]] has appropriate [[Setting_up_a_new_user#Groups for desktop usage|groups for desktop usage]].
-{{Warning|Membership of the <code>video</code> group will also grant unrestricted access to video devices, which is often a security issue. See issue {{issue|15409}} for further details. }}
 == Installation ==
@@ Line 14: / Line 13: @@
 === Pulseaudio interface ===
-The package {{Pkg|pipewire-pulse}} allows pulseaudio applications to use PipeWire as audio server in the backend. {{Cmd|# apk add pipewire-pulse}}
+The package {{Pkg|pipewire-pulse}} allows pulseaudio applications and [[#GUI tools|GUI tools]] to use PipeWire as audio server in the backend.{{Cmd|# apk add pipewire-pulse}}
 === JACK compatibility ===
@@ Line 26: / Line 25: @@
 === GUI tools ===
-{{Pkg|pavucontrol}} or {{Pkg|pavucontrol-qt}} package provides a simple GUI app for controlling sound, outputs, etc. To use <code>pavucontrol</code> tool install {{Pkg|pipewire-pulse}} as the tool still needs [[#Pulseaudio interface|Pulseaudio Interface]]. The XFCE Audio mixer can also be used to help control volume by installing the package {{pkg|xfce4-mixer}} which is currently in available in [[Repositories#Testing|testing]] repository.
+[[#Pulseaudio interface|Pulseaudio Interface]] is mandatory for {{ic|pavucontrol}} to work with PipeWire.
+<code>pavucontrol</code> tool from {{Pkg|pavucontrol}} provide a simple GUI app for controlling sound, outputs, etc. Consider using {{Pkg|pavucontrol-qt}} for [[KDE|Plasma]], if not installed already.
+The XFCE Audio mixer can also be used to help control volume by installing the package {{pkg|xfce4-mixer}} which is currently in available in [[Repositories#Testing|testing]] repository.
 ''{{Pkg|qpwgraph}}''' is a graph manager dedicated to PipeWire with Qt GUI Interface.
-== Configuration ==
+== Launch Pipewire  ==
+Most [[Desktop_environments_and_Window_managers#Desktop_environments|desktop environments]] launch Pipewire automatically in Alpine Linux upon relogging( i.e logging out and logging in) after [[#Installation|installing the above packages]]. Proceed with section below only if Pipewire is [[#Testing|not launched]] after a relogin/reboot.
+[[#Pipewire user service|Pipewire user service]] is the recommended method to launch Pipewire and will replace [[#pipewire-launcher|pipewire-launcher]]. Do '''NOT''' use both methods to avoid running multiple instances of Pipewire.
+=== Pipewire user service ===
+Since [[Release_Notes_for_Alpine_3.22.0#OpenRC_User_services|V3.22]], Pipewire can be launched as a user service.
+==== User service prerequisites ====
-PipeWire and WirePlumber store their default configuration in {{Path|/usr/share/pipewire}} and {{Path|/usr/share/wireplumber}} respectively. If you want to edit the configuration, you need to move it to {{Path|/etc}}:
+* Ensure the [[OpenRC#Prerequisites|OpenRC User service Prerequisites]] are met and [[OpenRC#Configure environment variables|environment variables are configured]].
+* Issue the command {{ic|$ rc-status -Ur}} to view and verify the current user runlevel as '''gui''' and '''default''' for Wayland and Xorg respectively.
-{{Cmd|<nowiki># cp -a /usr/share/pipewire /etc
+==== User service management ====
-# cp -a /usr/share/wireplumber /etc</nowiki>}}
-=== Pipewire user service ===
+To start the [[PipeWire]] user service and its '''wireplumber''' session manager:
+<pre>
+$ rc-service -U pipewire start
+$ rc-service -U wireplumber start
+</pre>
+To enable the [[PipeWire]] and '''wireplumber''' user services in '''Wayland''', issue the following commands;  omit the term {{ic|gui}}/swap it for {{ic|default}} for '''Xorg''' sessions:
+<pre>
+$ rc-update -U add pipewire gui
+$ rc-update -U add wireplumber gui
+</pre>
-Pipewire can be launched as [[OpenRC#User services|OpenRC user service]] since v3.22 in Alpine Linux. The necessary script {{Path|/etc/user/init.d/pipewire}} is installed by default as part of {{pkg|pipewire-openrc}} package.
+The above steps may be repeated for {{ic|'''pipewire-pulse'''}} user service.
-Follow the steps given in [[OpenRC#User services|OpenRC user service]] section to configure and start the {{ic|pipewire}} user service.
+Note that the {{ic|pipewire-pulse}} user service would be required to enable various functions, including setting audio levels with {{ic|pactl}}, when [[PulseAudio#PulseAudio_Utils|running pulseaudio with pulseaudio-utils]] and to enable associated volume user keys.
 === pipewire-launcher ===
-{{Note|The pipewire-launcher script will be removed in the future to be replaced with [[#Pipewire user service|OpenRC User service]].}}
+{{Note|The pipewire-launcher script will be removed in the future to be replaced with [[#Pipewire user service|Pipewire User service]].}}
-Start the PipeWire media server using the <code>pipewire-launcher</code> script provided by Alpine Linux. You'll probably get quite a few errors but just ignore them for now. {{Cmd|$ /usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher}}
+Launch PipeWire by using the <code>pipewire-launcher</code> script. You'll probably get quite a few errors but just ignore them for now. {{Cmd|$ /usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher}}
 If .xinitrc is used, add {{Path|/usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher}} to your {{Path|~/.xinitrc}}.
@@ Line 52: / Line 75: @@
 If you do not use GUI by default, add the following stanza to your shell configuration file:{{Cmd|export $(dbus-launch)
 /usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher}}
+== Configuration ==
+PipeWire and WirePlumber store their default configuration in {{Path|/usr/share/pipewire}} and {{Path|/usr/share/wireplumber}} respectively. If you want to edit the configuration, you need to move it to {{Path|/etc}}:
+{{Cmd|<nowiki># cp -a /usr/share/pipewire /etc
+# cp -a /usr/share/wireplumber /etc</nowiki>}}
 === Screen sharing on Wayland ===
@@ Line 87: / Line 117: @@
 This allows a member of the pipewire group to have the right permissions for PipeWire to use realtime scheduling without rtkit. This same snippet comes with pipewire since 0.3.66, so if you have a [[PAM]] login session and add yourself to the pipewire group, you don't have to do anything else. Note that the above {{Path|/etc/security/limits.conf}} will only work if your session is using [[PAM]].
-=== Disable D-Bus support ===
-{{Warning|This section is no longer supported since Alpine 3.19 as Using lua for configuration files is no longer supported in version 0.5.}}
-For certain configurations (e.g. only audio playback and recording) D-Bus setup is not necessary and it can be disabled as follows.
-Edit the following configuration parameters:
-{{Cat|/etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf|<nowiki>context.properties = {
-    ...
-    support.dbus = false
-}</nowiki>}}
-{{Cat|/etc/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf|<nowiki>context.properties = {
-    ...
-    support.dbus = false
-}</nowiki>}}
-{{Cat|/etc/wireplumber/bluetooth.lua.d/50-bluez-config.lua|<nowiki>bluez_monitor.properties = {
-  ...
-  ["with-logind"] = false,
-}</nowiki>}}
-{{Cat|/etc/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua|<nowiki>alsa_monitor.properties = {
-  ...
-  ["alsa.reserve"] = false,
-}</nowiki>}}
-{{Cat|/etc/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-default-access-config.lua|<nowiki>default_access.properties = {
-  ...
-  ["enable-flatpak-portal"] = false,
-}</nowiki>}}
 == Testing ==
@@ Line 185: / Line 178: @@
 pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused
 </pre>
+If you are running Alpine 3.22+ and continue to experience this error after verifying that [[XDG_RUNTIME_DIR]] is correctly set, ensure that the <code>pipewire-pulse</code> [[#Pipewire_user_service|user service is running]].
 === Bluetooth connect failed: br-connection-profile-unavailable ===