Introduction

Pipewire runs two services that are usually in user space: pipewire and wireplumber.

Start with systemctl start --user pipewire, etc.

Components

Pipewire connects to the ALSA kernel drivers and provides ALSA, jack and pulseaudio user clients. It also provides AES67 and AVB networked audio.

The various devices can be listed with wpctl status. Starred devices are the ones chosen by default.

The input and output notion is partly reversed, in the sense that an "output device" (e.g. an audio card output) provides inputs to which the user connects, thus these audio devices are listed with pw-link --input, or pw-link -i.

Audio generating applications provide outputs, they are listed with pw-link --output, or pw-link -o.

Links between inputs and output can be established with pw-link $output $input, i.e. from the application to the output device. Links can be listed with pw-link --links, or pw-link -l.

pw-top provides a running overview over the pipewire devices.