Pipewire setup on Debian Testing/Bookworm

Preface

Short maybe-up-to-date (as of August 2022) HOWTO to get Pipewire work as PA/ALSA replacement on Debian Testing/Bookworm (and probably unstable as well). This is just list of notes for how I did it, on a system that has avoided using PulseAudio garbage and only had plain ALSA with DMIX configured previously.

#1 - Install packages

Install Pipewire, the PA/ALSA compat stuff and WirePlumber

sudo apt install pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-jack pipewire-alsa wireplumber dbus-user-session rtkit

NOTE: I am not entirely sure if dbus-user-session is needed or not. During my first attempts, it seemed to matter for getting Pipewire and Wireplumber started properly for Xorg session, despite that package descriptions say that 'dbus-x11' should be enough. Having it installed should do no harm in any case.

Then, reload the systemd configuration. 

systemctl --user daemon-reload

#2 - Configuration

Edit /etc/asound.conf if necessary, in my case I removed everything else but the default audio device configuration, leaving out dmix etc since those things are not needed now. My configuration now looks as follows: 

pcm.!default {
        type hw
        card PCH
	device 0
	subdevice 0
}

ctl.!default {
        type hw           
        card PCH
}

Having an asound.conf may or may not be necessary for you. In my case ALSA defaults to using wrong output and mixer devices (HDMI audio), so I need to configure it. You could leave it unconfigured (e.g. no config file) and use 'pactl' (or edit $HOME/.local/state/wireplumber/default-profile) to set the default sink on Pipewire level.

#2.1 - Optional realtime configuration

Depending on your use-cases, you may wish to increase the realtime priority of pipewire as the default may be a bit low. In order to do that, you need to create an override service file: 

mkdir /etc/systemd/system/rtkit-daemon.service.d/

cat << EOF > /etc/systemd/system/rtkit-daemon.service.d/override.conf
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/libexec/rtkit-daemon --our-realtime-priority=49 --max-realtime-priority=48
EOF

This increases the max priority from to 48. Some people use even higher values, like the source for this information found in a comment of Pipewire Gitlab ticket #685. However, another commenter warns against using values that big. YMMV.

NB: The configuration change in /etc/pipewire/ mentioned in ticket #685 is not needed for newer versions of Pipewire, the default rt.* values have been increased to 88 so it is only limited by what kernel/rtkit allows.

#3 - Remove Pulseaudio

If you had PulseAudio daemon etc installed, you probably want to get rid of it now. Since I've never had it, I can't really help with that. You probably want to uninstall all packages with a name that begins with "pulseaudio".

You'll have to leave some of the libraries around due to dependencies: libpulse-mainloop-glib0 libpulse0 and you might want to leave / install pulseaudio-utils for 'pactl'.

#4 - Restart session / reboot

At this point you may wish to restart your X session, or maybe even reboot. Session restart should be enough, though. If you had PulseAudio installed, you may need to kill the pulseaudio processes first.

#5 - Test

Everything should be ready and work now. Attempt to use some software that outputs audio. You can use 'pw-top', a simple terminal program, to monitor the sources and sinks in real time. pw-top should show a list similar to following: 

!   28      0      0   0.0µs   0.0µs  0.00  0.00    0  Dummy-Driver
!   29      0      0   0.0µs   0.0µs  0.00  0.00    0  Freewheel-Driver
!   35      0      0   0.0µs   0.0µs  0.00  0.00    0  Midi-Bridge
    39   2048  48000  41.1µs  46.3µs  0.00  0.00    7  alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo
    71   3600  48000  10.8µs  21.1µs  0.00  0.00    7   + Firefox

E.g. there should be at least one output sink (alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo in my case) and few *-Driver and if any sound-using software is running, those should be listed as clients.

You can try 'pw-play <file>' to play some WAV/FLAC or so file to make sure that Pipewire itself works directly.

#6 - Cleanup

I previously used 'apulse' PulseAudio emulation over ALSA wrapper with Firefox. If you did also, you should remember to remove it to avoid useless indirection.

Potential problems