[gentoo-user] Re: [SOLVED] Pipewire not a dependency?

[Michael]

On Saturday, 1 October 2022 19:32:11 BST Daniel Sonck wrote:
> On zaterdag 1 oktober 2022 19:11:19 CEST Wol wrote:
> > On 01/10/2022 17:56, Michael wrote:
> > > Anyway, I ventured into pipewire because I wanted to see if Skype would
> > > work without pulseaudio and in this system it won't.  After I manually
> > > installed pipewire Skype won't access the microphone.  🙁
> >
> > I've got some vague feeling that pipewire is designed to happily sit
> > under pulseaudio. The design aim was to replace both Jack and pulseaudio
> > but it basically just presents a sound device to the layers above, so
> > just like you can stack block devices for disk access, you can stack
> > jack, pulseaudio and pipewire for sound.
>
> Well, it is actually designed as a drop-in replacement and won't present
> audio devices in the sense pulseaudio wants to receive it. I guess it would
> theoretically be possible to use pulseaudio's jack sink to talk to
> pipewire, but pipewire has the full pulseaudio interface for pulseaudio
> applications.

At the moment only some applications support PipeWire's native API, but most 
support PulseAudio's API.  When you come across an application like Skype 
which expects PulseAudio, the solution is to enable USE="sound-server 
pipewire-alsa" for PipeWire and in addition to PipeWire also install media-
libs/libpulse.  No other PulseAudio packages are needed.

Thereafter an application requiring PulseAudio uses PipeWire, the latter 
emulating PulseAudio's server by using PulseAudio's API via libpulse.

I applied the above and now the microphone in Skype works again.  I assume the 
same applies to other PulseAudio friendly applications, which won't play 
nicely with PipeWire only.  I suppose at some point PulseAudio will be 
completely replaced by PipeWire and applications will update their code 
accordingly.