How do I set up Audio Over network/LAN for pipewire? Pulseaudio + Pipewire

Issues & Assistance
1

Hi, could anyone tell me more on how to set up audio over LAN with pipewire?

I don’t work with sound professionally but i used to have a laptop sending audio to my desktop through LAN with pulseaudio. All i had to do was install pavucontrol and paprefs. Then in paprefs on both machines, I enable the following options:

  • Network access tab: “make discoverable pulseAudio network sound devices available locally”
  • Network server tab: 1. enable network access to local sound devices, 2. allow other machines on LAN to discover local sound devices, & 3. Don’t require authentication
  • Reboot.
    Now i just go back to pavucontrol on my laptop and for an app like spotify or firefox, i select sound output to my desktop.

I used to do this where i had a laptop and desktop running pulseaudio on manjaro xfce. Now my desktop is running Garuda gnome which uses pipewire by default and i cant uninstall it for pulse without uninstalling gnome-control-center. My current situation:

  • pulseaudio laptop (manjaro xfce) —> pipewire desktop (garuda gnome)

Things i tried:

  1. zita-njbridge: i cant get ‘jack2’ running on my laptop when i try the command “zita-j2n myIP myPORT”. I insalled jack via the gui example method on the Archwiki.
  • I’ve added myself to the audio & realtime groups but the following message occurs after successfully running jack in qjackctl:

Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server request channel
jack server is not running or cannot be started
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
Can’t connect to Jack, is the server running ?

  1. The old method using pavucontrol & paprefs. paprefs doesn’t work with pipewire as far as i’ve tried.
  2. Installing pulse through garuda assitant after uninstalling pipewire: doesn’t work (i’ll have to uninstall gnome-control-center).
  3. Someone recommened me roc-toolkit but i’m not even sure where to begin with that.
  4. Installing non-gnome distros: I kinda like gnome on my desktop :slight_smile:

Does anyone know of a way to do this? I could also try converting my pulseaudio manjaro to pipewire for a pipewire → pipewire solution if i really need to.

Edited title to include search keywords.

1 Like
2

Pipewire is still early in development so this may not be possible (yet).

Read over the Arch wiki page (PipeWire - ArchWiki) and the Pipewire documentation (Home · Wiki · PipeWire / pipewire · GitLab) for current features.

3 Likes
3

Thanks for the information. Do you know how to replace pipewire with pulseaudio on garuda gnome? I tried it with the garuda assistant and it needs to replace gnome-bluetooth with pulse-bluetooth. gnome bluetooth is a dependency of gnome-control-center & nautilus file manager. Is there a way to replace gnome-bluetooth without uninstalling nautilus & gnome-control-center?

4

Try:

sudo pacman -S pulseaudio pulseaudio-bluetooth

and see how that goes.

3 Likes
5

Thank you, that worked great! Although it's not quite a solution for pipewire, i will mark it as the solution for this thread.

Edit: Method #2 with pulseaudio works

1 Like
6

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