LINUX Unplugged - Episode 272: Prepare for Pipewire

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

The lead developer of PipeWire Wim Taymans joins us to discuss Linux’s multimedia past, and its exciting future. They promise to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux. Plus we review the professional grade Precision 5530, tour our new studio in a box, and release one of our first production tools as free software! Special Guest: Wim Taymans.

You know, this is kind of a special thing we're doing. I don't know, have we done it before this week? No virtual log and a single focus for an entire episode? Is this even Linux Unplugged, Chris? You might call it a special featured edition. It's the unplugged, plugged in show? I'm not sure. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 272 for October 23rd, 2018.

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's going in with a plan this week. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. We have a special episode, a feature edition of the Unplugged program, something we've been working on for a little while. We're going to do a deep dive into what the hell jack audio is, why people keep experimenting with it, and then why they run away crying.

We went deep, and we'll walk away with a little open source help to get you going with audio magic on your box. We'll tell you about building a studio inside a laptop, complicated audio routing between applications, how we're doing it all with free software. But then we'll look ahead to the future, to the Pipewire future. We'll bring on the main developer, Wim Tamens, of Pipewire to chat about our questions

about what's going to happen with Pulse Audio video on Linux and how it's all going to work in a Wayland future. Wim has had a long distinguished career going way back, and he'll tell us about some of that and what we should expect in the future. And then at the end of the show, but not quite the end, don't call it the last part of the show. His last but not least, a Precision 55 5530 review this is a beast machine in a spelt clean looking package we'll tell you about the feats that we managed to accomplish with this laptop and if you're looking for a mobile laptop something something's like a desktop killer the run linux why you might want to consider the precision line. It

is a heck of a work machine. So this being a special episode, we're actually recording ahead of time because I'm down at MeetBSD. As this is going out, I'll be on my way back from MeetBSD, which is sort of what got us thinking along these lines of like, how can we take our new ThinkPad laptops and build a studio inside the ThinkPad? See, here in the studio, we have a whole bunch of equipment to handle multiple calls and remote connections and the mumble room so we can have a virtual lug. And we have four microphones in studio. There's literally stacks of audio devices just sitting on the table here.

You can't take that with you when you want to go to a community event like Meet BST. You can't pack all that up. And so in the past, we've done it all these different incarnations with some mobile hardware, a couple of machines, depending on the event. But we set out to build it all

into one singular ThinkPad. And that's sort of where Jack came in. And I have to be honest, even though we've been doing audio forever, I have avoided Jack. I've avoided, you kind of, have you avoided it? Just haven't really had the need? I would say avoided.

I mean, is avoided the right term for a technology that you know exists and that you're interested in? And you know would be helpful. You know it'd be helpful, you know it's powerful. It's sort of like any of those topics that you're interested in. I don't know if you're like me, Chris, but you know, I can't get like a small understanding of something. It's hard to just like use the outside

edge of a tool and not deep dive, but I also know how long those deep dives take. So I think it's one of those topics where it's like, Jack is cool, I'd like to learn it, but I already have 10 other things I'm learning right now. Yeah, and pulse audio seems to work, right? For my desktop needs, totally covered by pulse. So have you ever wanted out there, dear

audience, to take the audio output of say one piece of software and send that audio to another piece of software? Have you ever wanted to take the output of that same program and maybe send it to two other programs and then maybe record the result of, say, the first program? That's what Jack enables. It's this comprehensive audio routing and management engine. audio routing and management engine. And because it's so comprehensive and because it can accommodate so many types of setups and musical setups and audio recording setups,

it is complex in its nature. But it's also a very clever piece of software that honestly manages to pull off some magic. In the time that it can route stuff inside your machine and all of that, it honestly is like a black magic box. You get this instant sort of flexibility that you just don't have with any other tooling. And I'll tell you what the damn shame is,

is that it is a super impressive piece of software engineering, but its complexity leads a lot of us free software users to just kind of not pay a lot of attention to it. I know a few people in our audience have really deep dived because I've gotten notes over the years like, Chris, you've got to check this out. And like, hey, Citizen comes in our virtual lug. He sounds amazing

and he's doing his audio processing through Jack. And so I'd always known there's something there. It wasn't until we started doing our deep dive that I learned to appreciate how sophisticated Jack is and how really they have managed to pull off a few shortcuts that make it

very competitive in its performance and all that so we wanted to get this to a place where we could build that studio inside our laptop multi-channel mobile broadcast studios but we couldn't just set it up once and call that good right no that's not going to work. I mean, we need something that's going to be reliable. And as you know, we are a bit of some distro hoppers here on the Linux Unplugged program. On occasion. Laptop shippers, shoppers, switchers. Really, we're not using the same devices just about any time. So if we set it up once perfectly on one machine, that's just not going to work.

Yeah, we wanted to make it something that not only could we use to get going quick, but also that the audience could use. So when we're all done here, we'll tell make it something that not only could we use to get going quick, but also that the audience could use. So when we're all done here, we'll tell you about a script that you'll be able to use, actually a couple of scripts, to help set all this stuff up on your own machine. We've only done a little testing on different distros, so there's more room there. We'll tell you more about that too.

But we wanted to accomplish fancy schmancy audio routing inside the laptop. And, for example, we want to take audio from, say, one mic interface and play the soundboard and maybe also keep a backup recording of my remote host, mix it in the right way so that way people aren't hearing each other to get echo, but they're hearing the other individuals in the call, things like that. Right. I mean, here in the studio, we've got a big 32-channel mixer, and we've got, I don't know, three or four computers, each with audio interfaces attached, feeding into those,

and then complicated mix bus settings to get those all going the right places so I can connect in when I'm remote and hear the mumble people and maybe be the right volume, at least these days. That's a lot to do. It is, and it's complicated, even in hardware. So trying to do it in software is really, and getting it reproducible, which is where the script comes in, is really tricky.

This was an area I didn't even realize wasn't quite covered very well by the traditional tooling because Pulse works pretty darn well and it's good enough for basic, if you're just joining, if I'm just joining to the studio connection, fine, I don't need anything fancy. If I'm just joining a video conference session.

But yeah, once you start needing to pass audio from multiple pieces or platforms that aren't designed to talk to each other, that's where Jack shines.

Like say you're playing something on your desktop and you want to send that to the Chrome browser. How do you do that? How can you take audio that's coming out of Firefox

and send it to just your headphones and not your speakers without changing defaults for your whole desktop? All of that, just on a per- basis. And so it is something that is, you can use it in a fairly simple, I just want to take this and send it to that kind of setup, a one to two setup, or you can reproduce a studio. And so we decided our all-in-one box solution would be powered by our two identical ThinkPads, so that way we have redundancy here, and it's also good for testing.

As of now, Ubuntu 18.04 is the base. We're both running Neon. But it should work on Kubuntu, and it has worked on Ubuntu 18.10 as well. And the whole idea is to create a couple of scripts to make it consistent. You log into a system. You perhaps open an application or run the script. We'll go through the process. And then everything gets set up.

And that part of it right there, I'm hoping that we can share with the audience and then people will perhaps add their own distribution as we go down. So what are we accomplishing when we first log in the machine? We want to get set up to be able to use Jack and record sound. What's the script doing?

What are we doing ourselves? I think just to start, get your distribution all set up, you know, a machine that you can normally use. And then I think the first set of scripts would just be to bootstrap the installs because you got to get all the packages. And sure, you can just install Jack, but there's a whole suite because, you know, it's the Linux open source community.

There's a whole suite of tooling that you might want and probably do want to go around. And a lot of those are not in necessarily the standard distributions. A big one for us is the KX Studio suite of applications. Huge. KX Studio is a great resource. It's available as a distribution or as repositories, or just of individual dev files, too. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of it is really just getting that shoehorned into place the right way and then getting all of the dependencies installed. Yeah. And that's going to be the part in regards to our script that we release that is going to be the most distro-specific,

I imagine. Yes, exactly. Package names will change if you're on Arch, and there's probably a whole other set of packages. I'm not sure. I haven't actually tried Jack on Arch yet. I'm sure it's well-supported, but you might need to hit the AUR up for some of those more esoteric applications. Yeah, so you think of it as this way. Your base Linux desktop

has good sound for just doing playback and, you know, everyday computer use. It's when you want to step it up to the next level where you've got to install this jack stuff. And it's like you're adding in this audio engine into your Linux box. You're grafting it in, and it has the ability to pretend to be a pulse device. It has the ability to pretend to be ALSAulse device. It has the ability to pretend to be ALSA too.

So applications that talk Pulse and ALSA just can automatically, by that nature, talk to Jack. Right, so it's functionally just another sound server that runs on your system. And so it talks to the kernel driver part of the ALSA stack and gets input that way. And then individual clients that want to support Jack, well, they implement some of the Jack API

and then they register what are called clients and can get to talk to Jack. And you can register inputs and outputs and then Jack lets you route between those. Like in our case, we set up VLC as a client and we set up Chrome as a client. Yeah, exactly. And then we could route audio between them.

In fact, I snuck a recorder into Wes's lab here at the studio and captured the first moment when we actually got this working. The audio's a little rough, but it's genuine, like, we made it! So how would we know if Chrome's getting audio from the right source? Right, we should be able to just go to Chrome in. Okay, so that goes from VLC left to Chrome left, from VLC right to Chrome right. So it's a stereo, that's cool. Yeah, and you can change that in the script of how, like, from VLC left to Chrome left, from VLC right to Chrome right.

So then it's a stereo, that's cool. Yeah, and you can change that in the script of how you want it to be. Mono. Yeah. So now we play this file in VLC, we go over to Chrome and... If I could select the right settings, this would all be a lot easier. Ah ha ha!

Okay, do it again, hit it again, let's see if it works. And the survey says, boom. So now we're going, we're sending VLC audio into Chrome. Yeah. And so we just have a Chrome in jack source. So anything that gets sent to Chrome in would show up in there. Exactly. So it could be the soundboard.

It could be another audio interface I have plugged in if I have two people. Yep. That's great. That's great. That's great. One of the things that makes this doable once it's up and running is there is a UI where you are dragging wires from one device to the other device

or to an application. What's that called? Yeah, exactly. That's the Jack Patch Bay. And there's multiple, again, there's multiple imitations of just about all of these different types of tools. We're using one from the KX Studio suite for a whole suite of reasons. Which is a nice, cute front end. Yeah.

And I mean, QT. It is nice, though, yeah. It gives you a nice visual space, and you can manage different Jack sessions. You can save a session and load them. Am I getting the terminology right there? Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Really, under the hood, we're using Lottish or the Lottie session handler, which, yeah, lets you save all that state. Once you've got, I mean, you can find some pictures online. We might have some stuff to share down the road. Once you get these patch bays really configured, there are a lot of connections, especially you were kind of talking about it. But, you know, if you're joined by a remote host and you're playing from the soundboard and maybe some music from another program or playing a clip from YouTube or something, well, you want to make sure everyone can hear just what they're supposed to hear and not everything else.

And you need to be able to monitor everything that's going through the system as well. So you end up with, you know, one output over here, but it's going to six different places. And actually, the UI makes it pretty intuitive. You can, you know, you can hover over it. It'll highlight just which lines go into which input and output. Yeah, it's a bit of a physical representation in software

of what we do here in the real world. Right. You can imagine just taking like TRS plugs and plugging them into two. It's basically that. We'll put a visualization of what we're talking about on the GitLab page for the script. So we'll have that linked in the show notes, linuxunplugged.com slash 272. If you want to see what Wes is talking about, we'll have a visual there on the script page. Just to clarify things a bit here, we're using Jack 2 right now, and that's just one additional

way some of this stuff can be really confusing. Jack's been around since 2002 and now runs on a whole bunch of platforms. So as you can imagine, really like any good open source project, there's a lot of good functionality, but not all of it's super well documented or it's just spread out between six different sources. Yeah, and one thing that confuses me is there's technically two versions of Jack. There's Jack 1 and Jack 2. Right. So originally Jack 2 was going to be a multiprocessor aware replacement for Jack 1, but it turns out that their feature sets are just ever so slightly different. Like if you need to use two interfaces, let's say. Two sound cards or

two USB audio devices, even two like snowball microphones or two headsets. Exactly. Well, only Jack One really supports that very well. But if you want some of the fancier features or to work on a bunch of other platforms, that's Jack Two's wheelhouse. Now they both implement the same C API in the background. So you can write your own.

The applications don't care. Don't care. Okay. That's confusing though, just even having two versions. And it seems like if they ever, and hopefully they will, get around to creating Jack 3, then they're going to re-merge them again. It's sort of like the intention-ish. Everyone agrees there doesn't need to be two, it's just that they both work right now.

And people like both of them for different reasons. But for our purposes, we're using Jack 2. And there's a lot of features of Jack that we don't care about for our particular purposes because we do a lot of offline recording or, you know, just some live shows with effects done or minimal effects that we can all do in hardware that we have. Yeah. But Jack excels at low latency applications. It's actually driven a lot of the work for the real-time kernel patch set that exists for Linux

because when you're doing, you know, if you're doing a complicated live show, you need fast feedback, and Jack can get you the really low, like, sub-10-millisecond latency that you're going to want to hit. Since we're automating this process for ourselves, and a big part of what we're doing now as part of Linux Academy

is trying to open-source the stuff we do, right off the bat, we're going to open-source the script, we're going to post it up on our new gitlab.jupytercode. open source the script. We're going to post it up on our new gitlab.jupytercode.io GitLab instance. We'll have some information there. The thing to really take away

is there's two scripts. One that's pretty Ubuntu-specific that installs the packages and then another script. But I'll let Wes tell you about that. Right.

So, yeah, the first script is just to set it up. And we're targeting Ubuntu right now. If people want to implement that script or just make documentation for how to set those things up on other systems, hey, that we're targeting Ubuntu right now. If people want to implement that script or just make documentation for how to set those things up on other systems, hey, that would be welcome.

Very much so. The other script is sort of our playbook script. It's how we're going to get everything up and running so that, Chris, let's say you're on the road and you've got your ThinkPad. You know you've already set up everything for Jack. You can just launch this script. It'll go through, set things up just how it should be. In particular, since we're using a lot of Pulse audio applications,

Jack includes some connectors so you can tie Pulse to Jack. And, you know, it's pretty featured. You can name them and get them all set up. But we want to make sure that happens every time. So it sets those up, launches applications so that they connect to the right Pulse sync so that we get the sound going where we need it to go, and then launches our favorite DAW Reaper. The nice thing about Jack being around for a while and the fact that it's pretty well respected software has meant that support for it has crept into more areas than you suspect. Jack is one of those things that's kind

of like Samba where you realize that Samba has been snuck into more devices and things in this world than you ever thought possible. Jack's a lot like that. It wasn't until we really started looking into this that we realized our audio editor and recorder of choice for Linux, Reaper, the Reaper workstation, has brilliant support for Jack. It just plugs right in. You get a whole bunch of inputs and outputs, and then it's super—I mean, we went through it, Chris. It's so easy. You just pick literally the names of the clients that you want right in the Reaper UI. And I can assign dedicated

tracks to each one of those. So my microphone is its own dedicated track, the soundboard, and my remote guest, I can keep a backup audio copy on its own track, all through Jack, one laptop, one microphone, one set of headphones. It's something that is just to me when I'm literally right now recording this sitting in front of a 32-channel mixer, it really kind of blows my mind. It's really... And it's the same laptop.

You haven't done anything. You haven't paid for any expensive proprietary software. I really feel like we came across this magical open-source project that I've heard a lot of people talking about that I avoided for a really long time. And the real magic they do that you just mentioned is that low latency. I know I mentioned earlier, but that is, from my understanding of talking to a couple of people who really know

how to build this stuff, it's almost unmatched. Right. And that's one of the things about Pulse that it just can't do. Pulse does a great job of, you know, combining things, letting you control which output from which application goes to which output device that you want, stuff that we couldn't easily do before. But there's a lot of latency involved because it wasn't designed for that. It's designed for a good end user listening experience, trying to minimize dropped packets and that sort of thing. You have very different goals when you want low latency, especially involves a lot of this is just passing bytes around and making sure that you don't allocate memory and you

don't do anything that won't be constant time. Right. So clearly Pulse has its limitations. It's good for certain applications. And I'd say Jack's limitations, it could be your everyday sound server, but Jack's real limitations might be its complexity, its general tooling set around it. Right. And this is where the opportunity for Pipewire opens up. Right, yeah.

This is where the opportunity for Pipewire opens up. And Pipewire not only brings in and solves the audio side of this, but it also solves the video side of this. And this is really going to be the future of Linux's media pipeline, assuming that Pipewire is successful. And that's why we wanted to bring on our special guest. So joining us now is Wim Tymus, and he is the man to talk to about Pipewire. Wim, welcome to Linux Unplugged. Hello, everybody.

Good to have you here. Wim, just because I was a little starstruck, I got a little nerd starstruck when I was Googling you. I thought if you would indulge us, maybe we'd start sort of towards the beginning of your career. You've got some standing in this industry. You've been working in audio and multimedia development since the Commodore 64, true? Yeah, I guess so. Impressive. Yeah, that gives you a history here.

What did you do on the Commodore 64? I started writing demos, just small little programs in assembly. And then it became like bigger demos and more complicated effects. And then I started to do some games. Then I kind of moved on to Amiga. And then I did some more demos and experimenting. And then I learned C and got some more multimedia stuff. So it's kind of a hobby that has been going on.

C is always very small. So yeah, it's always been a bit like image and audio and animation and stuff like that. Multimedia, I guess. Yeah, well, what I realized when I was Googling was that I've been following your career for quite a while. I just didn't realize it was you because fast forward down many years later

and you ended up being one of the primary developers of GStreamer, and you worked at Fluendo as well, true? Yes, yes, that's true. So yeah, that was a bit of a weird story, because I was doing my free time. I was working on the open source stuff, and I was going to write a video editor. But then I needed a multimedia framework, I realized. And then I discovered like the early beginnings of GStreamer back in 1999, I think it was. And then I started hacking on that actually my free time for quite a few years.

Yeah, until I got a job doing that, actually. I was working in a bank back in the day, so something completely different. GStreamer 1.0, September 24, 2012. I can't believe it was that long ago. Wow. Yeah, that's... And that's amazing. Yeah.

Wim, and now you're a principal software engineer at Red Hat. So, and that has brought us to talk about Pipewire today. Very excited to have you on the show, especially because audio is a big area that we work in. And we have a couple of questions for you. I mean, just to start off, one of the things we're talking about on today's show is Jack. And so we were very curious to see that Pipewire is going to have Jack support built right in. What's the status? Is that something I could use today? Use today is a big word. Jack is quite stable and well-established, but there are some things that work. It's all just not ready packaged and easy to test

and all of that stuff, but we're working on that. So soon, I'm hoping in a couple of months, we'll actually be able to test it properly. Wim, I think it would be a good idea if we just paused really quick and defined Pipewire to a degree. When you read the Pipewire site, it says, and this is a pretty big ambitious goal,

Pipewire is a project that aims to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux. Boom! That right there is a massive statement. How is it going to accomplish that? So, yes. So basically, I'm not going to do anything. I'm going to take all the bits and pieces that exist, the good stuff, and combine them into one new thing. It's, I turned out to be what is currently happening in pipe wire. So as the base for audio processing and general framework for these things, the Jack,

the design seems to work fine. Like parts from G streamer, for example, for doing buffer negotiation and format stuff that seems to work fine. Like parts from GStreamer, for example, for doing buffer negotiation and format stuff, that seems to work fine too. And there's lots of other things from plugin architectures that seem to work fine together. That allows you to build something

that is actually going to be able to compete with core audio, for example. Core audio, I've been looking at that quite lately. I don't agree with everything that they do, but what they can do is pretty impressive. I love to hear that. That's good. So you're taking a look at how the other side has made it work somewhat successfully. Yes, so I think with the combination of Jack

and also with what they have in core audio, like I.O. units, if we have something similar, that would be something what Pulse Audio did and also with what they have in core audio, like IO units. If we have something similar, that would be something what Pulse Audio did to take in arbitrary streams and feed that into a Jack pipeline or sort of pipeline because you need something more than Jack. That will get us very close, I think, to an ideal position. And something that I learned this year is that we need an external session manager, something that ties in closely with the desktop and all of the configuration stuff, because that is typically also something that is currently lacking in Pulse Audio and Jack,

the setup of the whole thing. How do you say my card? jack the setup of the whole thing how do you say my card it has four channels but really channel one and two is are not connected to anything and you shouldn't assume it's or i have two sound cards and i want them to make them into a surround sound so this session manager would also in theory allow you to save states so you could load an entire session up say you say for example you get to an area that has a lot of audio equipment that you plug in, now all this equipment's become available that wasn't there earlier in the day. Well, that is the session manager, how Jack defines it.

Yeah, it's like loading of complete setups of audio processing pipelines. I don't know exactly how we're going to call that. Maybe we should call the other session manager something else. But what I mean with the session manager is managing all of the devices that are on your system. Like I plug in my USB headset or something and I'm playing a video. What should happen with the audio? The decision that is currently being made for moving the sound

from your video player to your newly plugged-in device, it's like the decision is made currently by Pulse Audio inside a module, but you can't really tweak that anywhere, and the desktop can't really get to that setting, and you can't really influence anything. So I want to make that a bit more accessible to the desktop and have the user be more in control of that. So that would be something maybe where,

if two people were using the same computer, they could have completely different audio configurations from the same hardware, and that would be, the Pipewire could be aware of the different user configurations? Yes, yes, for example. The Pipewire itself, for example, it will start up, it will load all the devices, but in itself, it will just sit there, because then there is the session manager that starts up, connects to

Pipewire, and actually goes and restores information from a database to say, this card and all of these channels, they get these labels and these devices get grouped together and those are priorities and so on. So that if an app comes, VLC, for example, that you know, VLC, it presents me with a surround sound stream. The user wants a surround sound stream to discard

and then we link that all together like that. So that would be the responsibility of the session manager managing all of the audio that is coming in and also the video because it works for video as well and and routing that to the right device and it also goes for example what we currently don't have or something that is not accessible is, for example, equalizers or filter setups. You know, you can have like in other operating systems, you can, for example, say I want Dolby surround sound or something as an output. So for that, you can set up a little filter that will do this conversion for you. Currently, that is totally not accessible from anything, Pulsar or things like that.

So we want to make that a bit more configurable. And all of this management of these filters and setups would be done by a session manager under control of the desktop. So that is currently an idea we have. That makes a lot of sense. I picked up a lot of unification in this project, joining both audio and video, treating them in the same system. That really hasn't been how we've done it on Linux.

Have you seen any particular challenges in trying to join those into the same system? No, not at all, really. From a Pipewire perspective, it's basically moving memory around between like apps that are linked together in a graph. If it's audio buffers or video buffers, it doesn't really matter from that point of view. So it's basically an inter-app communication of multimedia at the Pipewire level. So from that point of view, there is not really any difference.

So what we are going to do in the session manager then is actually put meaning to all these things. For video, for example, we don't really have a good story yet about. What we currently have for video is the thing like, okay, you have your desktop and you have your desktop screen and we provide as a stream in Pipewire. And then you can have your app, connect to it and get the stream and do something with it. That makes a lot of sense. That seems actually pretty straightforward. Yeah, so it's one app sends multimedia to another app. So it's nothing more than that. But it's the session manager that brings meaning to that, of course,

then you have to have some logic around it to make that meaningful. It seems like, you mentioned it a little bit up at the start, but there's a lot from Jack here that sort of makes sense, or can be extended to other systems. Has there been difficulties

getting the Jack support going? That's one area we're just fascinated by. Seeing that Pipeware can maybe support these low latency workloads is pretty exciting. How has that been? That is, I mean, it maps pretty well, one-to-one to Jack, so that wasn't really

a big problem. The problem, of course, is getting it fast enough, because Jack takes a lot of shortcuts everywhere. So yeah, that's kind of the only challenge there. So currently it's kind of pretty competitive. It's in the same ballpark as Jack for the same kind of buffer size. It's a bit more complicated in what it does internally,

but it can actually be optimized. That's great. So we touched briefly on Jack sessions, not the session management we were talking about before, but session management within Jack. Will Pipewire support that as well? Well, the thing is with the session manager

that there is not really a consensus about what kind of features it should have. So for Jack itself, there's the internal session manager, but there's also a couple of other session managers. I looked at them before last year, but yeah, I don't remember them very well. But some of them were, for example, able to deconstruct sessions across machines over a network and stuff like that.

Others, like the normal Jack one, restores locally on your desktop only. So the question is, well, I've been told that there should be a session manager built in, but then if I want to do that, I want to do something that is powerful

enough for everybody's use case because it's pointless. Right, so there's still some questions at the design stage here to get. You want to make sure you have the right scope and feature set before you go build it all out. So my thinking currently is that the session manager also runs externally as an external app that configures pipelines across machines.

I don't see it exactly as a part of Pipewire currently. I don't know if we need to ship yet another session manager. Maybe there's one that already works well enough. There's a few of them out there. Yeah, right. That's a good point. So, okay, in this glorious new Pipewire future, is it just going to be one more daemon I have to run on my system, or is it going to be something that can really replace and talk to all the apps I have?

So it sounds like Jack support is well underway. What about all the Pulse apps that have proliferated on the desktop? Yeah, so the current plan is both Audio Server and Jack daemon, they get replaced by one daemon, Pipewire daemon. And then you have the API, the Jack API, like libjack.so and libpulse.so. They got replaced by Pipewire versions that basically have the same API. So apps keep on running, but internally they convert to a pipewire protocol, which for Jack apps is pretty much one-to-one conversion.

For Pulse audio, it's basically also a one-to-one conversion, but with the module that runs on the server that kind of is similar to what Pulse audio does. It talks Pulse in another way. Yeah, it's a new implementation of Pulse client libraries. And the same for ALSA. For ALSA, for example, you can do an ALSA plugin, so that's quite easy. ALSA lives! Even in the Pipewire future.

While we're talking about the future of the desktop, Pipewire is also being built with Wayland in mind, I presume. I don't know what you mean with that. Well, so specifically around sandboxed applications, applications delivered in Flatpak that are on a Wayland desktop where perhaps things are a little more contained,

applications are going through portals to get audio instead of just talking to the system, those kinds of things. Yes, yes. So the system is designed to, for example, not have anything like shared memory or stuff like that, that is very difficult to implement in a sandboxed environment. So it's mostly built on file passing, file descriptor passing. So that way you can give shared memory from the server to the client and stuff like that.

And also what we currently are doing is, for example example if you have a client that wants to capture for example screencast which is something we have implemented what happens then is it goes to the portal and it says to the portal i want to do a screen capture what the portal the portal is running outside of the sandbox and the way to talk to the portal is through Dbus, and that is a secured part that the sandbox app can do. And then the portal will set up a session in Pipewire where it configures just the screen capture screen together with the model that is under GNOME. And then it gives that session as a file descriptor.

It gives the file descriptor back to the sandbox application, and that is basically a file descriptor it gives the file descriptor back to the sandbox application and that is basically the file descriptor that it uses to open the connection with with pipewire server now if it does that then it only sees the stream that has the screen capture in it right so there is no sound cards or anything that are visible so from a pipewire point of view or from a client point of view, it only sees that there's a stream with capture of data. So that way we can use the portal to lock down a session for each sandbox individually.

Sounds like we're finally getting a sort of rich, lifted API design where instead of just having to deal with files, we actually have a more complicated system that can enable those kinds of use cases. Yeah, so there are still a couple of questions for this, especially if you add and remove devices and you want to dynamically change permissions on devices, how we keep all of this synchronized between portal and sandboxed app and pipewire and so on.

These are questions we still need to answer. That makes a lot of sense. Although I do now think I understand Pipewire a lot more than I did just 10 minutes ago. So I'm kind of excited over here now. If I want to go play with that, how do I do that? Is that something I can expect to see maybe available in Fedora 29?

Yeah, so currently it's all old versions floating around. So nothing that supports any of the audio use case. So that's all done in a work branch currently. So you'll have to check out Git and check out the work branch. And from there on, it's getting better. So we have sub-modules now that are automatically built with Jack support,

ALSA, and Pulse Audio. I think there's also a script now to set up the environment so that you actually have those libraries first in your library path. And then basically you should be able to run any app on top of Pipewire. Well, we are here on the show cheerleading you on. Very excited, Wim, and I hope sometime in the

future we're at an event where I can buy you a beverage of your choice, because I really appreciate all of the work you've done for years, not just in Pipewire. So we'll have links to the GitHub page, the project page. Is there anywhere else, any other resources you want to point people to for the Pipewire project? No, just the website and the GitHub pages. We'll do else, any other resources you want to point people to for the Pipewire project? No, just the website and the GitHub pages. We'll do for now. We don't have a lot of other things.

There is a wiki on the Pipewire website. There is a wiki as well on GitHub, which has some ideas we talked about here. And I try to keep that up to date. We will track that down

and we'll put a link in the show notes for that as well. Wim, thanks for taking a bit of your evening and joining us on the Unplugged show. Much appreciated. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you to Wim for coming on. Now we're really excited about the future of video and audio on Linux. And to power that media in the future, you're going to need a powerful system.

And sitting in front of us here, we have the Dell Precision 5530. It was sent to us by Dell for review. And it's funny. Well, look at this. It's surprising. It's really deceptively small for a 15-inch laptop. I mean, it looks big when you're just looking at it by itself, but you have it next to your 14-inch ThinkPad, and it's about the same size. They don't feel like different classes of device, really. One's just a little bit bigger boned. Yeah. So it is a 15-inch laptop, but it's sort of almost like a 14-inch size

because it's that edge-to-edge display setup that they have. And when you open that up, it really feels like they somehow snuck an even larger laptop into this Precision. It feels like a very large screen. And it's got that standard that we all like now, that carbon fiber mesh design on the top inside, which wraps around a chiclet-style keyboard with a pretty large, pretty practical trackpad. It's smooth. It's one of the better ones I've used. Wes and I both like it in some circumstances.

If you're trying to get across the screen, it's like one of the best trackpads on the market. If you're trying to do really fine text control, it seemed like it was a little jumpy. I think especially combined with the high DPI nature of the screen, those two factors together, especially on maybe an application that doesn't work too well or doesn't have the scaling built in, it gets difficult. None of that matters. None of that really matters, though, once the screen turns on. It comes loaded with 1604, and you know, it's fine. It's a little boring at this point. 1810's out. But once loaded with Ubuntu 1810

and its new theme, this 3840 by 2160 screen is so vibrant and the colors are so bold you would swear they were leaping off the screen. When Wes got to the studio the first time I was playing around

with this with 1810, I was telling Wes about it. He's like, well, I got to see this. I was like, okay, stay here. I ran upstairs and I grabbed the laptop and I come downstairs and I open up the screen and you were impressed. I still am. I mean, I'm looking at it right now. It's next to my ThinkPad and boy, does it put the ThinkPad, it just puts that screen to shame.

It's not even comparable. The colors are so much more accurate and superior and the dynamic range is way superior on the Dell. Plus, it's 4K versus 1080p. And it's just bright. It feels alive and vivid. I'd say it's better than the MacBook screen. It's one of the best screens I've ever looked at on a laptop. It's actually one of the best computer screens I've ever looked at. This seems like, I mean, even if you weren't doing video production, just editing some photos on here would be a treat. Yeah, it's really something, especially with the newer theme that has really sharp colors. So on the right side of this wedge-shaped bottom half of the laptop, you've got an SD card slot reader, which is great to see. A handy USB-A port is still there, which I much appreciate.

And one of my favorite Dell features I hope they never get rid of, it's been on our XPSs that Wes and I have both owned forever, is that LED battery meter that you can push in, and at a quick glance, it gives you a charge state of the battery. Don't have to turn things on. Don't have to worry. You're trying to grab it to go out the door. You want to know where you're at. It's right there.

It's right there. It's right there. And then on the left side of the wedge, you have a traditional barrel power connector. It is not USB-C powered, and that is to accommodate the laptop's 130-watt power needs. It is not USB-C powered. And that is to accommodate the laptop's 130-watt power needs. Yes, and you

just can't push it over USB-C yet. Next to that is another USB-A. Then you have a full-size HDMI out and a Thunderbolt-capable USB-C port and a headphone jack on that. And inside this sucker, it's got a 97-watt-hour battery, so the absolute limit of what the FAA will allow. And inside this sucker, it's got a 97 watt hour battery. So the absolute limit of what

the FAA will allow and what Dell calls, it's something they're very proud of, a sophisticated thermal management system that they claim helps it perform well under load. I will say we've been messing with this machine all day and it hasn't been plugged in. It's just now getting down to a half hour of time remaining. Yeah, I have not done extensive battery testing, but I have done extensive thermal and CPU punishing testing. And I will say their claims of a good thermal system are there. The fans are there, but it's very mild. If you're in a room with another computer fan, it's almost unnoticeable.

It's pretty good. If you're in a quiet, silent room, you'll hear it kick up, but it's one of the more pleasant fan noises. They have done a really good job there. So the hardware-wise, the CPU in the one that we got is a Core i9-8950K with 12 megabytes of cache, and it peaks up to 4.8 gigahertz, nearly 5 gigahertz, and it has more RAM in the cache than, it has more memory in the cache than I had RAM

in my old computers when I was a kid. That's insane. I didn't even have storage means that size. And all of that right next to the CPU, incredible. It's got, I mean, can you imagine what kind of difference that must make? It's loaded with 32 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM. That i9 CPU supports up to 64 gigs in this laptop.

It's got a Quadro NVIDIA graphics in it, and it has a 512 gigabyte Samsung Professional MVNE. Very nice system. As you can imagine, it benchmarked very well. I have a link in the show notes. If you would like to compare your system to this very system that I reviewed, you can read the link in the show notes on how to do that. I decided to use that. This is a feature of the Pharonix Benchmark Suite, and it integrates with a site called openbenchmark.org, where you can opt to post your results and then compare them to other systems or compare them to your own systems, and it gives you one command line to run to make that comparison.

Oh, that is slick. So I did the baseline benchmarks on the Dell Precision 5530. Then I came down to our studio machines, and I benchmarked them. Oh. And I was able to do a direct comparison between our existing equipment and the laptop. And I will post the one that is our Reaper workstation, our main audio production system. I will post that in the comparison if

you want to take a look at the differences between a custom-built PC from a couple years ago and this laptop. And there's obvious speed improvements with this brand new laptop. Just about every single task that we perform in the studio, not just about, every single task, exporting audio, that we perform in the studio, not just about, every single task, exporting audio, rendering to FLAC, all of the disk transactions, anything that hits the CPU, much faster. In some cases, moderately faster.

And it's pretty impressive because these are multi-core, six-core systems in some cases. This is also a six-core laptop, though, so it's... Wait, say that again. Six-core laptop? In a laptop, yeah, in a laptop. So we decided, well, how do you really properly punish a machine like this and put it through its paces, really, when it's got this much in it? In fact, this is getting harder and harder as these laptops get more and more incredible, and it's becoming almost a daunting task. And initially, I found this laptop a bit frustrating, if I'm going to be honest with you. It's so fast, it's hard to put it really into words how that is valuable. And

I'm in the middle at the time we record this of prepping for a trip to meet BSD. I'm going to be going down into the BSD gray wolf's den, and I have to be ready for that. I got to be on my A game. So I kept pushing it off. It was just one more problem I didn't read, one more problem I didn't read and one more problem i didn't need right now you know didn't need that i could just deal with it when i get back that's when i'll do the review i kept thinking i'll run the benchmarks i'll get my data collected and then i'll spend the time with it to really do the review but that screen and it's just good looks in general and not in the light up keyboard which is pretty good not nothing that

good but pretty good uh it just kind of kept pulling me back in. Like, it just kept, like, well, I'll do it. You know, I'll just do this. It was a machine you wanted to use. You didn't have to use it. You have plenty of laptops. Admit it, you find yourself feeling the same way. Using it right now.

There's two laptops in front of me, and I'm using this one. Yeah, and so, as you would expect, that screen and the overall just speed of the machine, I'd take a few moments here, take a few moments there and play around with it. And I started getting things set up. I'd run a thermal test here or there. Maybe as time went on, I'd start doing a few more things, load a few more bits of software. And pretty soon I found that I was working on the precision because it was saving me time. It had started out a problem, but by the time I was done getting it set up,

it was saving me time. It was solving my biggest problem of being out of time. It was a realization, like an actual realization of how this faster machine can get the job done a little bit faster, which means in the fall, I'm getting out the door before the sunset versus after the sunset.

And that actually makes a difference in my life, and I can drive home with the sun still out. That improves your mood, it makes you happier, you get your things finished faster. And why do you need to wait, right? You're running out the finished show, why do you need to wait and hang around for the computer to chug along? It just doesn't make sense. Yeah, it was,

so we set the whole thing up, Wes got it all set up with Jack. We did the remote studio test, we did the Reaper test. And fair enough, things like Reaper and a couple of Jack apps, they don't look great

on the 4K screen. It's a little too small. You can still read it if you have good eyesight, but if you struggle to read the screen, you know, that could be a disadvantage potentially.

But it'd be a shame because you'd be passing up really one of the most brilliant displays that's got to be in the industry. And everything you do on the machine, it's just snappy. There's no lag. It's like getting a brand-new machine every day that you use it.

Yeah. In fact, when I was – the first time I had brought it down and shown it to Wes so he could see the screen, he then started messing around with it. I'm like, just sitting there watching him. And before I even said it, you went over and started launching the terminal. You're like, look how fast this is. Look at the file manager. Look at this. It is really impressive. They've got a great machine on their hands and I think it's of note that I've gotten this far into the review and I haven't felt

it necessary to mention the Linux compatibility. Now I'm going to talk about that but I just, I think of note that used to be what you'd lead with. Right now it's a footnote and that footnote is essentially, yeah, it's great. I wiped off the stock install, which was great. It was just a nice standard 16.

Yep. And I wiped the drive and I put 1804, I'm sorry, I put 1810 on there. I'm gonna have to break that habit. And it has been flawless. Everything has worked. I have gotten a ton of mileage

out of the free NVIDIA driver. I have been shocked by that. Now, grant a lot of my tests weren't GPU-based. They were CPU and disk and network-based. But for day-to-day operation on 4K with what feels like one of the fastest desktop Linux experience I've ever had, the things that Canonical has done to 1810, GNOME's installation, and upstream GNOME have done to improve the performance of GNOME are paying dividends

on that machine. So it was a very, very snappy experience. And it all worked without me having to fuss with a single thing. I never had to install a driver. I never had any weirdness when I wiped the drive and I installed it. When I tried out other live distros on it,

they saw all of the hardware. 4K support on some of them is hit and miss, but that's not on Dell. Out of the box, though, it works great. So you get that MacBook experience. You buy it, it comes to your home, and it runs Linux on it. Yeah, I guess it is very much.

It's like that MacBook experience, or I suppose that Microsoft Surface experience, I imagine, might be. I bet you it's better than that, if I was betting, man. But yeah, it's pretty impressive. And it's nice to see really high-end, well-designed equipment that ships Linux. Now, if you were to ask me which computer I would buy now, now having the ThinkPad T480, and comparing it now for a couple of weeks to the Precision 5530,

my personal choice would likely still be the ThinkPad. A, I need built-in Ethernet pretty big. That's a pretty big deal when I'm broadcasting. And B, the slightly smaller form factor is just enough that it makes a difference when I'm on the train or on a plane. Right. I mean, so the Precision, it is not, it's not super heavy. It's probably about four pounds and it's not, it's not thick. It's remarkably thin, but that means it's, it's pretty dense and it's sized enough that coffee shop, anywhere in your home, put in your bag, that'll all work fine. I wouldn't necessarily like work on a bus or on a crammed train or something. So it's not, it's not ultra portable. It's not the laptop you just chuck in your bag and you don't think about, but you can move it around.

Yeah, I actually did take a train trip while I had that laptop, and it was a little too large for the coach seating. If I had gotten the fancy business class, I don't know, that might have been fine. But for the coach seating, it was just a little too large. And if you think about the kind of resources this machine has, that large battery is deceptive because really this is a desktop replacement. In all, it's just that it is, it's the thinnest, lightest, smallest desktop replacement I've ever seen.

Oh, yeah. Like it used to take like an Oryx Pro or a Bonobo size machine to get what you're getting out of this machine now. And they're doing it in a small carbon fiber wedge with aluminum casing. machine now, and they're doing it in a small carbon fiber wedge with aluminum casing. Three years ago, an earlier model of the Precision desktop replacement line was what I was using every day as my work machine. And that thing was like a solid inch thick. And it was powerful, right? It was fast and it was great, but that was probably six pounds. It made my back hurt. I had to lug it around everywhere. The fact that I could get a faster laptop, way smaller, way lighter today, it's just incredible.

Yeah, and I don't know if this is the traveler's laptop, but this is the workstation replacement laptop. And if that is the kind of machine you want, it's going to exceed your expectations. If you are looking for a workstation replacement that is mobile, that has good battery life, and one of the best screens you've ever seen, that's the use case for this laptop. It's exceptional at that. If you're looking for a laptop to go on the plane, to fit in a small bag, to go on the train, if you're looking for something that is on the lighter side. Right, if all you need is some Electron apps

and a terminal to get your work done, then the precision's probably overkill. Yeah, and I think that's something we can all make that determination. We know what kind of customer we are. Well, I can really see, Chris, that you've grown fond of this laptop. You like using it. But I've been a little confused because this process has seemed like a struggle for you. I'm a little torn. I almost wish I didn't like it so much because I just got the ThinkPad. And it was deceptively hard to review because it's so easy in a review to focus on the stuff

that didn't work. And so when you get something that looks great, performs great, and Linux just works great, it's what's the angle on that review? And so it wasn't, it wasn't really until it started solving my day-to-day problems. And I was like, oh crap, I really like this machine. And I think what it is, is it took a while for it to sink in how much performance you get. I mean, you get something that turbos up to 4.8 gigahertz. That's nearly 5 gigahertz. Wow. 64 gigabytes of RAM. It's mind bending. It is a new category of performance machine you can get pre-built with Linux. It's not the first laptop of its kind like this, but it's probably in the highest echelon of what you can get on the market right now in something that is portable and beautiful and feels high-end.

Right. And it's from a big-name manufacturer, right? This means that if you need a workstation from your big corporate job, this is a machine you could get. Yeah, I think this is the new benchmark. You could probably find a machine out there that out-specs it, although it's going to be tough, but you're not going to find a machine that out-classes it. Well, before we finish up this special feature today, we wanted to point you to some other special features that have recently appeared on the TechSnap program.

Yeah, we've just done a series of wrapping our brains around the cloud. If this is something that you have a passing interest in or something you have to figure out for your job, I want to point you to three episodes of TechSnap, 385, 386, and 387. It's a cool series of numbers. 385 is three things to know about Kubernetes. And we did a deep dive there. 386 is what makes Google Cloud different. And we brought on our Google Cloud platform expert to go into some of the interesting details. And I started with what really is like their secret competitive thing. And he had a great answer, just really fascinating. I was like, oh, that's Google secret sauce, at least part of it. So that was a

good one. And then TechSnap episode 387, private cloud building blocks is all about building your own private cloud, either on premises or maybe a hybrid. And we brought on our OpenStack expert, Amy, and she answered some of my basic questions and then really got into some of the more interesting, like, nitty-gritty stuff. And got us excited about all the potential applications of modern-day OpenStack. Yeah, so it was a great run of episodes that even if you don't know anything about the cloud or you have to work with it day-to-day, we think there's something there for all of you. So check out techsnap.systems and again that's 385, 386, and 387. And you can find links to everything we talked about today at

linuxunplugged.com slash 272. Where should they go get more Wes Payne? You can find me on the Twitter at Wes Payne. I like it. I'm at Chris LAS. Thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode of the Unplugged Program. We'll see you next week.

No, Wes, it's next Tuesday. get it out of here so i'm a bit curious here ch. One of the motivations we didn't talk about earlier for getting all this Jack work done is you had your own secret sauce for making this stuff happen. And a little birdie tells me it didn't always involve Linux. How does Jack compare? Is this going to work? Yeah, I mean, in the past,

before we'd switched over to Linux, this was accomplished on the Mac using an application called Audio Hijack Pro. And it would do a lot of this routing for you. But it had to install, like, stems into the audio stack that would then have to be revved with each rather, even minor update of macOS. And so you'd have to keep that all up to date.

Oh, almost like a DKMS module for us Linux people. Yeah, kind of, kind of. And you'd have to launch the applications in a specific order, and you'd have to keep up to date on the applications, and it's expensive. So it had its drawbacks, but you could really kind of piece it all together for a little while, and it would work pretty good, and it had some session management, which was nice. And it could do built-in recording, and it had other nice features like effects and audio monitoring. and it could do built-in recording,

and it had other nice features like effects and audio monitoring. But the thing that's nice about Jack is not only is it free software and it's Linux-based, which is good because we didn't have a great solution other than carrying around a bunch of rigs when I would go mobile, or like we do at Linux Academy, is we have a second studio with a second set of hardware down there, and that's nice if I'm going from Studio A to Studio B,

but not so great if I'm going to, say, meet BSD. Right. That does not work for everything. And so one of the things we've been doing as an intermediary solution is I just use a technology to connect back into the studio, and we use all of the studio's routing and recording and all of that to do all of this while I'm on the road. Right. It's just like more remote guests. Basically everyone is remote. Yeah, everyone. But the issue there is I can have latency, I can have network drops, then I have to also have a remote session to get in to control some of this stuff.

I have to have a VPN back to the studio. So that's like twice as much bandwidth right there. Yeah, it's a big overhead when you're mobile. And that has been our interim solution while we bridge the gap from the Mac solution to this mobile Linux solution. So that's the big thing for me is now I'm going back to doing a lot of this locally again.

So I won't have to be so reliant on that mobile connection. That's the big advantage for me. That's what I'm excited about because the audio hijack stuff was fine. But when you add the scripting capability of this, it just takes it from like a, what felt like a consumer tool. And this feels like a pro tool because it's all automated. My session's ready for me to go once the scripts are done, you know, running.

You have all the flexibility that you could possibly need. And sure, there's a little more learning curve up front. You got to get familiar with your tools, but then you have a handy set of tools. You know what's funny about this is this theme repeats itself in all areas of when I switched to Linux. For years, you know, I've been running it since the 90s, and audio and video production was the last holdout. I've just given up on video

production for a while, but audio production is what I'm passionate about right now. And we move that over, but the thing is, the theme that keeps repeating itself is, Linux starts way behind. Whatever the Linux open source solution is, it starts way behind. Yeah, it's way behind, right? And then it kind of gets up there and you're watching,

it's a little buggy, it's a little unstable, it's a little bit of a joke. And then at some point, it exceeds anything that's capable on the commercial platform. Like I feel like Plasma desktops there now with Mac OS and Windows. Yeah.

And Jack and eventually Pipewire are that same thing for Linux. They are a superior solution than what's available on Windows and Mac. And that's why you see Jack ported to Android and iOS. Yes, iOS and Windows and Mac. Don't forget Solaris. Because it offers something that those systems don't have. And when you combine it with your scripts that you've created, which are pretty straightforward but handy,

it makes it a reproducible pro setup. It's something that you could sit down on a laptop and get, boom, boom, boom, all set up and you're good to go in an event. And we just check it out. And then when you add new additions, you check those in. And when I go on location, I check out the latest version of the script and magic. Right. Or if you have a hardware failure, you know, someone spills coffee on your laptop at Meet

BSD, those rude BSD guys, geez, they need to buy you a new laptop. You could get it all set up again in minutes. The Gray Wolf's Den.