pipewire-0.3.53

[Bruce Dubbs]

New point version.

[pierre]

PipeWire 0.3.53 (2022-06-30)

This is a bugfix release that is API and ABI compatible with previous 0.3.x releases.

Highlights

The 44.1KHz samplerate was removed again from the defaults, it caused all kinds of problems with various hardware.
The ALSA plugin should now be able to deal with unsupported samplerates and fall back to the nearest supported one.
The rlimits performance tuning wiki page was updated. Please check you limits.conf file, the version on the wiki used to give all processes a -19 nice level instead of just the pipewire daemon.
The audioconvert plugin was rewritten to be more maintainable and faster. It also gained support for control ports and dithering with optional noise shaping.
An impossible buffering situation is avoided in pulse-server that would cause some applications (sunshine, ...) to stutter.

PipeWire

44.1KHz was removed from the allowed rates again. It caused all kinds of regressions due to driver bugs and timing issues on HDMI.

modules

filter-chain now does some more error checking and reporting to avoid some crashes.
filter-chain now supports more channel layouts for input and output that does not need to match the plugin layout.
Format parsing is now more consistent in the modules.

Tools

pw-cli can now also work without readline support.
pw-cat can now also read multichannel ulaw/alaw/u8/s8.

SPA

The audioconvert plugin was rewritten. This should make it more maintainable. It also fixed some issues such as CPU spikes in some cases and crashes in others. The old plugins were removed, for a code reduction of some 6000 lines.
The audioconvert plugin now supports control ports, which can be enabled on nodes in the session manager. This makes it possible to control audioconvert properties using timed events or midi.
NoteOn 0-velocity MIDI events are no longer filtered out. This is a valid event, nodes that can't deal with it should fix it up themselves. The JACK layer still filters out these events by default but this can now be configured with a per-client property.
The running status on midi events is now disabled to match what JACK does.
The ALSA plugin will now deal with driver bugs when a driver announces support for a samplerate but then refuses to use it later.
The ALSA plugin has been optimized a little for sample IO.
V4L2 now doesn't error when there are no controls.
Error handling was improved in the audio converter.
The audioconvert plugin now supports rectangular dithering and noise shaping.
The audioconvert plugin can now insert additional inaudible noise that can be used to keep some amplifiers alive.
The audioconvert format conversion was changed so that it now produces the full 32 bits range in the C fallback conversion code as well.
The resampler window function was changed to a cosh() window function.
Vendor and device id are now in hex.

pulse-server

Tweak the record buffer attributes some more and make sure we don't end up in impossible buffering situations. Fixes an issue with distorted sound in sunshine.
Fix a potential crash when updating the client property list.
Some properties on cards were aligned with pulseaudio.

Wiki

Change "priority" to "nice" in the example limits.conf file. It was giving a -19 nice level to all processes, not just the pipewire daemon.

DISTROS

We strongly recommend distros to apply at least the following patches:

​9af94508

[pierre]

0e02260f4 Update to gnome-maps-42.3
caed7d3eb Update to gnome-calculator-42.2
9e92861d8 Update to evolution-data-server-3.44.3
00e3f274b Update to lxml-4.9.1 (python module)
613c9aa7c Update to pipewire-0.3.53
aa8834104 Update to libsoup3-3.0.7