pipewire-0.3.56

[Bruce Dubbs]

New point version. Lots of frequent releases. There have been 13 tagged releases this year.

[Xi Ruoyao]

AFAIK pipewire makes a release per 4 weeks. If it's too noisy we can skip some of them.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Well as of today, we are in month 7, week 30. 17 releases in 30 weeks is slightly more frequent than once every two weeks. I agree that skipping a few releases would be OK.

[Xi Ruoyao]

Now 0.3.56 and I think it's better to make an update before 11.2 freeze.

[pierre]

PipeWire 0.3.56 (2022-07-19)

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

Highlights

• A critical bug that could crash JACK apps was fixed.
• Some more regressions in audiomixer were fixed. This should fix crackling and stuttering in some cases as well as some channel mapping regressions.
• A bug in the alsa plugin was fixed that could cause stuttering in VMs.
• Bluetooth sources should have improved latency and rate control.
• Many more bugfixes and improvements.

Modules

• An experimental AVB module was added. It can expose PipeWire as an AVB entity and initiate (broken) streaming between entities.
• module-loopback now handles the cases where the input and output channels are different without crashing or producing silence.
• The filter-chain module now correctly calculates the output size without crashing in some cases. It also skips invalid ports instead of crashing.
• Handle and report pthread errors better.

SPA

• The resampler qualities were tweaked a little.
• A bug that would sometimes cut off the last part of a buffer was fixed in the alsa plugin. This could cause broken audio in VMs. (#2536)
• Access to the alsa mixer and devices is now checked more thoroughly. (#2534)
• The spa-resample tool can now also handle large downsampling rates without crashing.
• Audioconverter now uses rounding for float to int conversions, which reduces distortions. Compilation of the c functions was separated and uses its own optimization flags now. Unit tests were added. (#2543)
• Noise shaping was improved in audioconvert. A new Wannamaker 3 tap shaper was added.
• Audioconvert now uses a pattern for generating keep alive noise. This should have much less energy and be even more inaudible. (#2540)
• A channel mapping bug was fixed in audioconvert. Unit tests were added.
• The dsp audio mixer would sometimes not mix enough and cause dropouts. (#2525)

JACK

• A critical bug in the mixer was fixed. It would cause most JACK apps to segfault at startup.

Bluetooth

• A new rate control algorithm was implemented for the sources.
• The media role on HSP/HFP streams is now fixed.

Pulse Server

• Add the resampler delay to delay reporting as well.

PipeWire 0.3.55 (2022-07-12)

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

Highlights

• Fix some more critical bugs in the new audioconvert and the queueing in pw-stream that causes stuttering and hickups.
• HFP hardware volumes are now saved and restored.
• Format conversions and mixing was improved.
• Small bug fixes and improvements.

PipeWire

• The queueing in pw-stream was improved with support for buffer prefetch in async mode.
• Add a pw-filter unit test.

tools

• pw-midiplay should now work again after improvements in pw-stream.

modules

• The RAOP module was improved to support auth_setup.
• The RAOP module should now handle timing packets better.
• Add some more filter-chain examples.
• The filter-chain now has a separate config file with the boilerplate settings. The examples are now just config snippets that can be dropped in .conf.d/ directories, such as the filter-chain.conf.d/ one.
• Start suggesting to use target.object instead of node.target in docs and examples.

SPA

• Use the cosh window again for the resampler. It should now give better resampler quality. (#2483)
• Rework the mixer functions. They were rewritten for higher precision and better performance. Add unit tests and benchmarks.
• Improve format conversion for 32bits for avoid errors in clang because of undefined behaviour at extreme ranges.
• Fix a bug in audioconvert where it would not consume the right amount of samples when the resampler was disabled. This could cause skipping and hickups. (#2519)
• Fix bug in audioconvert where it would try to convert the input samples multiple times, causing strange artifacts when upmixing.
• Be more strict about valid JSON floats.
• device.vendor.id and device.product.id should now always show up in 0xXXXX format and should not be converted to floats in pw-dump anymore.
• Add triangular dither, add unit tests for noise generation, add some more optimizations.

Bluetooth

• HFP and A2DP now expose different routes and thus can have different volumes.
• HW Volumes for HFP are now synced better. Volume changes from HW buttons are now also saved.

[pierre]

Fixed at 0f8c7d1a7f