pipewire-pulse.conf

Table of Contents

• CONFIGURATION FILE SECTIONS
• STREAM PROPERTIES
• STREAM RULES
• PULSEAUDIO PROPERTIES
• PULSEAUDIO RULES
• PULSEAUDIO COMMANDS
• PULSEAUDIO MODULES

The PipeWire Pulseaudio server configuration file

SYNOPSIS

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf

/etc/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf

/usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf

/usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/

/etc/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/

DESCRIPTION

Configuration for PipeWire's PulseAudio-compatible daemon.

The configuration file format and lookup logic is the same as for pipewire.conf(5).

Drop-in configuration files pipewire-pulse.conf.d/*.conf can be used, and are recommended. See pipewire.conf(5).

CONFIGURATION FILE SECTIONS

stream.properties

Dictionary. These properties configure the PipeWire Pulseaudio server properties.

stream.rules

Dictionary. These properties configure the PipeWire Pulseaudio server properties.

pulse.properties

Dictionary. These properties configure the PipeWire Pulseaudio server properties.

pulse.cmd

Array of dictionaries. A set of commands to be executed on startup.

pulse.rules

Array of dictionaries. A set of match rules and actions to apply to clients.

See libpipewire-module-protocol-pulse(7) for the detailed description.

In addition, the PipeWire context configuration sections may also be specified, see pipewire.conf(5).

STREAM PROPERTIES

The stream.properties section contains properties for streams created by the pipewire-pulse server.

Available options are described in pipewire-client.conf(5) stream.properties.

Some of these properties map to the PulseAudio /etc/pulse/default.pa config entries as follows:

PulseAudio	PipeWire	Notes
remixing-use-all-sink-channels	channelmix.upmix
remixing-produce-lfe	channelmix.lfe-cutoff	Set to > 0 to enable
remixing-consume-lfe	channelmix.mix-lfe
lfe-crossover-freq	channelmix.lfe-cutoff

Example

# ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/custom.conf
 
stream.properties = {
    #node.latency = 1024/48000
    #node.autoconnect = true
    #resample.disable = false
    #resample.quality = 4
    #monitor.channel-volumes = false
    #channelmix.disable = false
    #channelmix.min-volume = 0.0
    #channelmix.max-volume = 10.0
    #channelmix.normalize = false
    #channelmix.mix-lfe = true
    #channelmix.upmix = true
    #channelmix.upmix-method = psd  # none, simple
    #channelmix.lfe-cutoff = 150.0
    #channelmix.fc-cutoff = 12000.0
    #channelmix.rear-delay = 12.0
    #channelmix.stereo-widen = 0.0
    #channelmix.hilbert-taps = 0
    #dither.noise = 0
    #dither.method = none # rectangular, triangular, triangular-hf, wannamaker3, shaped5
    #debug.wav-path = ""
}

STREAM RULES

The stream.rules section works the same as pipewire-client.conf(5) stream.rules.

PULSEAUDIO PROPERTIES

For pulse.properties section, see libpipewire-module-protocol-pulse(7) for available options.

PULSEAUDIO RULES

For each client, a set of rules can be written in pulse.rules section to configure quirks of the client or to force some pulse specific stream configuration.

The general look of this section is as follows and follows the layout of match rules, see pipewire(1).

See libpipewire-module-protocol-pulse(7) for available options.

Example

# ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/custom.conf
 
pulse.rules = [
    {
        # skype does not want to use devices that don't have an S16 sample format.
        matches = [
             { application.process.binary = "teams" }
             { application.process.binary = "teams-insiders" }
             { application.process.binary = "skypeforlinux" }
        ]
        actions = { quirks = [ force-s16-info ] }
    }
    {
        # speech dispatcher asks for too small latency and then underruns.
        matches = [ { application.name = "~speech-dispatcher*" } ]
        actions = {
            update-props = {
                pulse.min.req          = 1024/48000     # 21ms
                pulse.min.quantum      = 1024/48000     # 21ms
            }
        }
    }
]

PULSEAUDIO COMMANDS

As part of the server startup procedure you can execute some additional commands with the pulse.cmd section in pipewire-pulse.conf.

# ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/custom.conf
 
pulse.cmd = [
    { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-always-sink" flags = [ ] }
    { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-switch-on-connect" }
    { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-gsettings" flags = [ "nofail" ] }
]
...

Additional commands can also be run via the context.exec section, see pipewire.conf(5).

Supported commands:

load-module

Load the specified Pulseaudio module on startup, as if using pactl(1) to load the module.

PULSEAUDIO MODULES

For contents of section pulse.modules, see pipewire-pulse-modules(7).

AUTHORS

The PipeWire Developers <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/issues>; PipeWire is available from <https://pipewire.org>

SEE ALSO

libpipewire-module-protocol-pulse(7), pipewire.conf(5), pipewire-pulse(1), pipewire-pulse-modules(7)