Support pipewire

[somini]

Pipewire is the new Pulseaudio replacement, it's almost backwards-compatible, but pacmd doesn't exist.

The script only uses pacmd for list-sinks/list-sources, which according to https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/Migrate-PulseAudio#pacmd, can be replaced with some manipulation on top of pw-cli ls Node.

[graysky2]

Haven't tried pipewire yet... is PA planned to be deprecated or is pipewire just an alternative?

[somini]

From what I can tell, Pipewire is a superset of Pulseaudio, which supports video too. With pipeware-pulse, there's compatibility with Pulseaudio's interface, and with pipewire-jack, the exposed API is JACK (for pro audio).

There's also video stuff, that does the same thing as Pulseaudio does to ALSA: allowing two programs to use the same camera at once, apply effects, screen sharing, etc.

I don't know for certain, but I would wager Pulseaudio will be deprecated in the future since Pipewire can expose a compatible API. Just not pacmd.

[graysky2]

I don't have any immediate plans to play with it but we can leave this open as things evolve.

[somini]

It's really "just" a matter of replacing the 10 pacmd invocations, it might conflict with #53. It's not trivial, so I don't have a PR at the moment.

In case anyone migrates and is unable to control audio (like me), there's pamixer for emergencies, it uses the API.

[somini]

FYI, looks like WirePlumber "solved" this issue by shipping a program that does basically the same thing:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/WirePlumber#Keyboard_volume_control