My pipewire seems to have issues with crackling audio and severely dampening my mic and I have no clue why.
Pipewire’s default quantum (buffer size, effectively) is incredibly low, this is good for low latency audio but anytime your system is too busy to keep the buffers filled you get crackling.
If you look at pw-top you’ll see all of your devices and nodes. The quant column is probably 1 or a very small number for the devices.
You can increase the quantum with this command. This only lasts until pipewire restarts:
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 512
At a sample rate of 48000, this is roughly a 10ms buffer. 1024 is 20ms, etc. You want it as low as possible without getting crackling. Start with 512 and adjust from there (you don’t have to use a power of 2, a quantum of 1234 works just as well).
severely dampening my mic and I have no clue why.
By default pipewire doesn’t do any ‘mic boost’, as Windows calls it. You can get the same effect by raising the maximum volume.
In your sound control panel you should be able to turn the mic up higher than 100%. In KDE Plasma, you can do this in System Settings -> Sound -> Configure Volume Controls… [top right button] -> Raise maximum volume.
Alternatively, you can use EasyEffects to add a compressor. This will boost your mic volume and also prevent it from getting too loud
Compressors basically reduce the dynamic range of an audio signal by attenuating loud sounds and boosting quieter ones, this would provide a better mix.
Other useful plug-ins are noise canceling, (kills background noise) and echo canceling (lets you play sound out of your speakers which won’t get picked up by your mic). Sometimes apps, like Discord, will do this signal processing for you while others, like Signal, do no signal processing.
Pipewire’s default quantum (buffer size, effectively) is incredibly low, this is good for low latency audio but anytime your system is too busy to keep the buffers filled you get crackling.
If you look at
pw-topyou’ll see all of your devices and nodes. The quant column is probably 1 or a very small number for the devices.You can increase the quantum with this command. This only lasts until pipewire restarts:
At a sample rate of 48000, this is roughly a 10ms buffer. 1024 is 20ms, etc. You want it as low as possible without getting crackling. Start with 512 and adjust from there (you don’t have to use a power of 2, a quantum of 1234 works just as well).
By default pipewire doesn’t do any ‘mic boost’, as Windows calls it. You can get the same effect by raising the maximum volume.
In your sound control panel you should be able to turn the mic up higher than 100%. In KDE Plasma, you can do this in System Settings -> Sound -> Configure Volume Controls… [top right button] -> Raise maximum volume.
Alternatively, you can use EasyEffects to add a compressor. This will boost your mic volume and also prevent it from getting too loud
Compressors basically reduce the dynamic range of an audio signal by attenuating loud sounds and boosting quieter ones, this would provide a better mix.
Other useful plug-ins are noise canceling, (kills background noise) and echo canceling (lets you play sound out of your speakers which won’t get picked up by your mic). Sometimes apps, like Discord, will do this signal processing for you while others, like Signal, do no signal processing.