Pipewire vs PulseAudio, general question

https://lemmy.world/post/4455930

Pipewire vs PulseAudio, general question - Lemmy.world

What are the main differences between pipewire and pulseaudio? Which one is better? What are other alternative popular sound servers besides these two?

Pipewire is the new hotness. I’ve read comments from various audio engineers and programmers that pipewire “gets it right”.

Pipewire came out in 2017, pulseaudio in 2004.

Audio engineer here. Anything ALSA is inherently does not “get it right”
What sort of problems have you heard of or seen? I’d like to hear your different perspective, if that’s ok with you?

This got me curious what these acronyms were. I found this information interesting.

hal.science/hal-03116888/document

I suspect they meant “Hardware Abstraction Layer” for “HAL”
Which is what any OS already is.
I’m assuming it’s a complaint about how low level ALSA is compared to the, E.G. Audio HAL in Android
Well, being low level is exactly what lets to extract better performance, lower latency and other good stuff.

There’s still a fine line to draw between usability and performance

ALSA is too low level for musicians to reasonably understand

Having something like PipeWire to make it easier to configure isn’t a bad thing

People here also are asking for super low-latency

That’s another nice thing about PipeWire.

It supports configuring JACK for you if you need low latency

One person above(Audbol) want to go even lower.
You lost track of the conversation. That was about ALSA