PipeWire Alternatives

PipeWire is described as 'Project that aims to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux. It provides a low-latency, graph based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both PulseAudio and JACK' and is an app in the system & hardware category. There are seven alternatives to PipeWire for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac, Windows, BSD and Self-Hosted apps. The best PipeWire alternative is JACK Audio Connection Kit, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like PipeWire are PulseAudio, GStreamer, NewPlayer and Phonon.

Copy a direct link to this comment to your clipboard
PipeWire alternatives page was last updated

Alternatives list

  1. JACK is a professional sound server daemon that provides real-time low latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications that implement its API. The API can be used through either JACK1 or JACK2.

    21 JACK Audio Connection Kit alternatives

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • BSD
     
    • JACK Audio Connection Kit is the most popular Windows, Mac & Linux alternative to PipeWire.

    • JACK Audio Connection Kit is the most popular Open Source & free alternative to PipeWire.

    • JACK Audio Connection Kit is Free and Open SourcePipeWire is also Free and Open Source
    • JACK Audio Connection Kit is LightweightPipeWire is not according to our users
  2. PulseAudio icon
     19 likes

    PulseAudio is a sound server system for POSIX OSes, meaning that it is a proxy for your sound applications. It is an integral part of all relevant modern Linux distributions and is used in various mobile devices, by multiple vendors.

    6 PulseAudio alternatives

    Cost / License

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • BSD
    • Oracle Solaris
     
  3. GStreamer icon
     12 likes

    GStreamer is a library for constructing graphs of media-handling components. The applications it supports range from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback, audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing.

    11 GStreamer alternatives

    Cost / License

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
     
  4. NewPlayer icon
     2 likes

    NewPlayer is a media framework, which is independent of NewPipe itself. I decided to make it independent, because one of the big issues we have with the current player is that it is deeply integrated into NewPipe.

    Cost / License

    Platforms

    • Kotlin
    • Self-Hosted
     
    • NewPlayer is the most popular Self-Hosted alternative to PipeWire.

    • NewPlayer is Free and Open SourcePipeWire is also Free and Open Source
    • NewPlayer is Privacy focusedPipeWire is not according to our users
  5. Phonon icon
     1 like

    Phonon is the Qt multimedia toolkit. It allows developers to add multimedia functionality to applications with minimal effort.

    Cost / License

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Mac
    • BSD
    • Windows
    • Self-Hosted
     
  6. Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (known by the acronym ALSA) is a free and open source software framework that provides an API for device drivers for sound cards. Some of the goals of the ALSA project at its inception were automatic configuration of sound-card hardware, and...

    3 Advanced Linux Sound Architecture alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Platforms

    • Linux
     
  7. coppwr icon
     Like

    coppwr is a tool that provides low level control over the PipeWire multimedia server. It aims to expose and provide as many ways to inspect and control the many components of the PipeWire multimedia server as possible.

    Cost / License

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Flathub
     
7 of 7 PipeWire alternatives