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PipeWire

The audio and video server that made per-application stream audio practical.

Not display-server dependentMIT

Install

Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS

sudo apt install pipewire

Fedora, RHEL, Nobara

sudo dnf install pipewire

Arch, Manjaro, EndeavourOS

sudo pacman -S pipewire

openSUSE

sudo zypper install pipewire

NixOS, or Nix on any distro

nix profile install nixpkgs#pipewire

You almost certainly already have this — every current mainstream distro uses PipeWire by default. It is listed here because it is the thing that makes the rest of the audio category possible, and because knowing it is there changes how you debug.

Two capabilities matter for streaming. First, you can route each application’s audio to a different sink, which is how you keep Discord out of your VOD or run a separate track for music. Second, PipeWire is what the Wayland screencast portal uses to hand video frames to OBS.

If audio routing is misbehaving, the useful next step is looking at the graph with qpwgraph or Helvum rather than guessing at volume sliders.