Per-application volume, Bluetooth device support with automatic profile switching, headphone jack detection, and probably 5 other things I use daily but don't know about.
alsa alone works fine for me as well… a sound server would make sense to me if i did a lot of audio processing using a bunch of different applications, but how many people really do that anyway as opposed to just working in some overengineered DAW?
That makes a few assumptions: that I don't want to change it while the app is running, that I don't want to set the output to another app, that I don't want outputs into multiple sinks, and that setting environment variables for all apps is trivial.
This actually sounds like something that might make me switch to Pipewire one day.
The rest of your comment seems to indicate to me that you have some kind of professional audio setup? Or is it something that might be interesting for the rest of us, too?
Yes, but that's not related to the comment. I tried to avoid my fancy use cases. It's more that through this I know that pipewire makes some scenarios trivial that people normally wouldn't know how to achieve or would spend lots of money on (https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/ for $100+)
The rest is just basic usage. For example, I'm in a video call and want to add just the browser's sound output to the call, but still hear it myself. With pipewire, that's "open (your preferred audio graph tool)", "drag and drop from browser to zoom". Runtime change, multiple sinks, including app sink.
