Audio lag with pipewire

Ask Fedora Ask in English
, , , , , ,
1

I am experiencing serious audio lag/delay with pipewire and wireplumber with default settings. I have confirmed this occurs on Fedora 35/36, I have not tested any other operating systems. It becomes very noticeable while; editing videos with Davinci Resolve (Which I need for work), Watching YouTube Videos, and playing games such as Quaver/MusicWave (rhythm games). It makes it almost impossible to get any work done.

Here are my hardware specifications:

Model: Framework Laptop
Memory: 64GB
Processor: 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-1165G7 × 8
Graphics: Mesa Intel® Xe Graphics (TGL GT2)

Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you in advance!

2

Did you check what power profile you are using. I had experienced similar thing but only when I was on power saver mode on a laptop. In my case it occurred whenever I was trying to use multiple applications at the same time on power saver mode and the lag was not that serious in my case. In performance mode I didn’t get any problems.So I suggest to first try this and I am not that knowledgeable about audio stuff so this is as far as I can help. I hope your issue get resolved quickly :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
3

Thank you for the reply! I found that delay was a combination of that and a weird Bluetooth delay i am still trying to solve. I’ll post the solution when I find it.

4

I think there’s always a delay when using Bluetooth. I used to play Rocksmith (guitar game) and the timing is everything when playing music and I was always a little off beat when using a Bluetooth headphone. It was solved after connecting the headphones with a cable.

1 Like
5

You can´t get rid of delay with bluetooth. The transfer rate is too low to send a raw audio stream, so it has to be compressed on the computer and decoded in the headphone firmware. For the standard SBC codec there is an average 220msec delay. There are even some codecs added to pipewire which might offer lower latency, but without support in the headphone firmware they will fail. The only thing you can do is delay the video. No solution during music making.

1 Like
6

Thanks for your reply! Your answer was very useful, I can stop messing around with Bluetooth config if it won’t work anyway. I need wireless and I ended up getting a pair of Logitech G733 headphones with the Lightspeed USB module. There is no latency at all, and I would recommend something like this to anyone with the same issue.

1 Like