PipeWire in the official Docker image

[noelhibbard]

So I am trying to make the switch to PipeWire but I'm having issues. I have pipewire working on the host with no issue. When I try to get it up in the container I am getting this in the sps logs:
Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?

I shelled into the container and then installed the pipewire-tools and sox packages and then I am able to play /dev/random to pipewire and I'm hearing static. So pw does seem to be working in the container.

Today is my first attempt at using pipewire on any system at all. Any ideas?

More info on my setup. I'm on a fresh install of Debian Bookworm. I edited the systemd service so that it will run as root. Here is my docker compose:

services:
  Instance1:
    container_name: Instance1
    image: mikebrady/shairport-sync:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
    #  S6_KEEP_ENV: 1 # Allow S6 to pass environment variables from compose file
      XDG_RUNTIME_DIR: /tmp # Path for pipewire
    volumes:
      - ./shairport-sync-instance1.conf:/etc/shairport-sync.conf
      - /run/user/0/pipewire-0:/tmp/pipewire-0
    networks:
      - spsnet_shared
      - spsnet

networks:
  spsnet:
    name: spsnet
    driver: macvlan
    driver_opts:
      parent: enp2s0
    ipam:
      config:
        - subnet: 10.1.0.0/22
          ip_range: 10.1.3.88/29
          gateway: 10.1.3.1
  spsnet_shared:
    name: spsnet_shared
    driver: bridge

[mikebrady]

I must confess that I haven't used PipeWire insider Docker -- it was added in response to a request. Looking on the web, there seems to be some guidance, e.g. here, but I guess you've tried all that?

[noelhibbard]

Actually, I hadn't seen that one. I'll take a look. I mostly looked around here because I have PW working fine in the container, just not in sps. Everything I read in this repo about PW in docker seems to be people using the PA backend to go through PW.

[mikebrady]

Fair enough. Slightly separately, my experience with PipeWire is that its latencies seem considerably more stable than PulseAudio's.

[noelhibbard]

That is exactly why I wanted to make the switch. Still not having any luck in the container but at least I'm getting the hang of how to configure pipewire/wireplumber. I have it how I want it now, so I'm going back to getting it working in sps and still getting the same error, despite being able to test via pw-play from within the container.

[noelhibbard]

Solved. I needed the to use S6_KEEP_ENV: 1 because otherwise XDG_RUNTIME_DIR: /tmp was getting wiped out. Not sure how pw-play was working within the container if that env var was missing.

[mikebrady]

Cool! So does that mean it’s working properly?

[noelhibbard]

Cool! So does that mean it’s working properly?

Yep, working perfect. I have 5 identical USB sound cards which I have several instances of sps pointed to., I am testing with wired earbuds and I can put the left earbud fomr one sps instand in my left ear and the right ear bud from another instance and then stream to but with my iPhone and it's in perfect sync. I can pause/unpauce, change tracks, remove/add instances and it is always in sync.

It's cool how you can link things together dynamically with pw-link. PipeWire has abig learning curve and a lot of the apps don't work as documented, for example pw-ctl create-link does not seem to work. At least not on the arch package.

Still a lot to learn.