WirePlumber

WirePlumber is a powerful session and policy manager for PipeWire. Based on a modular design, with Lua plugins that implement the actual management functionality, it is highly configurable and extendable.

Installation

Install the wireplumber package. It will conflict with other PipeWire Session Managers and make sure they are uninstalled.

WirePlumber uses systemd/User for management of the server.

Optionally, install wireplumber-docs to review the documentation.

Configuration

WirePlumber's modular design confers lots of flexibility when it comes to swapping the implementation of a specific functionality without having to re-implement the rest of it. Detailed information can be found at the official documentation.

Below we add examples of simple configurations.

Obtain interface name for rules matching

In WirePlumber's Lua scripts, you need to specify matches rules with PipeWire objects of the target interface you want to configure.

Use the commands pw-cli list-objects and pw-cli dump to show all available objects in the system.

Object Node are sinks or sources in the PipeWire graph. They correspond to the ALSA Device.

To filter what type to show, add the option with one of . For example:

Object type filtering also applies to the pw-cli dump command.

If you are looking for specific class of the endpoint (ex. “Audio/Sink”), see the property.

In most cases, when configuring ALSA the property you need is either or node.name.

Changing a device/node property

To change a device or node property, such as it's description or nick, you must create a Lua script and add it into under the proper path and name.

For instance, to change the description of an ALSA node, you would create a file such as with the following content:

51-alsa-rename.lua

rule = {
  matches = {
    {
      { "node.name", "equals", "alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3.output_analog-stereo" },
    },
  },
  apply_properties = {
    ["node.description"] = "Laptop",
  },
}

table.insert(alsa_monitor.rules,rule)

If instead you wish to change something on a Bluetooth node or device, you could create with a content such as:

The Lua scripts' filenames and locations are thus devised in a way that allows WirePlumber's Multi-path merging to run them just after the default configuration files (e.g. ) but before the file that loads and enables the devices (e.g. ).

The properties that you can change as well as the matching rules to select devices or nodes are documented at ALSA configuration and Bluetooth configuration.

Disable a device/node

Since WirePlumber v0.4.7, users could now disable any devices or nodes by property or node.disabled

For the name of in your system, see #Obtain interface name for rules matching