u/animateknet

Hi everyone!

I've made a VCV Rack 2 plugin that adds native PipeWire support directly to Rack's audio driver menu on Linux.

Instead of routing PipeWire through ALSA, PulseAudio or JACK, the driver creates a real PipeWire pw_filter node with named audio ports.

Rack shows up as a proper node in the PipeWire graph, ready to be routed with qpwgraph, Helvum or pw-link.

v2.0.0 is out and there's now a prebuilt binary no compiling needed:

1. Grab AnimatekPipeWire-2.0.0-lin-x64.vcvplugin from the release page
2. Drop it into ~/.local/share/Rack2/plugins-lin-x64/
3. Restart Rack, add an Audio module, pick PipeWire in the driver menu

https://github.com/animatek/rack-pipewire-driver/releases/latest

What it does:

• Manual routing nodes with 2 or 16 channels, left unconnected for you to wire up by hand.
• One entry per sink in the graph pick a card and it links the ports automatically
• Duplex I/O: the capture side of the same card is paired via device.id, so selecting an interface gives you its real channel counts (my Bitwig Connect Pro comes up as 6 in / 12 out)
• Works with the stock Audio-2 / 8 / 16 modules
• Adds no modules of its own registering the driver is the whole job

libpipewire is loaded with dlopen() and never linked, so the plugin loads fine on a machine without PipeWire and just doesn't register the driver.

One thing to know before you file a bug: PipeWire ignores any sample rate that isn't in clock.allowed-rates. The driver reports back whatever the graph actually granted and logs a warning saying so that one gets fixed in ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/, not in the plugin.

It's a fresh release and still being tested, so feedback from different distros, PipeWire configs and audio interfaces would be really helpful.

Source and build instructions: https://github.com/animatek/rack-pipewire-driver

Bugs and suggestions: https://github.com/animatek/rack-pipewire-driver/issues

Happy patching!