Handy Pipewire commands and tools

PipeWire provides a nice set of CLI commands and tools to manage and monitor A/V devices on you machine. Here’s a list of those commands with some usage examples:

• pw-cli - The PipeWire Command Line Interface.
  • Examples:
  • pw-cli dump short Node - list all input/output nodes and their state.
  • pw-cli info 0 - inspect the state of the server.
    • Lists useful details like: clock-rate and allowed clock-rates
• pw-mon dumps and monitors the state of the PipeWire daemon.
• pw-metadata - Monitor, set and delete metadata on PipeWire objects.
  • pw-metadata -n settings - list the current settings.
• pw-dot can dump a graph of the pipeline, check out the help for how to do this.
• pw-top monitors the real-time status of the graph. This is handy to find out what clients are running and how much DSP resources they use.
• pw-dump dumps the state of the PipeWire daemon in JSON format. This can be used to find out the properties and parameters of the objects in the PipeWire daemon.
• pw-link - List, monitor or link input or output ports, e.g.:
  • pw-link --input
  • pw-link --output

BTW. you can still use pactl command to control “PulseAudio” sound server, e.g.:

• pactl info - shows details like server name & version, sink & source names
• pactl list - list all clients, cards, their properties, loaded modules etc
• pactl list short - same as above but much less verbose