PipeWire 1.6.9 is now available as the latest maintenance update to the 1.6 series, bringing improvements to JACK handling, audio resampling, RAOP/AirPlay support, Bluetooth, and several other parts of the Linux multimedia stack.
One notable change concerns audio resampling. PipeWire adjusted its upsampling cutoff frequencies to preserve more high-frequency content, addressing cases where previous defaults affected audio quality, especially with 32 kHz sources.
JACK support also received attention. Object lookups were reworked so applications no longer receive stale information about ports or objects that have been removed and whose IDs may have been reused.
Several fixes target RAOP, the protocol commonly used for AirPlay audio. PipeWire 1.6.9 fixes RAOP encryption when using OpenSSL 3 or newer, resolves RAOP-over-TCP problems, and addresses cases where transmitted audio could be truncated.
Network audio sinks and sources are now marked with node.network=true. This lets applications like pavucontrol recognize them as network devices and avoid waking them unnecessarily.
On top of that, SPA components improve filter-graph reconfiguration and passthrough format handling in audioconvert. They also improve center and LFE channel volume behavior when upmixing is enabled. Video4Linux2 format filtering has been refined, and PipeWire now requires libcamera 0.6.0 or newer.
The PipeWire PulseAudio server fixes a possible crash involving the active port name and an issue where pending sibling messages could starve audio capture. The ALSA source name was also corrected.
Bluetooth support gets fixes for a possible memory leak when a transport fails to start and a potential crash while cleaning up ISO I/O transports. For GStreamer users, PipeWire 1.6.9 includes fixes related to state changes and other situations that could result in lockups.
Finally, the bundled command-line tools received a few fixes too. pw-cat now handles the end of encoded files correctly. pw-record fixes MP3 encoding and adds support for A-law audio. Loopback channel and position handling were also corrected.
For additional details, see the changelog.
PipeWire 1.6.9 is available now from the project’s GitLab repository and should gradually arrive in the software repositories of rolling-release Linux distributions.
