Using JACK and PipeWire

QEMU's JACK backend provides the best audio quality out of all the available options (Scream, PulseAudio, etc.). One of the easiest ways to leverage the JACK support is by using PipeWire, which emulates JACK.

In order for PipeWire to provide drop-in JACK support, you should (depending on your distro):

• on Debian: run sudo cp /usr/share/doc/pipewire/examples/ld.so.conf.d/pipewire-jack-*.conf /etc/ld.so.conf.d/; sudo ldconfig
• on Arch: install the pipewire-jack-dropin AUR package.

Once this is done, you have two options. You could run your virtual machines under your user, or you could set it up so that the QEMU user has access to your PipeWire socket. The former is easier, while the latter is more secure.