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possiblylinux127

Why is Linux audio such a nightmare? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/linuxquestions

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It's been several months since I switched to Linux mint and it's been great so far. My biggest headache has been dealing with Linux audio and trying to use JACK. I have an electronic drum kit and I use Reaper for recording and using VSTs with yabridge. I managed to get this to work but it only works with ALSA. I want to have YouTube open and play along to songs and this does not work with ALSA. I've researched and experimented with JACK for way longer than I cared to. When I switch to JACK, reaper doesn't recognize my e kit, even tho ita connected with patchbay, and it also makes my default audio output a dummy output. I've gotten to the point of just going back to windows cuz this has been a nightmare. Pulse audio does what I want but the latency is too high.

Is getting a second drive with windows on it the best solution?

EDIT: I have made some progress, I switched to bitwig, uses pipewire, mapped my pads to midi notes and assigned them sounds. I got the latency good and I'm able to play with YouTube. The only problem is bitwig doesn't recognize all the zones in my cymbals. I'm not sure how to fix that, when I was using Steven slate in reaper it registered all the zones.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Give pipewire a go. It is basically replacing pulseaudio and jack as a combined thing and is meant to not have the latency issues that pulseaudio does.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I can second this somewhat. I haven't done anything particularly music related so my recommendation is limited here, but I was trying to get my head around the basics of Linux audio when I was troubleshooting a problem that came up when gaming and on voice chat, and pipewire was way less stressful to configure and to understand what was actually happening

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The latest version of Linux mint uses pipewire by default. I double checked that it's active with a command, but reaper doesn't have an option for use pipewire in the audio settings only jack, ALSA, dummy and pulse.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You can install pipewire shims for each of those back ends

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, for JACK, the package should be called pipewire-jack.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I installed that through the flatpak store, but do I need to set it up? Nothing was different after I installed it

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Perhaps try installing it natively with the package manager in the OS instead of with flatpak.

I'm starting to warm up to flatpaks but the one place I think they really don't make sense is core OS stuff which I think is the case here.

I'm not saying it wouldn't work as flatpak, but I just think it would be better integrated if you install it directly in the OS, and I don't see much need for sandboxing a shim like that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It's not available on Flathub. I'm guessing, @[email protected] just used the app-store-like UI for installing software, and that thing integrates both Flatpaks and native packages. So, it's probably installed correctly already, but yeah, just run sudo apt install pipewire-jack in a terminal to be sure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Oh man, I set it up once like a year ago, and around the time I also tried to get JACK working raw, so I'm very shaky on the details, but I believe, in principle, the configuration works as if you were using JACK.

So, you'll need to tell Reaper to use JACK. I don't know anything about Reaper, but maybe something like this: https://forums.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=272361

And then, I think, you use QjackCtl to link all the inputs and outputs together.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I have wanted to do this but I don't know how. Rraper doesn't give an option for pipewire in the audio settings. Only ALSA, jack, dummy and pulse audio. I've researched it but it just gets too technical for me. I'm a Linux noob.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Pipewire can talk to both pulseaudio and jack applications - it basically provides both APIs. It does not create a new one that things nee to implement. You may need to install a plugin to get it to talk with jack applications though - never needed to do that side of things myself.