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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] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

For doing actual music production, yeah, switching to Windows is an option you need to consider, annoyingly.

Reaper is powerful, but getting it set up right can be an adventure. I've had better luck with Bitwig. Bitwig also happens to support Pipewire out of the box. This will relieve you from having to deal with JACK.

If you're going to be dealing with JACK, then you may want to look into Cadence from the KXStudio project. It will help you set up JACK in such a way that, for instance, PulseAudio (if you have not switched to Pipewire yet) will route its output through JACK, allowing you to hear YouTube as expected.

In all cases, I would very much avoid using ALSA directly for sound input/output. (Using it for MIDI is sometimes fine.)

So, in short, I'd start with installing Pipewire and checking out the Bitwig demo, and if that doesn't work for you, install Cadence and use it to manage JACK.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I messed around with bitwig some more, I was actually able to map most of my pads to a midi note, I got the latency good and I was able to play with YouTube. This is awesome and I'm really happy to finally make progress. However... Bitwig isn't recognizing all the zones on my cymbals which makes it kind of a pain to play. I'll see if I can fix that.

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

I have looked into bitwig but was a little overwhelmed and wasn't sure how to connect my vsts to it. And it is also paid which was another reason I didn't mess with it too much because I wasn't sure if I could get it to work. Linux mint now comes with pipewire and I used a command to make sure its active and it is.