Distortion in Waveform

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Matt73
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Matt73 »

Ok guys...I've slept on it. Watched an inspiring video yesterday from an artist about why he makes music on linux. I don't like big tech, I'm into crypto...It's got to be linux for my audio production and I just have to learn more. I recently bought a new laptop just for that purpose so I can use this one in the meantime. I guess I have to learn about JACK and get over my aversion to it. Heading over to another section to ask about installation of AV Linux (which looks super cool) because I've hit a confusing bump. In return I can offer my talents as a mixer and someone who can add drums, bass and guitar to your tracks. Want people to think that David Gilmour did the guitar work on your track? I'm your man. Upwards and onwards (assuming we make it through the apocalypse)!
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Linuxmusician01
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Kott wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 4:41 am
Matt73 wrote: Mon Aug 30, 2021 7:58 pm And I don't know how to turn pulse audio off.
Run pavucontrol, open the configuration tab, set profile for your USB card to off.
The way I do it:

Code: Select all

pulseaudio --kill
PA is completely gone then. :wink:
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Kott »

Linuxmusician01 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:35 am
Kott wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 4:41 am
Matt73 wrote: Mon Aug 30, 2021 7:58 pm And I don't know how to turn pulse audio off.
Run pavucontrol, open the configuration tab, set profile for your USB card to off.
The way I do it:

Code: Select all

pulseaudio --kill
PA is completely gone then. :wink:
It's not. It can start if the daemon autospawn is on. And it will start on next logon.
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Linuxmusician01
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Matt73 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 6:51 am [...]Heading over to another section to ask about installation of AV Linux (which looks super cool) because I've hit a confusing bump.[...]
I don't know on what Linux distribution AV Linux MX (link) is based. It's probably a great distro, but realize that if you have to ask Linux questions anywhere and they don't know your distro it might be difficult to help you out.

Some thing one should know about the distro one uses (in my opinion):
  • Is it deb or rpm based?
  • If based on another distro like Ubuntu: on what version?
  • What repositories does it use? Standard repo's from the distro on which it is based or custom?
  • To what date does the (long term) soppurt last?
  • Can you use Chrome instead of Chromium? Do you know the difference?
  • etc. etc.
For a beginner it may be better to choose something widely used. To get used to Linux in general. For experienced users a custom distro might be better in certain cases. I myself, for example, have absolutely no idea what AV Linux is. So you've probably lost my support to start with.

Choose wisely. :)
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Linuxmusician01
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Kott wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:49 am
Linuxmusician01 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:35 am The way I do it:

Code: Select all

pulseaudio --kill
PA is completely gone then. :wink:
It's not. It can start if the daemon autospawn is on. And it will start on next logon.
Ooops! :oops: You're right. Forgot to mention that I also did the following. Uncomment the following 2 lines from /etc/pulse/client.conf:

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   autospawn = no
   daemon-binary = /bin/true
For other Linux systems (i.e. Debian 10):

Code: Select all

   systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.socket
   systemctl --user stop pulseaudio
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sunrat
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by sunrat »

Linuxmusician01 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:35 am
Kott wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 4:41 am
Matt73 wrote: Mon Aug 30, 2021 7:58 pm And I don't know how to turn pulse audio off.
Run pavucontrol, open the configuration tab, set profile for your USB card to off.
The way I do it:

Code: Select all

pulseaudio --kill
PA is completely gone then. :wink:
That will certainly stop it but it will respawn as soon as an application requests access to PulseAudio. A better way is to stop it using systemctl, or to run an application one time without PulseAudio start the application from terminal and prepend pasuspender which will stop it until you exit that application. Both methods are explained in https://wiki.debian.org/PulseAudio
I am doubtful that will help anyway. There are now several pages of posts and suggestions but no actual logs or error messages from which to base these. What is needed here is some proper diagnostics. Without that people can only blindly guess. Check journalctl, dmesg, system logs etc.

I have no trouble running JACK and PA together using pulseaudio-module-jack which is loaded from Qjackctl with a start command and patchbay preset. It can instead start automatically if D-Bus is active for JACK although I don't use that. But I doubt JACK will help in this case, probably just complicate matters further.

Also there is considerable optimisation possible to improve audio performance in Linux and I'm pretty sure Zorin doesn't do any optimisation. The proposal to install AVL-MXE is wise as it is well optimised out of the box. It is quite easy to install so keep at it. Soon you will find there is one step in the process which you may have done incorrectly and it will be plain sailing after that! :wink:
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Matt73 »

Well I've been on Linux for almost two years now. Trying out AV Linux can only be instructional. If it's too hard then maybe I can use ubuntu studio. Just want a lean, resource efficient machine mainly to be used for music production. I'll give it try. Just have to get it installed first (looking into that).

As far as the topic, if I kill pulse audio then won't that stop me from hearing audio through the laptop speakers when I want to watch the news?
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Matt73 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 9:09 am [...]As far as the topic, if I kill pulse audio then won't that stop me from hearing audio through the laptop speakers when I want to watch the news?
Yep. It will. Pulse and Jack are "servers", the audio driver is, and will always be, Alsa. Alsa can only serve one application at the time. That's why we have Pulse. Then why do we have Jack? Because it's more configurable. It confuses me too sometimes... :wink:


P.S. Ubuntu Studio is also a distro that is not that widely used. Debian and Ubuntu are. Mint too, but that's Ubuntu in a nice suit. Debian Stable is always somewhat out of date. Many people that have up to date versions of their software (Qtractor for instance) have it for Ubuntu. Choose wisely.
Last edited by Linuxmusician01 on Tue Aug 31, 2021 9:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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sunrat
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by sunrat »

Linuxmusician01 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:55 amI don't know on what Linux distribution AV Linux MX (link) is based. It's probably a great distro, but realize that if you have to ask Linux questions anywhere and they don't know your distro it might be difficult to help you out.
AVL-MXE (and MX-19 upon which it is built) are based on Debian Buster and use primarily Debian repos with some MX repos. AVL-MXE includes some custom packages which are not in repos, plus several third party repos such as KX Studio.
Debian is possibly the easiest distro for which to find help. :D
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Matt73 »

Ok, that's helpful. ALSA can can only serve one application at a time but JACK and PA allow several applications to have sound simultaneously right?
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

sunrat wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 9:18 am AVL-MXE (and MX-19 upon which it is built) are based on Debian Buster and use primarily Debian repos with some MX repos. AVL-MXE includes some custom packages which are not in repos, plus several third party repos such as KX Studio.
Debian is possibly the easiest distro for which to find help. :D
Yep, Debian is. But I check out on the MX part and the custom packages that are not in repo's. Not gonna bother trying to instruct a fellow Linuxer how to use, configure or install that. Because that'll need me to delve into a distro I'll never use and at which point I'm stuck with knowledge that is useless to me at the cost of a lot of energy. Sorry, man.
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Matt73 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 9:41 am Ok, that's helpful. ALSA can can only serve one application at a time but JACK and PA allow several applications to have sound simultaneously right?
As far as I know Jack can't. But now comes the confusing part. You can use Jack and Pulse at the same time. Jack can "sink" it's audio to Pulse (or vice versa, dunno how it works exactly). That way you can listen to Youtube and use your DAW with Jack at the same time. Most do not recommend this but I do it nontheless. I can always kill PulseAudio if I want to.

It is called jack_sink. I start it like this:

Code: Select all

pactl load-module module-jack-sink &
pactl set-default-sink jack_out &
Then I open pavucontrol and set "jack_out" as Chrome's playback device if it hasn't been done already. I use this shell script for all that. Might come in handy for you, might not. Screenshot:

Image
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Matt73 »

Alright, well this is all interesting. I always shut down other programs when I am focusing on music production. It's an interesting world. Lots to learn though but I have a nerdy streak so it's all good.
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Michael Willis »

@Matt73, I'm impressed with your patience and tenacity. A lot of folks give up within a week, but if you stick it out there are rewards to using libre software for audio work. (At least I keep telling myself that :lol:)

Earlier you asked about the definition of real-time audio. When I use this term, I just mean tuning your system to get low latency results from your DAW without all the snap crackle pop from x-runs. The low latency is only really important if you are doing live recording from a microphone, guitar, midi from digital piano, hardware synths/effects, etc. If you are not recording live, then you don't need to work about low latency and you can set your buffer size really high (say 1024 or more) and avoid buffer under runs.
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Re: Distortion in Waveform

Post by Matt73 »

Yeah, I don't lack tenacity. I'm just grinding away. At the end of the day it's your talent as a musician that matters most and there's all the software in the world to shine just as brightly as anyone with pro-tools and all the waves/kush plugins. Waveform support are halping me with this issue as well. Really looks like I will have to learn JACK but that's ok. It's interesting and even with the approaching apocalypse/new era of human freedom, we have to keep our minds stimulated.
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