Why does ardour kill my audio?

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terzoid801
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Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by terzoid801 »

I am a newbie, just got here. I am a fairly technical person but find myself somewhat overwhelmed trying to sort out what I need to do some simple music (synth, drum, recording, sequencing) on my Ubuntu 21.10.

I installed amSynth and got it working and was able to record on Audacity, but could not get it to "see" my sequencer. I think ALSA is installed but I have not tried to install JACK and am not certain I want it.

I googled my eyes out and Ubuntu Studio looks interesting but it seems they want to do a fresh install and after taking months to get this install configured and all my app I really do not want to do that.

So I installed ardour (latest version). I seems to run fine but when it start up my audio goes completely dead, no signal at headphone out. Anyone care to speculate (or ever better know :)) why that is?

Any and all help and advice is appreciated!
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

terzoid801 wrote: Tue Dec 07, 2021 10:18 pm [...]
I installed amSynth and got it working and was able to record on Audacity, but could not get it to "see" my sequencer. I think ALSA is installed but I have not tried to install JACK and am not certain I want it.
First of all: welcome! We're glad to see you. :)

What do you mean by sequencer? Hardware? Software?

I cannot answer your question about Ardour since I do not use it (I've that read new versions of it output project files that are not compatible with old versions. NO WAY I'm gonna produce files that I can not easily use in a few years/versions). Chances are it wants Jack audio. Install it (either version 1 or 2 is fine, long story) and start it in the background like this:

Code: Select all

jackd -d alsa --device hw:0 &

Then close the terminal. That'll do the trick in 90% of the cases. If you have an external USB audio device than you probably need to replace the hw:0 with hw:1.

Good luck! :)
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by sunrat »

Ardour doesn't need JACK. It runs well just using ALSA.
It's not possible to help with the current information supplied. What is set in the Audio/MIDI Setup? What is connected in the Audio Connections window?
terzoid801
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by terzoid801 »

I cannot answer your question about Ardour since I do not use it (I've that read new versions of it output project files that are not compatible with old versions. NO WAY I'm gonna produce files that I can not easily use in a few years/versions). Chances are it wants Jack audio. Install it (either version 1 or 2 is fine, long story) and start it in the background like this:

Code: Select all

jackd -d alsa --device hw:0 &

Then close the terminal. That'll do the trick in 90% of the cases. If you have an external USB audio device than you probably need to replace the hw:0 with hw:1.

Good luck! :)
Well I took a leap of faith and installed JACK. and qjackctl. I can start Jack successfully (or so it seems from the log) but once I do all audio is dead again. For example if I use a mp3 player it will hang trying to start PLAY, clearly it is unable to open whatever it needs to to play audio. qjackctl says it cannot connect to the server and cannot start the server. Using systemctl, it doesn't seem like Jack service is running, but if I try to start it again is says it is already running. LOL.

I get that I am not putting enough info in here for anyone to make a serious diagnosis, I'm just looking for ideas of the big gotchas I might not know about. :) Thanks for your reply!
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by dawhead »

Ardour and JACK are intended to be used for professional audio & music creation workflows. In such cases, control of the audio interface hardware needs to belong to Ardour (or JACK), and it should not be available for arbitrary use by random desktop noise-making.

Consequently, both Ardour and JACK take full control of the audio interface hardware they are told to use, and other software cannot access it while they are in control.

JACK will also share the audio interface hardware among any JACK clients, and this provides one way to get other applications to still deliver audio to the interface (I'm not going to document how to do this here).

This stuff is all changing fairly rapidly on Linux, since Pipewire is arriving, and unifies a lot of this stuff to make the "make my browser still play audio while running Ardour" problem easier to solve (still not guaranteed to be easy, depending on some details, but definitely easier).

In general, we (Ardour devs) recommend that most new users use Ardour with its ALSA backend, not with JACK. JACK is crazy powerful and very useful when you need it, but most new users get confused about its role and how to use it.
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by dawhead »

Linuxmusician01 wrote: Wed Dec 08, 2021 11:59 am I cannot answer your question about Ardour since I do not use it (I've that read new versions of it output project files that are not compatible with old versions. NO WAY I'm gonna produce files that I can not easily use in a few years/versions).
We work hard to ensure back-compatibility, even back to version 2.0 which is nearly 20 years old at this point. Occasionally there are issues - let us know and we will try to help. Sometimes, such as when we changed the basic concept underlying crossfades, a session will still load but will not sound identical. Older versions of Ardour can be built at any time from the source to deal with this if it is really an issue.

It is true that newer versions of Ardour produce session files that cannot be loaded by older versions, but there is very little software for which this is not true. Back-compatibility is important, forward-compatibility is much less and essentially impossible.
terzoid801
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by terzoid801 »

dawhead wrote: Wed Dec 08, 2021 9:46 pm Ardour and JACK are intended to be used for professional audio & music creation workflows. In such cases, control of the audio interface hardware needs to belong to Ardour (or JACK), and it should not be available for arbitrary use by random desktop noise-making.

Consequently, both Ardour and JACK take full control of the audio interface hardware they are told to use, and other software cannot access it while they are in control.

JACK will also share the audio interface hardware among any JACK clients, and this provides one way to get other applications to still deliver audio to the interface (I'm not going to document how to do this here).

This stuff is all changing fairly rapidly on Linux, since Pipewire is arriving, and unifies a lot of this stuff to make the "make my browser still play audio while running Ardour" problem easier to solve (still not guaranteed to be easy, depending on some details, but definitely easier).

In general, we (Ardour devs) recommend that most new users use Ardour with its ALSA backend, not with JACK. JACK is crazy powerful and very useful when you need it, but most new users get confused about its role and how to use it.
Ok, I suppose that makes sense. I just have to figure out how to tell Ardour that my synths and drum machines need access to the audio.
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by dawhead »

If they are other JACK clients, then you'll have to use JACK.

If they are plugins, they run inside Ardour, and you don't have to do anything (this is one of the big reasons why DAW+plugin approaches are so much easier for most users).

If they are neither plugins nor JACK clients, then (a) I don't know about them (b) they can't be a part of your workflow.
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by Michael Willis »

dawhead wrote: Wed Dec 08, 2021 11:16 pm If they are neither plugins nor JACK clients, then (a) I don't know about them (b) they can't be a part of your workflow.
Well, if they're hardware synths then you can use them with either JACK or ALSA.
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by dawhead »

Right, excellent point. That's just a MIDI connection and the audio I/O side of things is not (as) relevant there. Sorry I forgot about those devices :)
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by Michael Willis »

We should probably have @terzoid801 tell us more about these synths drum machines. After reviewing this thread again, I realize that they are probably some kind of software, since the concern is access to the sound hardware.
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

@dawhead: Thank you for clearing up that Ardour does not use Jack per default and why.

[off topic] About (forward/backward) compatibility of software, drivers, daemons and the lot: I'm one of those people (read: weirdo's) who went nuts when Microsoft went from doc to docx. :wink: I use old computers with old software a lot and I exchange files between 'm to work on 'm. Docx wouldn't play nice with my computers for years. I dread the day that I'll have to learn how to use Pipewire instead of Jackaudio. Pipewire even appears to be unstable at the moment (which will be solved in time off course). Hated it when Gnome2 disappeared along with some software I used a every day (GPE, Xdialog). This summer I considered going back to Windows after 15 years because I had to upgrade my distro and a lot of my tips 'n' tricks were deprecated (gksudo anyone?). Never thought an OS based on UNIX from 1974 would change so much in a few years. [/off topic]

Good luck in developing Ardour!

@terzoid801: I take it back: forget about Jackaudio for the moment. Concentrate on the Ardour probelem. And what @Michael Willis said!!!
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by terzoid801 »

Michael Willis wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 3:48 am We should probably have @terzoid801 tell us more about these synths drum machines. After reviewing this thread again, I realize that they are probably some kind of software, since the concern is access to the sound hardware.
Exactly. Software sound generators. I realize that I just have a lot to learn before deciding how to proceed, I appreciate the help from all of you.

I popped into Ardour and the "sound and midi setup". I select ALSA, when I "Start" it, my software synth sound goes dead. When I "Stop" it the audio to my software synth is restored. I have yet to figure out how to tell ALSA to allow my software synth access to audio. But I suspect that I don't really need JACK and that perhaps ALSA will do everything I need.
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by Michael Willis »

@terzoid801 What specific software synth are you using? If it is available as a plugin, then that will probably be the easiest way to get it to cooperate with a DAW. If it will only run as a standalone process, then I don't think that you can give both the synth and the DAW access to the ALSA device at the same time without JACK (or Pipewire, I guess). If that is the case, hopefully your synth supports JACK.
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Re: Why does ardour kill my audio?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

@terzoid801: are you using a VST (i.e. a plugin) or a standalone application that one can also use without a DAW? Could you name the exact software/plugin and place a link to the manufacturers website?
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