Any solution for reliably running Kontakt 6 standalone on pipewire?

[ShopGoose]

I'm on Fedora 35, wine 7.3.1. Kontakt 5 runs great as standalone or as a plugin, in both FL Studio and Reaper via yabridge. Kontakt 6 runs great as a plugin, again in both FL Studio and Reaper. Kontakt 6 as standalone however is very unstable and finicky.

Running Kontakt 6 with pulseaudio selected works, and Kontakt will launch, but the audio driver never actually starts running in Kontakt. This means library user interfaces will load, but all the controls have no effect, and there is no audio output.

Kontakt 6 with WineAsio is very unpredictable. Often it will crash Kontakt immediately on launch. Sometimes it will open, a library will load, but playing sound will crash. By messing with QjackCtl, stopping or starting the driver, changing from dummy to ALSA and back, about 1/10 times it is possible to get Kontakt running flawlessly, but I haven't figured out a reliable way to reproduce.

Kontakt 5 meanwhile has no problem running over Pulseaudio, but has similar issues with WineAsio.

I'm not sure where to start debugging this, whether it's a PipeWire issue, Pulseaudio, Wine, or something else, and any help would be appreciated.

[Linuxmusician01]

[...]
I'm not sure where to start debugging this, whether it's a PipeWire issue, Pulseaudio, Wine, or something else, and any help would be appreciated.

You're on the right track because it could be all of 'm.

Reading your post I think we can conclude that the "problem" lies in Kontact 6 (what ever the hell that may be, probably Windows software or a Windows VST). Version 5 seems to work just fine for you.

As far as I know ASIO is a Windows driver. I'd cut that from the equation immediately, if at all possible.

The way I finally got a certain Windows VST working (a VST of the famoust VCS3/Synthi AKS synthesizer) - on the advice of YABridge's developer (Robert v/d Helm on this forum) - is by updating Wine to the latest Wine-Staging version. Wine Staging is a testing version of Wine or something. Dunno. You could try that.

If that fails you can troubleshoot further of wait for utilities like YABridge and Wine Staging to get updated and pray it'll solve your prob. However, running software from one operating system on another is never easy or completely supported by anyone. That's no problem for 99% of the software out there because there's always a Linux alternative. But VST's? Hmmmmm. That's another story.

Have you tried bridging the VST via Carla?

Might it be an alternative to stay on Kontact version 5? Sometimes upgrades/updates don't offer extra features that one actually uses (MS Office '97 is still enough for me, unless people send me docx files).

Good luck!

[tavasti]

I'm on Fedora 35, wine 7.3.1. Kontakt 5 runs great as standalone or as a plugin, in both FL Studio and Reaper via yabridge. Kontakt 6 runs great as a plugin, again in both FL Studio and Reaper. Kontakt 6 as standalone however is very unstable and finicky.

If plugin works, you can run it with carla-single. Then you don't need wineasio, but carla takes care of jack-connection.

[ShopGoose]

Unfortunately, as the plugin version lacks a few important features like the ability to pop-out windows, using it in a VST host is not ideal, but I may give it a go anyway in case it reveals something. Also since I develop for Kontakt it is necessary to have both 5 and 6 functional.

The issue does not seem to be related to the Wine version, as running Kontakt through WineAsio is unstable but does work some of the time. I submitted a bug report for PulseAudio https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ssues/2246 and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a solution.

[tavasti]

Unfortunately, as the plugin version lacks a few important features like the ability to pop-out windows, using it in a VST host is not ideal, but I may give it a go anyway in case it reveals something. Also since I develop for Kontakt it is necessary to have both 5 and 6 functional.

The issue does not seem to be related to the Wine version, as running Kontakt through WineAsio is unstable but does work some of the time. I submitted a bug report for PulseAudio https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ssues/2246 and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a solution.

But if you are running on pipewire, isn't pulseaudio also provided by pipewire?

[Linuxmusician01]

Sorry, I got confused. Are you using Pipewire and PulseAudio at the same time? If so: don't. AFAIK PW should replace PA.

[sysrqer]

I guess the Fedora version of pipewire is quite up to date?

There is a config option to "make sure that no automatic quantum is changes while JACK applications are running". I think this is why unfa had problems with ardour when he was running pipewire and I wonder if that's the reason you're fine in a daw but unstable standalone.

Further info here https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ck-quantum

I don't know much about wineasio so it could be something else entirely. I have come across a few programs that can't deal with pipewire for some reason (sononym, emissioncontrol2).

[sysrqer]

AFAIK PW should replace PA.

It does but programs can still use pulseaudio, or so they think, so you still see pulseaudio in audio config pages etc. I'm guessing this is what OP means.

[bluzee]

How does it work on a system without pipewire?

[ShopGoose]

Sorry for the confusion. Yes, the item I select in Kontakt is "PulseAudio", but as I understand it pipewire is a drop in replacement so applications still see and call pulseaudio, but really it's pipewire in disguise.

To add to the confusion, it turns out that I was actually running pulseaudio without pipewire. I don't know how that happened, since pipewire should be the default on Fedora, but pactl info was returning just PulseAudio, without any (on PipeWire x.x.xxx).

Either way, switching over to pipewire for real did not change the Kontakt on pulseaudio behavior. What it did do however is make wineasio work more reliably, so in a way my problem is sort of solved, since the end goal of being able to have Kontakt 6 and other applications play audio at the same time has been achieved.

I have no idea what to make of the fact that Kontakt 6 behaves exactly the same on pulse and pipewire. Tomorrow I'll try reinstalling pulse and confirm that the behaviour is the same. Thank you everyone for your help so far.

[Linuxmusician01]

Sorry for the confusion. Yes, the item I select in Kontakt is "PulseAudio", but as I understand it pipewire is a drop in replacement so applications still see and call pulseaudio, but really it's pipewire in disguise.

To add to the confusion, it turns out that I was actually running pulseaudio without pipewire. I don't know how that happened, since pipewire should be the default on Fedora, but pactl info was returning just PulseAudio, without any (on PipeWire x.x.xxx).

Either way, switching over to pipewire for real did not change the Kontakt on pulseaudio behavior. What it did do however is make wineasio work more reliably, so in a way my problem is sort of solved, since the end goal of being able to have Kontakt 6 and other applications play audio at the same time has been achieved.

I have no idea what to make of the fact that Kontakt 6 behaves exactly the same on pulse and pipewire. Tomorrow I'll try reinstalling pulse and confirm that the behaviour is the same. Thank you everyone for your help so far.

Sorry for the confusion on my part too. But are you sure PulseAudio is fully stopped when you start Pipewire? I have to stop PA from automatically restarting (i.e. autospawn) AND kill PA's process like as follows. Uncomment the following 2 lines from /etc/pulse/client.conf:

Code: Select all

autospawn = no
daemon-binary = /bin/true

For newer Linux systems (i.e. Debian 10):

Code: Select all

systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio

And I still don't get why one needs WineASIO. ASIO is a Windows hardware driver, not? Will your audio card/device not work without it? Does ALSA not have a driver for it? I mean: doesn't Wine use Linux's hardware driver (i.e. ALSA)? And Kontact is software, is it not? I believe y'all that one might need it, I just don't understand what it is and why one should need it... I get confused 'bout the hardware and software part... And I'd like to learn about WineASIO.