WineASIO and Ableton Live

[matyas]

I wanted to try running Ableton Live under Wine, since apparently some people have had good luck with it and I already own a Live license. (Of course I am aware that there are native Linux alternatives, but as I mentioned, I already own a license for Live.) Anyway, I did manage to get it to install, and it loads and runs as expected, but I can't seem to get decent performance. With the PulseAudio device, the latency is absurd - something like >100 ms. With WineASIO, the CPU utilization skyrockets past 100%, and I can't get any playback at all without breakups and an enormous number or xruns. I should mention that I have WineASIO working well with Max/MSP and the latency is good, with CPU usage only about 2-3% higher than on Windows. I'm using Ubuntu Studio 20.04 running on top of Xubuntu, with a low-latency kernel, Wine Staging 8.2, and the latest version of WineAsio, using JACK.
Native Linux apps are working great, by the way.

[tavasti]

My experience is that even with wineasio, using windows DAWs needs big buffers, meaning big latency. Tested Ableton Live Lite and Mixcraft, with both need frames/period at least 4096 for lite use, and for real project 8192 in my computer.

I have asked many times here, reddit and facebook that if someone is having any decent latency with any windows daw in linux, and nobody has claimed to have.

[revoxs]

having any decent latency with any windows daw in linux

Yeah, OOTB, WINE is not optimized for this...

, and nobody has claimed to have.

Thats not true, someone is working on that and making progress...see Ableton Live 11 Support / Notes-Docs

Wine-NSPA: A Real-Time Capable and Proaudio-Centric Build of Wine(-TKG)

This is experimental and involves:

• compiling a patched version WINE (7, 8 is still making problems)

Features (non-exhaustive)

Code: Select all

NSPA-Specific Wine-RT Implementation
Improved multi-threading / scheduling support
Various Locking, Atomics & Membarrier Optmizations/Improvements
Kernelbase linux-thread RT hooking for TIME_CRITICAL threads*
Wineserver Shared Memory support
Wineserver SHMEM Per Thread (Server Requests/Replies)
Esync / Fsync Proton 7.0-experimental implementation
Wine Low Fragmentation Heap Patchwork
Keyed Events Linux Futexes Implementation
Numerous Performance Optimizations
Significant backports and Bugfixes
Winserver + Ntdll backports
MSVCRT backports/updates
Hacks to improve Wine for NSPA usage
Loader/vDSO performance Optimizations
Proton's CPU Topology Overrides

https://github.com/nine7nine/Linux-NSPA-pkgbuild

• compiling a patched kernel.

Features/Patchwork:

Code: Select all

PREEMPT_RT_FULL : Realtime Linux Patchset
Fair/RT Scheduler optimizations, modifications + backports
Locking backport and modifications
MM Multi-Gnerational LRU (https://lwn.net/Articles/856931/)
MM Maple-Tree patchwork
Tunable WorkingSet Protection Mechanism
Subset of Intel Clear Linux Kernel patches
Various Performance / interactivity related changes
Wine-related performance patchwork
Power management improvements
Numerous subsystem backports from mainline, -next and tip
Subset KernelToast's kernel patchwork
Misc fixes/changes

nine7nine is using ARCH Linux, for which the process is fully documented.
For Debian/Ubuntu, there are Instructions for compiling WINE, and patching & compiling a kernel is also no rocket science

[matyas]

There are definitely people claiming to have achieved decent latency with Ableton Live under Wine. It's clearly difficult, but I'm not sure it's completely due to Wine. After all, I'm achieving latencies comparable to what I'm see on Windows with Wine under Max/MSP. And some people were reporting native-level performance with Reaper under Wine before the native version of Reaper came out.
What I have noticed, though, is that Wine is fairly unpredictable, seems to change a lot with each software version, and is just really annoying and difficult to set up.

[glowrak guy]

Check the latency in the upper right corner of the screengrab. This is a recent windows Reaper, .679, I think,
with the stock wine and wineasio that are preconfigured inthe great AVlinux. Wine is 6.22 staging, as I recall.
Now check the size of an Ableton Archive, or any other mainstream daw, versus a Reaper archive.
Says a lot about skilled-owner-coding versus paid-by-the-hour, paid-by-the-byte, or salaried-employee coding.
The linux version of Reaper is also a low latency gem. I use both, according to circumstances,
and depending which linux setup has the power on when the muse pounces
Check out the many Kenny Goia videos, to see Reaper in pro level action.

K6-Absynth5-Reaper.jpg (218.83 KiB) Viewed 1948 times

[matyas]

Yes, I like and use Reaper as well, and I agree that it's a marvelous piece of software engineering. I tend to approach DAWs the way I approach instruments: they have different strengths and weakness, and different use cases. In the case of Ableton Live, I used it on Mac and Windows for its excellent collection of effects and synths, and above all for Max for Live, as I've been a Max user for over 20 years. I take the name of the program at face value - I use it as live performance instrument, rather than as a general-purpose DAW. When I mix classical music or rock bands, I use other DAWs, like Reaper. I guess the native Linux equivalent would be Bitwig, which I am curious about, but as I have a license for the full Live suite, I thought it might be worth investigating.

Of course, the other possible substitution in Linux-land for something like Max for Live would be use PD or my beloved SuperCollider into Reaper or similar via Jack. I've already played around with that and it's good.