JACK is Hannibal Lector with an ear fetish

[bluzee]

Every interface has a reference clock for sample rate timing. These are all slightly off. Imagine a clock store full of clocks. At the start of the month you go through and set every one synchronized to exactly the same time. At the end of the month you look at them again and you find none of them match any more.

In a consumer grade world applications simply resample the sound as things drift out of sync and make them match up again. This is what pulse audio is designed for.

In a pro audio situation this is a bad thing. When we have multiple interfaces we connect them together to a central clock so everything stays perfectly synced. This is what Jack is designed for.

[sunrat]

Don't worry everyone, the new standard of Pipewire is coming; then everything will work perfectly!

[tavasti]

Plugins and Jack are not mutually exclusive. Plugins are managed by your DAW or a simple plugin-host while Jack allows you to connect different music applications and use them together.

If you are overstrained by the routing possibilities of Jack I suggest that you use a single DAW like Ardour. It manages everything for you and don't have to care about any Jack routing in the background.

I agree with every word here.

If I am producing something, I have daw running. When just snooping around, testing plugins I can launch stand alone programs or plain plugins running with carla-single, and route midi & audio just like I want. I love the flexibility jack gives me.

Sure there is sometimes problems: if some program connected to jack crashes, it is possible that I need to restart jack to get everything back working like expected.

[j_e_f_f_g]

Get ready for yet another world of pain, folks. As if there hasn't already been an odiously reeking dung pile of "sound servers" -- all of them simultaneously fighting over your audio hardware -- a new mutation known as "PipeWire" just emerged from its dinosaur egg. And just like the majority of its inbred ancestors, it's also threatening extinction for all who came before it. This thing is claiming the ability to shape-shift into something that looks just like PulseAudio to your firefox browser, while at the same time appearing to be JACK to Ardour.

You should know what this means by now. First, because of all the bugs and limited amount of testing, software specifically written for PipeWire will periodically crash and burn like an iPhone prototype. (Remember what it was like when PulseAudio barged into the room like some Marvel superhero and yelled "I'm here to rescue you from Gnome's and Kde's incompatible sound servers!"... then tripped over his own cape? Sure you do.)

And PipeWire will emulate PulseAudio and JACK just enough to fool those servers' apps into thinking that everything's good in the world, and no one need be disturbed with annoying error messages. Except that the emulation won't be comprehensive enough to actually produce sound. (And don't you just love dealing with software that doesn't work, but also doesn't tell you why it's not working?)

I hope you're in the mood for some "quiet time". Because I have a feeling you're soon going to be getting lots of it. Whether you want it or not.

[raboof]

You set EDrummer to use ALSA, then recorded the room sound of you tapping a key on your PC, and the sound waves coming out of your speakers.

Wait, you got it backwards: I first looked at the code and saw you were comparing 'number of bytes' to 'number of frames' - which (at 4 bytes per frame) would explain the '4x difference' you claimed. The audio test was just to double-check that finding.

probably used a microphone that wasn't performant enough to even remotely measure the latencies you thought you were measuring

Well, you claimed a 4x latency difference - that should be easy to measure even without fancy equipment, right?

[tavasti]

You should know what this means by now. First, because of all the bugs and limited amount of testing, software specifically written for PipeWire will periodically crash and burn like an iPhone prototype.
...
And PipeWire will emulate PulseAudio and JACK just enough to fool those servers' apps into thinking that everything's good in the world, and no one need be disturbed with annoying error messages. Except that the emulation won't be comprehensive enough to actually produce sound. (And don't you just love dealing with software that doesn't work, but also doesn't tell you why it's not working?)

I am confident that there is early adopters that take care of that before I end up up upgrading my OS. Running Ubuntu 18.04, so I am forced to make some moves 04-2023. And I am pretty sure even then I can still go with jack and pulse.

[Largos]

Someone should tell every DAW developer that making a software patchbay is a mistake and wasn't where the market was heading

[bluzee]

No need to get your panties in a knot. This is Linux. This is not Windows or Mac. You are in control. If you don't want Pipewire you don't have to use it. If you don't want Jack, don't use it. If you don't want Pulse, don't use it. If you don't want ALSA then use OSS. No one is forced into any one thing. Use what ever options you want.

[tramp]

I'm using jack all day long.

[bluebell]

I'm using jack all day long.

I use it at night, too.

[Fmajor7add9]

Get ready for yet another world of pain, folks. As if there hasn't already been an odiously reeking dung pile of "sound servers" -- all of them simultaneously fighting over your audio hardware -- a new mutation known as "PipeWire" just emerged from its dinosaur egg. And just like the majority of its inbred ancestors, it's also threatening extinction for all who came before it. This thing is claiming the ability to shape-shift into something that looks just like PulseAudio to your firefox browser, while at the same time appearing to be JACK to Ardour.

You should know what this means by now. First, because of all the bugs and limited amount of testing, software specifically written for PipeWire will periodically crash and burn like an iPhone prototype. (Remember what it was like when PulseAudio barged into the room like some Marvel superhero and yelled "I'm here to rescue you from Gnome's and Kde's incompatible sound servers!"... then tripped over his own cape? Sure you do.)

And PipeWire will emulate PulseAudio and JACK just enough to fool those servers' apps into thinking that everything's good in the world, and no one need be disturbed with annoying error messages. Except that the emulation won't be comprehensive enough to actually produce sound. (And don't you just love dealing with software that doesn't work, but also doesn't tell you why it's not working?)

I hope you're in the mood for some "quiet time". Because I have a feeling you're soon going to be getting lots of it. Whether you want it or not.

LOL!

[j_e_f_f_g]

Some of you aren't prepared for what's ahead. We're about to get a "shock to the system" with Wayland. I don't expect this to have deadly consequences for most software. But it's not going to be pleasant for music software, and in particular, it could be really bad for LV2 plugins. LV2 doesn't currently have support for Wayland, and I'm a bit puzzled as to how a host is going to be able to use both LV2 plugins that use the old XWindows server, and plugins that are updated to Wayland. I have a feeling its going to cause the same trouble for LV2 plugins that don't use GTK (ie, gnome) as we currently have with LV2 plugins that do use a different version of GTK than the host. I mean, can a host that uses Wayland somehow be able to also invoke XWayland for old LV2 plugins? That's the rub.

[tramp]

I mean, can a host that uses Wayland somehow be able to also invoke XWayland for old LV2 plugins?

Why not? XWayland is just a Wayland client and could be invoked at any time.

[JamesPeters]

Oh, just let Jeff be angry with his rants about how terrible all of Linux is for DAW use. It seems he really wants to be angry. Let's not take that away from him.

[Kott]

I mean, can a host that uses Wayland somehow be able to also invoke XWayland for old LV2 plugins? That's the rub.

No. And that's why PipeWire was invented for

Seriously. Wayland and Flatpak are much forced to desktops. Flatpak means no Jack, Wayland means no X11 in Wayland-native hosts (and vice versa).
The idea of PipeWire is to be super universal solution for these issues and for everything else.

Someone really found that idea good: https://gist.github.com/abique/4c1b9b40 ... 2a7c760db4