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Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2021 5:44 pm
by chrisanthropic
Like some of you, I've been following the development of Pipewire for a bit and finally decided to see if it can replace my current setup.
TLDR; - as of today, Pipewire can completely replace my existing workflow with the exception of one bug (See BUGS below).
SETUP
My pre-pipewire setup is as follows:
- Arch Linux
- Alsa (1.2.5)
- Pulseaudio (14.2-3)
- Jack2 (1.9.18-1)
- Cadence (0.9.1-4)
- Catia (0.9.0)
- Ardour (6.7)
- Intel motherboard w/integrated Audio
- Nvidia graphics card w/Audio
- Monitor speakers w/HDMI audio ('screen' monitor, not professional audio monitors)
- Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB Audio Interface
WORKFLOW
I use Catia for my Patch bay
I use Cadence to start/stop Jack, bridge Alsa -> Pulse -> Jack
Ultimately, this setup allows me to run Ardour, watch youtube tutorials, and listen to reference tracks, all through my Audio Interface.
I'm hoping Pipewire is able to be a drop-in replacement.
PROCESS
- First I removed all non-default Alsa, Pulse, and Jack configs.
- Next I followed the Arch Wiki for installing Pipewire and installed
Code: Select all
pipewire (1:0.3.30-2)
pipewire-jack (1:0.3.30-2)
pipewire-pulse (1:0.3.30-2)
pipewire-alsa (1:0.3.30-2)
pipewire-jack-dropin (3-1)
- All sound cards are recognized
- All sound cards show up in Catia
- Firefox audio works, able to use sound applet to switch between all sound cards (Audio Interface, Intel, Nvidia, HDMI)
- Vital, Helm, and LSP-EQ standalone apps all launch and play sound successfully
- Ardour launches and plays sound
BONUS
- Bluetooth headset works out of the box
BUGS
- Playing sound through my Audio Interface from Firefox and Ardour simultaneously will crash Ardour 100% of the time.
- When I started testing last week, any Midi plugins that would use the Ardour "fan-out" feature would crash Ardour and require a restart of Pipewire, but as of the most recent update this is no longer happening.
DECISION
Given the results and simplicity (all default configs) I'm very happy with Pipewire so far.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2021 2:55 am
by chrisanthropic
After updating to the recent Pipewire release, everything works as expected!
As of Pipewire version 1:0.3.32-1 I can start Firefox, play a Youtube tutorial, and follow along with Ardour and I no longer need to use Cadence or Jack2 directly!
Pipewire has now fully replaced Jack/Alsa/Pulse on my system and its a nice experience.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2021 4:41 pm
by folderol
What's the buffersize/latency?
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2021 12:28 am
by chrisanthropic
Using all defaults set the buffersize to 1024 which resulted in 21.3 ms latency on my machine.
That said, I was just able to the Ardour UI to change the Jack buffersize to my standard 256 with 5.3 ms latency and so far am not seeing any issues, though I've only done a cursory test.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2021 7:57 am
by folderol
Hmmm. I normally work with a buffer size of 32 or 64 @ 48kHz.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2021 10:44 am
by bluebell
folderol wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 7:57 am
Hmmm. I normally work with a buffer size of 32 or 64 @ 48kHz.
It might be a question of the number of plugins loaded in a session.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2021 11:55 am
by folderol
bluebell wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 10:44 am
folderol wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 7:57 am
Hmmm. I normally work with a buffer size of 32 or 64 @ 48kHz.
It might be a question of the number of plugins loaded in a session.
Good Point. I normally work with Yoshimi, Rosegarden, Qsynth, Hydrogen, Audacity - no plugins.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2021 2:34 pm
by Michael Willis
This is pretty amazing. Some time ago I kind of dismissed pipewire as vaporware, but over the last year I've been reading reports of people actually using it successfully. Sure, there are bugs needing to be fixed and performance improvements to be made, but that will happen in time. Now I think that maybe some day I might actually try using pipewire.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2021 7:56 pm
by glowrak guy
It's not fully working (in my book) until it has plain-text documentation, a config gui, an editable config file,
is recognized and supported by the linux daws, and can be installed and successfully uninstalled
by common package managers.
I'm guessing another six months for the many (busy) parties involved to team up,
but would love to be proven too pessimistic
Cheers
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2021 1:23 am
by sunrat
glowrak guy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 7:56 pmI'm guessing another six months for the many (busy) parties involved to team up,
but would love to be proven too pessimistic
I think 6 months is being optimistic.
It took PulseAudio at least 6 years from first release to being anywhere near bug-free.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2021 6:59 am
by folderol
sunrat wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 1:23 am
glowrak guy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 7:56 pmI'm guessing another six months for the many (busy) parties involved to team up,
but would love to be proven too pessimistic
I think 6 months is being optimistic.
It took PulseAudio at least 6 years from first release to being anywhere near bug-free.
As far as I'm concerned PA
is a bug
After this, and systemd I tend to be suspicious of anything coming from Redhat.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2021 7:43 am
by sunrat
chrisanthropic wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 2:55 am
Pipewire has now fully replaced Jack/Alsa/Pulse on my system and its a nice experience.
Are you saying you don't use PA or JACK, or have even actually removed them?
Is your MIDI device (keyboard or controller) working, so no need for a2jmidid?
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2021 10:40 am
by robbert-vdh
sunrat wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 7:43 am
chrisanthropic wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 2:55 am
Pipewire has now fully replaced Jack/Alsa/Pulse on my system and its a nice experience.
Are you saying you don't use PA or JACK, or have even actually removed them?
Is your MIDI device (keyboard or controller) working, so no need for a2jmidid?
That's the idea behind PipeWire. That it should be a drop-in replacement for the existing audio APIs so applications don't have to directly support it, at least until it takes over as the primary high level audio API at some point. It's definitely not near ready to be a true plug-and-play drop-in replacement for PA+JACK yet, but after spending a bit of time setting it up (quantum size changes and creating a virtual sink so PulseAudio applications will still output in stereo even if my audio interface has 8 outputs were the fun parts) it's working as well or better than JACK2+PulseAudio for me. And I never had any complains about those two. The thing that started getting me personally excited about PipeWire (being able to freely route audio between PulseAudio clients is nice too of course) was that with some tuning you can get
slightly lower latencies out of PipeWire than what you can get with JACK2 in synchronous mode (and of course substantially lower than what you'd get in the default asynchronous mode).
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:30 pm
by sunrat
I realise it's supposed to be a drop-in replacement sometime in the future. I mainly asked about a2jmidid because a question was asked today at Debian forums by someone trying to use PA + JACK + Pipewire but not able to start a2jmidid. I think they may be in over their heads but then so am I. Just wondering if that setup is possible or practical.
Re: Pipewire, Ardour, and Arch - Fully working as of July 2021
Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2021 1:10 pm
by robbert-vdh
sunrat wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:30 pm
I realise it's supposed to be a drop-in replacement sometime in the future. I mainly asked about a2jmidid because a question was asked today at Debian forums by someone trying to use PA + JACK + Pipewire but not able to start a2jmidid. I think they may be in over their heads but then so am I. Just wondering if that setup is possible or practical.
You don't use PulseAudio,
and JACK2,
and PipeWire. You either use PA+JACK, or PipeWire. And PipeWire has an ALSA to JACK bridge built in, so you don't need a2jmidi.