LinuxMusicians

I've got a fresh install of Kubuntu 22.10 with the audio subsystem (PipeWire is now default) working on the out of the box settings. Normally at this point I would install the KXStudio repos and the audio metapackage and go from there.
But this includes pulseaudio and jack. I don't know if JACK is even necessary anymore.
I could install Ardour (6.9 or 7 is not important at this point) and plug the interface in and see what happens, but being a clean install, I don't want to have to backtrack.

Can anyone offer some advice?

I don't know if Kubuntu has already configured PW to be a dropin replacement for JACK. Hopefully it is. You may just install Ardour, launch it and see if it can connect to JACK (PW). If it does you are good to go.

If you install the KXStudio plugin packages and not the standalone applications it is likely they don't require JACK. You can check the dependencies of a package with:

Hi cabsi,

I had this running on Arch for a while, and it worked great for me. Arch also has a good Wiki page about it, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire

In general, if you add/install packages like pw-jack, pw-alsa, and pw-pulseaudio (or so; forgot), the pipewire will emulate all these and connect them if needed - you can look at packages like helvum which looks a lot like Carla/Claudia or like QJackCtl.

Which means that while in Ardour you'd select 'jack', you in fact are using pipewire instead. Worked for me (I don't have that machine and partition anymore; sorry).

Hope that helps,
Wolfgang

Unless I was a victim of doing the smaller installation, Kubuntu 22.10 needs pipewire-media-session or wireplumber to avoid the need for pw-jack prefixing everything.

ForrestH wrote: ↑Sun Oct 23, 2022 3:54 pm Unless I was a victim of doing the smaller installation, Kubuntu 22.10 needs pipewire-media-session or wireplumber to avoid the need for pw-jack prefixing everything.

Can you explain to me what that means? Or is there a good page o nthe internet? I'm not a PW user yet so I have to learn a lot. What exactly are "pw-jack prefix", pipewire-media-session and wireplumber?

Edit: looks like pipewire-media-session and wireplumber are what the Graph or the Connect window in QJackctl is.

Linuxmusician01 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 24, 2022 9:53 am

ForrestH wrote: ↑Sun Oct 23, 2022 3:54 pm Unless I was a victim of doing the smaller installation, Kubuntu 22.10 needs pipewire-media-session or wireplumber to avoid the need for pw-jack prefixing everything.

Can you explain to me what that means? Or is there a good page o nthe internet? I'm not a PW user yet so I have to learn a lot. What exactly are "pw-jack prefix", pipewire-media-session and wireplumber?

Edit: looks like pipewire-media-session and wireplumber are what the Graph or the Connect window in QJackctl is.

Not exactly, media-session and WirePlumber are session (and policy) managers, in some way they are more similar to NSM than Qjackctl Graph/Connection window that are GUIs.
A great thing about WirePlumber is that you can script your session in Lua (imagine how many users find it convenient ).

If you are not familiar with Lua you can however, in the meanwhile a more friendlier way to interact with WirePlumber will surface, use JACK session managers (like NSM, Agordejo, RaySession).

The "pw-jack" prefix is required when PW is not configured to be a drop-in replacement for JACK.

In short, if PW is configured to replace JACK you don't need to use that prefix, because all the JACK programs will believe that JACK is running while it's PW.

e.g., if neither pipewire-media-session nor wireplumber are installed, as was the case on my K22.10, you'd need to launch Ardour from the command line with
pw-jack ardour
rather than just
ardour
and similarly any launcher icons you used would have to be edited appropriately.

@LAM and @@ForrestH: thank you both for the help. I understand now how and why one would use pw-jack. I've grown accustomed to using JackAudio so I might need that in the future. However, I think that configuring PW as a replacement for Jack for "Jack-aware" applications might be more user friendly for me.

If I may be so "off-topic": I still have a hard time understanding what pipewire-media-session and wireplumber are. It can be compared to NSM (Non Session Manager). However, from reading the NSM website I do not exactly understand what that is or does.

Linuxmusician01 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 10:11 am

@LAM and @@ForrestH: thank you both for the help. I understand now how and why one would use pw-jack. I've grown accustomed to using JackAudio so I might need that in the future. However, I think that configuring PW as a replacement for Jack for "Jack-aware" applications might be more user friendly for me.

If I may be so "off-topic": I still have a hard time understanding what pipewire-media-session and wireplumber are. It can be compared to NSM (Non Session Manager). However, from reading the NSM website I do not exactly understand what that is or does.

WirePlumber can do a few more different things compared to NSM. WP can change node (clients) properties or load some different configuration for a device for example.
The usecase that would interest more a music maker is routing/connecting different nodes based on some rules or predefined paths and loading/saving diefferent sessions, I guess.
WirePlumber can accompish this by reading configuration files written in Lua.
NSM accomplish this goal allowing to load/save routings/connections and entire sessions, and beside that manages a few more things like opening/closing clients, centralized saving, etc.
WirePlumber lacks these last kind of features.