Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

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bluzee
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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by bluzee »

Well, I never expected Pipewire would replace Jack. I always assumed one would just continue using Jack for low latency audio and let Pipewire replace pulse. If it's possible for Pipewire to equal Jack's performance that would be fine.

I have recently installed Pipewire on a machine I use for ham radio. The ham radio apps use pulse however there is a need for audio to be routed between apps and some microphone signal chain inserted. I tried doing it all in pulse with either pulse effects or running Carla with a pulse engine and the results were dismal. Switching to Pipewire everything works very much like it's all running in Jack as far as routing goes. Every Pulse app presents ins and outs just like a Jack app. Carla can run using a Jack engine and doesn't seem to notice it's actually running on Pipewire. Easy to get it all routed in qpwgraph. I can get latency down to about 16ms setting without issue. It's low enough that everything works fine and since I don't have to monitor my mic in the headphones it's fine. Over all I quite like it. However, playing guitar through Guitarix at 16ms latency would not make me happy. I need to monitor that live. This is where I use Jack set to 5ms.

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Re: Food for thought -- continuing the jack/pipewire debate

Post by Largos »

Impostor wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 6:36 pm
merlyn wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 6:29 pm

I'm not going to be using Pipewire any time soon, in the same way that Wayland is the new thing but I still use X11. Another negative is that x42 expressed his reservations. That's not a good sign to me. But ... a lot can happen before version 1.0.

Yeah. Pipewire could even become the nail in the coffin of Linux pro audio.
Don't take this as a prediction though.

Don't see why, the "worst case scenario" is we keep using what we're currently using.

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

A. Can we get a link to the discussion in the top post? Probably not, but if at all possible it would help for readability.

B. I don't want to offend the developers of PipeWire, but if it doesn't replace Jack and PulseAudio than why develop PW? I hate Pulse too, but it sort of works. It's the "pro audio" part for musicians that's the problem. You don't have to be a dev to try and explain this to me. From the PW website:

PipeWire website wrote:

PipeWire is a project that aims to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux. It provides a low-latency, graph-based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both PulseAudio and JACK.

I scanned through this discussion and I think that I read that PW ain't no replacement for Jack yet. Reading the quote on the website I understand why they'd test PW with a Yt video. I didn't even know there was a problem with audio in videos on Linux, and I've used Linux as a Mediacenter on a Raspberry Pi. :wink:

wtay wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 7:55 pm

[...] timer based scheduling doesn't work reliably enough for pro audio so we're going to have to add IRQ based scheduling like what jack does. [...] It's not finished yet, we're working on it...

Again, not to offend anybody but if it ain't ready yet should we Linux Musicians for the time being continue to use Jack rather than PW? Anyway, @wtay thanks for replying.

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by sysrqer »

Linuxmusician01 wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 10:49 am

Again, not to offend anybody but if it ain't ready yet should we Linux Musicians for the time being continue to use Jack rather than PW?

It depends on your use case. For me, it is absolutely ready and I don't have any issues with it. In Bitwig, I can lower the block size and it tells me the latency is 2.67ms, and I can't perceive much latency if any at all when playing guitar through an amp sim, although I don't know how accurate this figure is. As a disclaimer, I haven't played through a real amp in well over a decade so perhaps I've just got used to there being some latency.

I do more mixing and recording without monitoring though, and it works perfectly for me.

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by sunrat »

sysrqer wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 11:53 am

... the latency is 2.67ms, and I can't perceive much latency if any at all when playing guitar through an amp sim,...

2.67ms is less latency than you would experience if you were listening to your guitar amp from a metre away. At 20 °C (68 °F), the speed of sound in air is about 343 metres per second (1,125 ft/s). :D

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by Audiojunkie »

sunrat wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 1:12 pm
sysrqer wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 11:53 am

... the latency is 2.67ms, and I can't perceive much latency if any at all when playing guitar through an amp sim,...

2.67ms is less latency than you would experience if you were listening to your guitar amp from a metre away. At 20 °C (68 °F), the speed of sound in air is about 343 metres per second (1,125 ft/s). :D

I suspect this measurement is not round-trip, but one-way. The actually round-trip latency is probably double that number.

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by sysrqer »

Audiojunkie wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 2:21 pm

I suspect this measurement is not round-trip, but one-way. The actually round-trip latency is probably double that number.

I was thinking that too. I think Bitwig has a compensation adjustment in the hardware interface tools so I could give that a try later, I'd be interested to know if it's much different going the other way.

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Re: Food for thought -- continuing the jack/pipewire debate

Post by Impostor »

Largos wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 9:44 am
Impostor wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 6:36 pm
merlyn wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 6:29 pm

I'm not going to be using Pipewire any time soon, in the same way that Wayland is the new thing but I still use X11. Another negative is that x42 expressed his reservations. That's not a good sign to me. But ... a lot can happen before version 1.0.

Yeah. Pipewire could even become the nail in the coffin of Linux pro audio.
Don't take this as a prediction though.

Don't see why, the "worst case scenario" is we keep using what we're currently using.

If what we're currently using remains usable with future distro's. I've only used Linux for three years, so haven't really encountered backwards incompatibility yet, apart from the GTK2 UI issue, but it does seem to be an issue for people who've used Linux for longer than that.

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by Baggypants »

So the summary of this thread as I understand it is: The devs say it's still a work in progress, the people already using pw are happy enough, the people not using pw are unhappy.

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by sunrat »

Baggypants wrote: Thu Jun 15, 2023 7:48 am

...the people not using pw are unhappy.

I'm still using PA and JACK, and I'm happy. :D

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by alex stone »

sunrat wrote: Thu Jun 15, 2023 9:39 am
Baggypants wrote: Thu Jun 15, 2023 7:48 am

...the people not using pw are unhappy.

I'm still using PA and JACK, and I'm happy. :D

Just PA and Jack here, and i'm happy too. :)

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by folderol »

alex stone wrote: Thu Jun 15, 2023 10:21 am
sunrat wrote: Thu Jun 15, 2023 9:39 am
Baggypants wrote: Thu Jun 15, 2023 7:48 am

...the people not using pw are unhappy.

I'm still using PA and JACK, and I'm happy. :D

Just PA and Jack here, and i'm happy too. :)

Of what art this Pea Aye thou speakest of?
Jack is the king for dedicated audio. For everything else ALSA does all I want.

The Yoshimi guy {apparently now an 'elderly'}
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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by novalix »

sunrat wrote: Thu Jun 15, 2023 9:39 am

I'm still using PA and JACK, and I'm happy. :D

Does that mean you use pulseaudio proper? Or is it the drop-in replacement of pulse which is provided by pipewire?

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by Audiojunkie »

Baggypants wrote: Thu Jun 15, 2023 7:48 am

So the summary of this thread as I understand it is: The devs say it's still a work in progress, the people already using pw are happy enough, the people not using pw are unhappy.

Close. Here's the summary as I understand it: There are some that are having success with it (with normal tuning), like me. However, Pipewire is supposedly not supposed to need tuning at all. A lot of its current low-latency/low-xrun success is very dependent upon the hardware being used. I use a Lenovo Yoga, which turns out to be one of the pieces of hardware that respond better. However, even I need to do tuning to get the response I get from my system. So, it has been determined that the timing scheduler that is currently in Pipewire is not sufficient, and Pipewire, just like JACK, will need to move to IRQ-based scheduling in the future to improve low-latency/xrun-free response. This will take time. Wim hopes to have it fixed by the end of the year. With IRQ-based scheduling, the performance should be less reliant upon what hardware is used, because the IRQ threads will be prioritized like the RTIRQ script does now. I couldn't understand why some of us were getting usable results and some weren't, but this explains it all to me. So, since those who have been experiencing the better results are still achieving this through tuning, which isn't intended, it means that there is much improvement to be had even for people who have been having success with pipewire. The intended goal, however, is that there should not be any tuning needed with Pipewire in the future, and a simple command from the command line should be sufficient to change the sample rate and the quantum (pipewire's latency). So, in short, I don't think any of us are as naïve as we were a few months ago. We pipewire users just want things to work properly for everyone. Those currently using the JACK server need not change to Pipewire until it is ready. Those who use a distro with Pipewire built in will need to be patient. Pipewire will be a better, easier solution all the way around--it's just not there yet. Be patient.

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Re: Continuing the jack/pipewire debate...

Post by GuntherT »

I only use Linux for low latency recording with Ardour (preferably 64 buffer size with no xruns during capture; 128 is useable but latency is still perceptible). I don't have a need for Pipewire because I use the ALSA backend and am never in a spot where I want to watch a YouTube video while recording. If I was, I would either stop Ardour to free up the soundcard, let PulseAudio play the video using the computer's internal soundcard while Ardour maintains control of my USB audio interface, or I would (most likely) just watch it on another device.

I am all for Pipewire becoming the default sound server when it is ready, provided it operates at low latency as well as straight ALSA does. It seems it has a way to go before it is there. I would be concerned with distros adopting PW before it has this capability. If I have to take additional steps to configure my system to a useable state (for my purposes), then the program is creating problems for me, not solving them. I am fully aware I am an edge case as the average desktop user is not concerned with this stuff, but that is my reasoning for staying away from it for now.

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