Is there a beginner guide I can review for live audio on linux?

[Eloquent3295]

Does anyone have any reference material like a video or guide that made sense to them for how to route live audio in linux?

Most guides I see for music software on Linux seem to focus on Midi keyboards and audio generation on linux, rather than capturing live sound and working with that signal.

Context:

I have played guitar for a long time, and used and loved GNU/Linux for ₄ years. But I have never really married the two hobbies.

I use digital/modelling rigs all the time. And I know all of those pieces of gear I love are just little specialized computers.

I don’t really have an interest in recording. But the idea of using my GNU/Linux computers as a modeling rig for home fun has always intrigued me.

I found something called a “plugin host” named “Element” by Kushview. It seems to be the perfect tool for what I am looking for.

https://kushview.net/element/

But I cannot figure out the basics of how to select just the input of my audio interface, get it to route through Element, and then exit out to my speakers.

I remember having this issue back when I tried Ubuntu Studio a few years back and read about Jack, but could never figure it out when I was trying to understand how to use Ardour. A DAW like that, Garageband, Cakewalk, and others always felt like overkill for what I was looking to do, and it was difficult to understand how to work with those. Which is also difficult because it means I don’t really have much of a frame of reference for how to use these “plugin hosts”.

Thank you for any help/thoughts.

[Largos]

A better plugin host to use would be Carla. A good video to watch for JACK (and carla is being used in it) is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEduGnD6ZKQ Though note, if your distribution is running pipewire then this won't be entirely valid.

[glowrak guy]

The first post at the url below has links for Debian and Arch linux pro audio guides,
some nice tips in there, coming from a variety of perspectives.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=277496

Cheers

[sunrat]

The first post at the url below has links for Debian and Arch linux pro audio guides,
some nice tips in there, coming from a variety of perspectives.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=277496

For beginners, the best tip in that linked Debian guide is:

To make your life easier, install either Ubuntu Studio or AVLinux. Almost all of the following tweaks are taken care of.

There are a few suggestions I would not follow and some are unclear or not always applicable.

• Debian with KDE Plasma does not use Pipewire so that bit is irrelevant. Most other DEs do use it though.
• It says jackd2 sets up limits etc. but still mentions how to do it.
• It says to set performance governor as a kernel parameter. I prefer to enable it just for production and use a more conservative governor like ondemand for other tasks. The suggested Liquorix kernel defaults to performance governor and full preemption so that's not needed for Liquorix, but still needs threadirqs.
• I don't think changing swappiness does much
• JACK Dbus is not essential. I disable it but it may be good for some use cases.

Otherwise a fairly good guide.
There is a lot of good info in this forum's HOW TOs, Tips & Tricks section, including my guide for Debian Bullseye KDE setup (must write a Bookworm one, soon™ ).

Oops, got carried away a bit. I think OP was asking more about how to connect things rather than system setup.
If using JACK, connections between devices and applications are fairly simple using Graph or Connections in Qjackctl and connection setups can be saved as a Patchbay. For more complex setups, a session manager such as RaySession can be useful.

Back to basics, try AVLinux-MXE. You can run it live from a USB flash drive (or install it) and it should be easy to set up and includes Carla plugin host iirc.

[nils]

Have a look at this video: "Switching to a Linux audio system - A pragmatic guide"

https://youtu.be/dm3oxMg0oIg

[bueycansao]

Have a look at this video: "Switching to a Linux audio system - A pragmatic guide"

https://youtu.be/dm3oxMg0oIg

Hello,
After watching this video, which was really helpful, I wanted to install cadence/catia/claudia. I'm using Ubuntu 22.04, and APT can't find any of the three applications. I noticed that the repository of cadence has been archived. Does this mean that these three applications aren't available any-more?

Besides QjackCTL, are there other applications to 'connect audio and MIDI signals' (not sure if I'm using the right terminology)?

I've tested my MIDI-keyboard (also a digital piano) with Qsynth, QjackCTL and Rosegarden a couple of days ago and I got sound through my speakers. I wanted to try to generate a sound of amSynth with my MIDI-keyboard, but I'm a bit stuck. I would be glad to get a suggestion of which combination of software I could install to use my MIDI-keyboard as a synthesizer . I'm new on this subject

Thanks

[Michael Willis]

I wanted to install cadence/catia/claudia. I'm using Ubuntu 22.04, and APT can't find any of the three applications.

The KXStudio Repositories should get you sorted out.

[hmollercl]

If you have ubuntu (or one of his flavors) already installed the easy way is to use ubuntu installer https://ubuntustudio.org/ubuntu-studio-installer/
There you can find what to install based on what do you want to do, in your case (very similar to mine) I would install: audio, lowlatency, low latency settings, performance tweaks and carla. AND add backports.
That will install "studio controls" which make jack very easy to configure/use.
From that point you now need an amp simulator or similar. FOSS alternatives exists like rackarack and guitarix, I never got a convincing tone from them. You could also enter into the NAM world https://github.com/mikeoliphant/neural-amp-modeler-lv2 for which you need an lv2 host (like carla) or a DAW (like ardour or reaper)
Personally the easiest and good tone option is tonelib-gfx https://www.tonelib.net/, not free anymore but cheap, I get better tone than with my pod hd, it also has IR loader, but it does not has an harmonizer effect.

EDIT: include the backports, carla has a bug for plugin change in the ubuntu 22.04 version which is fixed in backports

Hope this helps @bueycansao