AV Linux MX Edition 23.1 (AVL-MXe) Released!

[All in One Wish]

I have an RME FireFace 800 with black audio ADA converters but I also have an old Digidesign USB 2 interface for playback and maybe connect a guitar or a bass. So I'll be trying the new AVL this weekend!

[GMaq]

Hi!

All I can say about FireWire is whatever PipeWire's 1.0.0 release has to say about it, I've done nothing nor do I know what to do about enhancing support with FireWire. My last personal use of FireWire was 8 or so years ago with my dearly departed Mackie Onyx.

If your FireWire device is supported with the ALSA FireWire drivers I would strongly suggest using your DAW with the ALSA backend and hooking directly into it and going around PipeWire completely but that may or may not even work perhaps @Largos or others here using FW devices with PipeWire can comment..?

I had very little choice in embracing PipeWire and other than the metadata tool and qpwgraph being thrown in there is very little I can do to further customize that experience.. Something I have learned too late is that 'pavucontrol' needs to be installed to expose the 'Pro Audio' profile so if you need that for your FireWire device(s) then you may want to install that..

[sunrat]

It's not going well for me so far. Only tried playback of songs from my collection so far. Music plays but is distorted and seems to vary in speed a little. First tried with the default MPV, then I installed DeadBeef which has a direct Pipewire output plugin thinking it may be a pipewire-pulse issue but still the same (didn't check if MPV outputs to PW or PA).
Curiously I also tried pavucontrol to configure card profiles and sound seems fine when it is open but deteriorates when closed! Haven't tried Pro Audio profile yet it's next on the list. It was 3am when I gave up testing so had to sleep and put it on the to-do list.
AVL is installed, not live. My sound card is an ancient lowly M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI which usually works fine.

[GMaq]

It's not going well for me so far. Only tried playback of songs from my collection so far. Music plays but is distorted and seems to vary in speed a little. First tried with the default MPV, then I installed DeadBeef which has a direct Pipewire output plugin thinking it may be a pipewire-pulse issue but still the same (didn't check if MPV outputs to PW or PA).
Curiously I also tried pavucontrol to configure card profiles and sound seems fine when it is open but deteriorates when closed! Haven't tried Pro Audio profile yet it's next on the list. It was 3am when I gave up testing so had to sleep and put it on the to-do list.
AVL is installed, not live. My sound card is an ancient lowly M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI which usually works fine.

Hmmm, that's odd

Something is very amiss and out of the ordinary there, I've been testing PW for months and I'd never had any audible sound issues with any media players, Did you try some different settings with the PipeWire metadata tool? It might be worth testing out another Live ISO with PipeWire by default to see if this is an issue with PW in general with your particular hardware...?

[sunrat]

Just got back to it. Standard PW seems to work fine after selecting Pro Audio profile.
DeadBeef playing through either PW output or Pulse output is good. I tried a quick test Mixbus32 session,13 channels, playback only, via ALSA output and it was fine too. I will have to work out room correction EQ as my room is crap and that probably requires JACK (to-do list).

Curiously I tried an install of Pipewire 1.00-1 from bookworm-backports on a sacrificial separate new install of Bookworm/KDE (which uses Pulse by default) and it worked fine immediately.

Still not sold on Enlightenment though. It seems to work quite well but will take a bit of use to like it. A couple of annoyances:

• Click windows to focus should be default. Found where to set it but the default is weird.
• Some menus go off screen and are not scrollable with default theme. Changed to Skeuos-DIEHARD-Dark which has smaller font/layout and is ok now.
• Had a window title bar appear off screen. Most windows are fine though. My monitor is UHD with which some WMs have occasional gotchas, but generally looks good here.

Overall I am impressed. Will definitely give it more workouts soon.

[sjzstudio]

It happened to me that the volume level was about half of normal. So, in general, the volume level was only about half of what it should be. I don't know what I did before that. Also with ALSA/Mixbus combination. I finally noticed that when I go to pavucontrol and click "DEFAULT" the volume returned to normal. After this, when I pressed Pro Audio, everything was still ok. Apparently that somehow resets the settings.

[Largos]

I don't have problems with MIDI/soft synth latency but I did when I had some jack thing installed alongside pipewire jack. So make sure there are no conflicting libraries with a "apt search jack" etc. I don't know why I had those things installed, I hypothesised that some application may have installed them as well and I didn't notice but I am not sure. The only latency problem I have is audio input monitoring.

[GMaq]

@sunrat

Thanks for the report, appreciated!

The Alt key is invaluable with Enlightenment, it handles window coordinates differently and the title bar appearing off screen is kind of a known thing that can happen, Alt drag will fix that..

Enlightenment is full of quirks, so am I... that is why I like it, it has the artists temperament...lol

[Rodney]

That's awesome! Got a New notebook Just for AVL . Definitely installing It this weekend.

Thank you Very much as always Glenn, you rock!

[Linuxmusician01]

I saw something about YADBridge in the video. I only know about YABridge (notice the missing D here). Google can only find info on YABbridge. Is YADBridge a graphical frontend to YAB that you made yourself?

[Lume]

I would like to say that the distribution is installed in my computer and so far so good. No issues with pipewire and everything seems to work properly.

But I really don´t like Enlightenment desktop. I can see why it is included, I know it consumes less system resources, less memory, I know it is faster and snappier... but maybe I´m too used to XFCE and it´s goodneses and I´m feeling very clumsy using this "enlightenment". I find XFCE easier to use, easier to customize and much more useful in general. Or maybe I don´t know how to do the same with Enlightenment.

Anyway, just a thought, my 2 cents. AVLinux is great

[sjzstudio]

It may seem strange at first. But after just a couple of days of use, it has turned out to be a pretty good and smoothly functioning desktop environment. Give it some time, I think you'll fall in love with it.

[GMaq]

@Lume

Thanks for the feedback, change is hard... unwanted change is harder.. I had been using XFCE4 for 10 years or so and I got bored of it and there were some things about Distributing it and how it's XML files work that annoyed me so I changed.. I've always wanted AVL to be unique, not just another 'business blue' Desktop Distribution and I find KDE has become almost like using a really nice Windows theme on Linux. At the end of the day I want people to have a comfortable and convenient system to create their art on but I also want some of the art to be in the system itself, Enlightenment is a good vehicle for that..

@sjzstudio

Thanks! Glad to hear you're warming up to it even in a Finnish winter!

[GMaq]

I saw something about YADBridge in the video. I only know about YABridge (notice the missing D here). Google can only find info on YABbridge. Is YADBridge a graphical frontend to YAB that you made yourself?

YADbridge (a kindergarten-simple YAD frontend for yabridge) is included in AV Linux and is a basic tool I made, it 'should' work on most Debian-based Distros and it can be found here for those who may want to try..

http://bandshed.net/packages/AVL-MXe-23 ... -1_all.deb

*NOTE it expects yabridge assets to be in their recommended place as per the github instructions at ~/.local/share/yabridge/

[Linuxmusician01]

I saw something about YADBridge in the video. I only know about YABridge (notice the missing D here). Google can only find info on YABbridge. Is YADBridge a graphical frontend to YAB that you made yourself?

YADbridge (a kindergarten-simple YAD frontend for yabridge) is included in AV Linux and is a basic tool I made, it 'should' work on most Debian-based Distros and it can be found here for those who may want to try..

http://bandshed.net/packages/AVL-MXe-23 ... -1_all.deb

*NOTE it expects yabridge assets to be in their recommended place as per the github instructions at ~/.local/share/yabridge/

Wow! Thanks for sharing man. Very kind of you.