Am I the only one? XR-18 is not an option when

#1

I wrote about this several months ago but the topic is closed.
I’m curious if this is happening to anyone else.

I have a Behringer XR-18 with X-Touch controller.
If I run the PC without Ardour running all of the audio will play through the XR-18 and I hear it over my audio monitors. If I look at the HARDWARE tab within Ubuntu’s “Sound Settings” both the XR-18 and the HDMI (from the video monitors) are present…

So if I just play a local video, audio track using VLC or a media player it will use the XR-18.
However if I launch Ardour using ALSA of couse it will dedicate the audio engine to use the XR-18 and everything else (VLC, browsers based audio, etc.) will use the HDMI speakers. Once I do this the “XR-18” disappears within the Hardware tab of Ubuntu’s “Sound Settings” and regardless if I shut down Ardour or not it will not allow any audio to play through the XR-18…only over the HDMI speakers within the video monitors. Until now there has only been one way to fix this…reboot the PC.
I really go tired of doing this so I dug into this a few months back and found some commands that will sort of restart/reboot pipewire after ALSA took over. From this I made a new application that I install on the last three fresh installs of the linux OS (Debian, Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu MATE with Studio packaging) and this works like a charm.

So now if I were to shut down Ardour no other audio would ‘normally’ play through the XR-18 but with a click of this application I made called PipeWIre-Resume, it confirms what this application will do and after it’s done it confirms that it’s been done. Once this happens, the XR-18 shows up again in the Hardware tab of the Ubuntu Sound Settings and I now can play all non-DAW audio through the XR-18/audio interface.

Is anyone else having this happen to them when it comes to running the DAW in ALSA mode makes it impossible for use to use your audio interface for general non-DAW audio pass through unless you reboot the PC?

#2

No, something is not configured correctly on your system.

#3

Agreed.

On my, Kubuntu 24.04, system running Pipewire (I would have to check which version, but it’s not stock)…

EDIT: It’s version 1.4.10

When I run Ardour with ALSA mode, it takes control of the XR18 and my desktop switches to other audio interfaces ( in my case, the onboard HDA audio, as I have my HDMI ones disabled).

BUT:

When I stop Ardour, it releases the XR18 and my desktop audio switches back, which is the expected behaviour.

Something is odd with your setup there.

It may be worth using some diagnostic tools after Ardour has shut down to determine the issue.

Here’s some to start with:

First, if you haven’t already, use aplay to see if your sound card is still present on the system:

aplay -l

This will show up devices irrespective of whether they’ve been disabled on the desktop, so my system shows this:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC1220 Analog [ALC1220 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC1220 Digital [ALC1220 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [DELL U3818DW]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: XR18 [XR18], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Run this to see what is using your sound card:

fuser -v /dev/snd/*

You should expect to see pipewire and wireplumb on this list on a typical modern distro like Kubuntu.

For example, this is what I see on my system when using normal desktop apps, but without Ardour running:

                     USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  kamilner   3889 F.... wireplumber
/dev/snd/controlC1:  kamilner   3889 F.... wireplumber
/dev/snd/controlC3:  kamilner   3889 F.... wireplumber
/dev/snd/seq:        kamilner   3877 F.... pipewire

If Ardour is running, I see this:

                     USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  kamilner   3889 F.... wireplumber
/dev/snd/controlC1:  kamilner   3889 F.... wireplumber
/dev/snd/controlC3:  kamilner   3889 F.... wireplumber
/dev/snd/pcmC2D0c:   kamilner  540875 F...m ArdourGUI
/dev/snd/pcmC2D0p:   kamilner  540875 F...m ArdourGUI
/dev/snd/seq:        kamilner   3877 F.... pipewire
                     kamilner  540875 F.... ArdourGUI

If I quit Ardour, it goes back to the first list with just pipewire and wireplumb. If it does something different on your system, that’s probably the problem.

I would suggest using these commands before you start Ardour, when it is running, and when you have quit Ardour.

Cheers,

Keith

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#4

Ok thank again Keith,
Yes, I do recall more than one person stating that once Ardour is shut down (from using ALSA) that it should return to “normal” mode where all desktop audio devices should now be able to use it.
Well I just got the new Samsung MUSIC_Drive in and it’s been formatted and the fstab has been updated.
The OS drive was suppose to have come in too but got lost in transit. I’m mentioning this because as soon as it’s here I’m going to do a fresh install of the OS and start from scratch.
I’ll run these tests (I have run them before) on this installation of the OS which is the one I did back in October. It’s always done this where it doesn’t release ALSA after Ardour is closed but I’ll check it out now and learn something (hopefully) and report back.
Thanks bud,
C

#5

Debian and at various times Ubuntu seem to have either messed up pipewire installation or made it more difficult than necessary. Maybe that only applies to pipewire-jack, but I would recommend the latest version of whichever distribution you choose, and if it is Debian or an LTS Ubuntu release check to see if there is a repository available which back ports the most recent pipewire version.

1 Like
#6

Ok Chris thanks.
I’ve used Debian 13 and Ubuntu MATE 24.04 which I think is the very latest…well of the LTS versions.
Just to add a bit more information to this issue. I haven’t started Ardour at all in two days. I was waiting for two SSD to show up. Neither showed up on time but the MUSIC drive did. I installed it, tweaked the FSTAB file to use the UUID not the device path…worked great. Restored the backup data from the back up drive to the MUSIC drive. All went well. The drive is readable and writeable and is mounted upon boot.

In the mean time while I wait for the new SSD OS drive I still have the existing HDD that has a well working version of Ubuntu MATE 24.04…even with the reversed engineered driver for the MOTU MIDI Express 128 as I did all of this back in October.

The machine had been rebooted after tweaking the FSTAB file to make sure the drives permission were set correctly, etc.
A few hours later I opened up Chrome and when on my website to play one of my tunes …and a Youtube video…guess what… The audio didn’t play from the XR-18 (audio interface) it played only from the HDMI speakers in the monitor.

So I thought that this only happened after running Ardour in ALSA mode and when I shut down Ardour I couldn’t get any of the general PC audio (browsers, media player, etc.) to play on the XR=-18 but this can’t be the case because Ardour wasn’t never running…even with two reboots I never ran anything that would give the DAW or anything else priority.

I also looked at the “Sound Settings” under the Hardware tab…and the XR-18 isn’t there just as I expected. This happened on Debian as well a few months ago. THIS is why I made the applications called “Pipewire-Resume”. As soon as I clicked on my app and let it do it’s thing, the XR-18 shows up in realtime within the hardware tab of the Sound Settings" application and the browser audio, VLC media, etc all play through the XR-18.

So this now has happened in Ubuntu Studio 24.04 (stock install), Ubuntu 24.04 MATE LTS and Debian 13. I think this might be more than a simply configuration issue.

#7

When that happens again, I would try the commands I suggested before resetting anything.

It seems that the XR18 is either becoming disconnected from the Pipewire stack somehow (which, as far as I know, normally only happens if another application takes exclusive control of it).

That is very odd behaviour.

Bear in mind if you have imported your home folder settings each time, it may also have imported your local-user’s desktop audio settings.

One test you could do is to create a brand new user (“testuser”, for example) with a virgin home folder, and run as that user for a bit to see if you get the same issues.

Cheers,

Keith

#8

hey Keith,
Yes I’ll try the commands before a reset next time (and I’ll try and recreate the problem now) but I have had this issue for some time and it had happened when I was talking with Paul in the IRC chat room. He too had given me the commands (I actually have them right on the desktop in a notepad) when I ran them last time the XR-18 did show up as far as I can recall but I didn’t show up as a viable option in the Sound Settings Tab.

I didn’t copy any of the user/home config. files either. With all the trouble I’ve had over the last seven (when I was testing the crap out of Debian 13 as well as the testing out Ubuntu Studio and MATE) I wouldn’t carry over any of the Home config files or anything else for that mater, just to avoid these issues.

As soon as the the OS SSD comes in I’ll be keeping this install on this HDD drive and starting from scratch with the new SSD. I really did think everything was being done correctly as I’ve must have done at least 80 fresh installs over this past year (for the farm, my person PC and friends) but few of these were for pro audio.

A few other things I want to change that you likely know about:

  1. Disable the HDMI and re-enable the on-board audio on the M/B and patched it into the XR-18 somewhere so when I’m using Ardour with Alsa I can still have option of listening to the PC audio on the studio monitors and not the video monitor speakers. I’ve had enough of that.

  2. Making the memory uses is set to Unlimited. On this machine it is but I look through my notes and can’t find what I did to adjust this. Time to Google again.

  3. There was another setting similar to this but its in regards to priority of …well something. I recall it being an adjustment in config. to give priority to either a process or RAM or CPU usage. Do you know what this might be?

Thanks Keith for your support on all of this.
Chris

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#9

You can set the maximum realtime priority in the same file that you set the memory limits.
I think all the current distros install a pipewire configuration file in /etc/security.d/ where you can make those settings. Maybe only if you install pipewire-jack, not certain if it is installed with base pipewire package.
If you are using Ubuntu then 26.04 is the latest LTS (I think you mentioned previously having a preference for the LTS installation).

1 Like
#10

Hey Chris,
It turns out these changes that I had made for the RAM limit and priority were in the file you said but that only seem to apply to Debian. I just looked for that file and it doesn’t exists in Ubuntu 24.04LTS.

I didn’t know 26.04LTS was out! I’ll look into that. I do have a preference for LTS versions just so I don’t have to upgrade as often. The amount of PC BS I’ve been doing for the last 16 years has been off the charts. It feel like I spend more time trying to get things the way I want it work more than actually getting the music done.

I just looked into it. There is not going to be a “Ubuntu MATE 26.04 LTS”. I think they are loosing their devel. team. Wow. That really isn’t good.

I may just try out the standard Ubuntu Studio and make it what I want w

#11

I was typing from memory, the actual location with current pipewire installations is:
/etc/security/limits.d/25-pw-rlimits.conf

The traditional jackd package usually uses the file:
/etc/security/limits.d/95-jack.conf

The specific file name doesn’t really matter, but they are processed in numerical order, and files processed later can override earlier files, so you need to make sure that if you have both they do not have conflicting settings.
You may also have to manually add your user account to the proper group for the permissions to take effect.

1 Like
#12

ahh thanks Chris.
Ok the OS new drive just came in. On my current OS install all of this (proper groups, RAM unlimited,etc.) Everything looks good. But I’m going to at least get the core of the new OS installed and go from there. Thank you again for your efforts and time on this.

It’s very likely that my system was actually setup just fine but these hardware issue was the main cause of all of it.
I’ll check back in soon for a status update.
Thanks again,
Chris

#13

Hey guys,
What an adventure in getting these issue fixed. I had hardware instability issues for months if you recall. I’m not yet convinced that I fixed everything but so far so good. I have gone through a lot. With the very first “lock ups” I’ve think I ever have seen on a Linux PC I was concerned. Internal music drive would be in use and disappear (and the machine would lockup). In some cases the machine wouldn’t even reboot. It reminded me of Windows 95 when plugging in any new hardware.

I switched around between Ubuntu Studio 24.04, Debian 13, Ubuntu MATE 24.04, Ubuntu Cinnamon, etc. This was due to all the issues. Errors during login, drives disappearing from the UI, "Emergency Mode " errors during boot. I’ve never had this many issue and it took over 5 months to find it.

So recently I had noticed data corruption when trying to open files up. This is usually associated with a read/write issue with the hard drive or a RAM issue. When I had mentioned this to you guys I was asked about what brand drive I was using. Well prior to October of last year it was actually a Seagate HDD but during the improvement stages of I swapped out the OS and Music data drive with two Kingston SDD. I read somethings about the Kingston drives having a lot of issues. So after another $450 I bought two Samsung SSD…for the OS (250gb) and one for the music drive (500gb). Three days later the exaxt same issue of weird lockup, “emergency Mode” errors during boot and in some cases a no boot condition.

I did several thorough tests on the RAM…all is well there. I was about to test the M/B and CPU but thought I would test the easiest things first. I removed the PCIe network card and SATA expansion cards. The problem so far has gone away.

Although from what I read Ubuntu MATE is waaay understaffed and it seems like the new 26.04 is not an LTS release I felt like I just need to get things going again so I installed what I know and like best and that’s Ubuntu MATE 24.04LTS with the Ubuntu studio installer and audio add-ons. So far rock solid.

Keep in mind that I’ve done this same setup countless times with those other distros…including Debian 13. On all of them If the computer was started and I logged in Pipewire would all my XR-18 audio interface to be used by anything that needed audio. After starting Ardour in ALSA mode of course Ardour would take over and I’d be left with my audio being pushed out of either the HDMI (which I really need to disabled) or the recent enabled on-board M/B audio which I’ll find a way to patch that into the XR-18. When ALSA is being used by Ardour if I look in the Sound Settings under the Hardware tab the XR-18 is no longer there or available. AND when I shut down Ardour it’s still not avaiable.

This is why I made this app utility called Pipewire-Resume. No matter what I do, short of rebooting the PC, I can’t get the XR-18 to be available after shutting down Ardour (when it’s using ALSA mode).
If I have a video playing in VLC or on Youtube the audio will come out of the HDMI speakers in the monitor…but the moment I click my Pipewire-Resume app the system immediately switches over to the XR-18 and it shows up again in the Hardware tab of the Sound Settings dialog.

Some of you mentioned it’s likely a configuration problem but there is very little in this area I configured. It’s all pretty much the out of the box setup and it’s happened on four different distros. So far I’m just going to use my Pipewire-Resume app to fix the issue when I need to and re-patch the audio from the onboard M/B sound to my XR-18…unless you guys have something else up your sleeves that might be the cause.
Your thoughts??

Pipewire-ResumeDialogs
Pipewire-ResumeDialogs911×497 68 KB

#14

Is the XR18 configured as the default device? When new devices show up there needs to be some way that the system determines order of priority to determine if the new device should be used or just added to the list of possible choices.
That may be what is missing on your configuration.
Does your distribution use pavucontrol for sound device configuration, or something else? Whatever is used, poke around the available settings to see if there is a “make default” setting you can find.

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#15

I think what you want is the “set as fallback device” setting on for the XR18 in the output devices tab.

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#16

I just installed pavucontrol and did see what you were talking about. It did seem to work. I’m not sure if it will work when the XR-18 complelty disappears from the Hardware tab in the Sound Setting dialog but it did work the way I hoped. When Ardour isn’t running it would play with the XR-18 when Ardour is running it plays with the onboard M/B sound. Thanks! hopefully this stays working.