I am new to both Linux and Ardour. Running Mint v20.3…
Audio System: ALSA
Input Device: HDA Intel PCH
Output Device: HDA Intel PCH
Sample Rate: 44.1
Buffer Size: 1024
Period: 2
Input Ch: all available
Output Ch: all available
Hardware input latency: 0
Hardware output latency: 0
MIDI System: ALSA raw devices
I have some looped audio regions playing, and nothing is coming through my speakers. When I look at the OS sound preferences, under the applications tab, it states “No application is currently playing or recording audio”.
I am seeing level in the master section. When I pull up the Master Output matrix, under the hardware tab it shows L & R connected to playback_1 & playback_2, respectively.
I guess it’s from pulseaudio sound manager. If you use Ardour with ALSA backend, there is no sound in pulseaudio.
maybe alsamixer in a terminal, then F6 to select the device and check if some outputs (‘Master’, ‘Speakers’) are muted (with a ‘MM’ under the meter/fader). If so, type ‘M’ on your keyboard to mute/unmute .
you have the computer’s internal soundcard set. Is that what your speaker’s are connected to? or do you have another soundcard i.e. usb audio interface, pci soundcard… ?
if you are using the internal soundcard, open up a GUI frontend for alsamixer (like Qasmixer or whatever is available in the Mint Repos). Pull up your soundcard and either play with those settings or give us a screenshot so we can guide you.
If you are showing input … check the I and D on the left of the screen under the add plug-in area those buttons are for monitoring the D for the recorded tracks and I for incoming sound. For monitoring the input click the I, for recorded tracks the D needs to be lit up.
I did as you instructed, (thank you for showing me the alsamixer command) and I did have to unmute the speaker and headphone channels. Sadly, this has not corrected the problem. See my reply to the user below for a screenshot.
I am not using any external interface. Perhaps in the future, but I do not currently have one, so attempting to do this on the internal hardware. My speakers are not directly connected to the soundcard. They are connected via bluetooth, which has not caused issues with other software. I suppose I should try connecting the speaker directly…
I am not seeing the I or D on the left side of the screen in either edit or mix mode. I see a frame for ‘favorite plugins’ on the mix window, but no I or D buttons. The channel strips each have a button for ‘In’ and ‘Disk’, is this what I’m looking for?
I was going to say to unmute the “Line” channel in the alsamixer, but now that I see you’re using a bluetooth speaker I think we are on a completely different and one that may not have a resolution.
If the soundbar is bluetooth, then it was not being driven by your soundcard. your soundcard is mostly just converters and amplifiers. When using a bluetooth speaker, the speaker itself is the soundcard, albeit one that only outputs sound. So you would have to select that device (the speaker itself) as the device for Ardour to use in the Audio/MIDI setup dialog. BUT the problem with that, is Ardour can’t use separate devices for Input and output. If you insist on using bluetooth (which I wouldn’t recommend anyways, bluetooth sounds terribly phase-y in the upper mids) you may have to use JACK and then… I don’t know because I haven’t played with JACK in a decade much less for anything related to bluetooth.
Possibly using Pipewire. I don’t know if Mint has Pipewire yet or not.
If it does you will likely need to go to the Pipewire forums to figure out how to configure it. Because of the additional lossy codec involved in bluetooth audio transmission that slightly reduces quality and adds latency, it would not generally be recommended for audio production use.
