Since 7.4 (not sure), I am not able to add any MIDI Track with a Synth when I am using JACK as the backend. Ardour just freezes, and I also get no output or crash dump. I tried switching to ALSA and it seems to work fine. Also, when running Ardour with sudo, I can add MIDI Tracks with Synth Plugins when using JACK.
Unfortunately, there is a problem with pipewire-jack from release 0.3.70 and Ardour 7.4, see
Either downgrade Ardour, pipewire, or as a workaround switch to ALSA backend only while creating MIDI tracks.
2 Likes
Thank you for the information, seems like thereās a fix already, hopefully it will get merged soon.
The issue is not fixed at least on Arch Linux.So i have a stupid solution,but itās works at least.So you have to change in you midi/audio settings jack to alsa,then add midi track(s) that you want,and then after you have added midi tracks change back alsa to jack. Wellā¦itās dump,butā¦i have wrote about it to pipewire bug tracker on gitlab.Letās see then it will be fixed.
1 Like
I confirm, the bug is not resolved yet. Iāve just compiled Pipewire from source code and this bug still exists. 
@skygge Please contact the pipewire team at deadlock: JACK port-registration blocks on graph-order callback - Ardour hangs (#3183) Ā· Issues Ā· PipeWire / pipewire Ā· GitLab about this.
Yes Sir! I report the completion of the task 
1 Like
OT rantā¦
So, Iāve lost count of the number of PipeWire releases that donāt work properly or as expected with Ardourā¦ how is someone supposed to work with distributing this on a stable or LTS platform?
3 Likes
The good news is that the issue has been fixed in pipewire/git (0.3.70-157-g41ec84185).
And there is the usual dilemma: if distros donāt ship it, no bugs are found.
However it is still true that pipewire is not ready for prime-time pro-audio. Luckily there is still jackd and Ardourās ALSA backend. Using the latter will make pipewire release the device for Ardour to take control.
As for the LTS (long term stable); since pipewire is not stable, and under heavy development, it should probably no be on a LTS in the first place?
Reserve it for casual testing/unstable and rolling release distros and let them report bugs.
6 Likes
LOLOL. I was going to ask if I could have āpipewireā and ācompileā flags so I could sort these out of my feed 
1 Like
The sad truth is the end users are the best software testers. And even famous PT has (or had) stability issues. I know this is not a justification.
From the other sideā¦ Belive me or not, but we all would wish such approach from developers to research and problem solving like this oneā¦ Many thanks to Robin Gareus and Wim Taymans from Pipewire team for their involvement.
And the Pipewire is the future. There is no way back.
Have a nice day! Or evening. Or night 
2 Likes
Pipewire works better than PulseAudio for desktop use, and has for quite a while. Pipewire is required for some video use cases with Wayland video server (the original impetus for Pipewire), so I do think it is appropriate even for LTS distributions to ship Pipewire as long as they choose a well tested version that works for the desktop cases.
As Robin pointed out you can use jackd in place of the pipewire-jack implementation, so even if you need audio routing you can use Pipewire for desktop use and jackd for production use. I could see a good argument for an LTS release making jackd the default choice over pipewire-jack for a JACK server installation. Maybe it just needs to be better publicized that you can still install jackd in parallel with Pipewire.
Look,
I donāt have a thing in the world against PipeWire, but people keep saying itās ābetterā and at the same time this forum and other places are littered with posts (including yours) about how it doesnāt perform as well as JACK, or how it has even broken certain workflows. Iām a tough sell because I have really never had an issue with PulseAudio, for my general Desktop needs it works perfectly, I honestly donāt know what it does/did so horribly to be shat upon so vigorously in Linux circles. I do my recording with Ardour with ALSA, I use other Audio apps like my beloved energyXT with JACK and with the default AV Linux JACK/Pulse/pajackconnect setup I can route JACK and Pulse seamlessly and route anything to anywhere and everything Iāve ever wanted to do works exactly how I expect so how is PipeWire going to be ābetterāā¦? I donāt care about Wayland (just another divisive Linux wheel re-invention) at this point and everyone talks up Video sync with PipeWire, which might be wonderful except Iāve never had an issue with any Media Players not having AV sync. Itās a serious question, what am I going to find is so much better with PipeWireā¦?
3 Likes
JACK and PulseAudio are 20 years old and PipeWire is 5.
There are thousands, if not millions, of reports of PA causing various issues for people.
There are also thousands of people having various problems with getting JACK to working properly.
When PW has ironed out the major showstoppers it may not be massively better than the Pulse/JACK combo, but it will be one less piece to keep track of and will hopefully be easier for the non-experts to use.
As for Wayland it was clear that something needed to replace the old and crumbling X-Windows system.
Even the maintainers seems to have mostly given up on trying to keeping X afloat.
The way things are going, theyāre going to have to pry Jack from my cold, dead hands
Things in the PW world seems to be going ābugs are getting fixedā so I donāt see what the problem is.
But ALSA isnāt going anywhere and as long as falkTX keeps updating Jack itāll keep running as well.
And you can always install Debian old-stable on a computer, disconnect it from the Internet and keep it running in a fixed state until the sun goes red giant and engulfs us all. 
1 Like
And then theyāll come up with ChatAI (ChatAudioInterface), taking the place of PW, and it will just know what you want.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.