Changing the sampling rate in Ardour 8.9

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

I am currently running Ubuntu Studio 24.04 with Ardour 8.9 installed. The default sample rate is 48000. I would like to change it to 44100. I’ve tried using both Jack/Pipewire and ALSA; however I cannot change the rate even if I set the sample rate to 44100 in QJackCtl. I checked the pipewire config in /usr/pipewire, and added 44100 as an option. I still cannot change it. Any suggestions as to what to do?

#2

There’s a very reasonable chance that you have a device that can only do 48kHz - they are very common these days. What makes you think it can support 44.1kHz ?

#3

QJackCtl can set the startup setting for jackd, but has no effect on pipewire-jack. Since you mention a config file in /usr/pipewire I assume you are using pipewire + pipewire-jack and not jackd.

#4

When I was running Ubuntu Studio 22.04, I routinely set Ardour to
44.1kHz. And, I run Mixbus 10; if I set this to use ALSA as the engine,
I can set it to 44.1kHz.

#5

Yes I am using pipewire + pipewire-jack. When I looked at the pipewire-jack config file, I saw that only 48kHz was listed. That may be the problem. I’ll have to research how to add 44.1kHz, or accept Ardour resampling the audio files.

#6

Hi,

With ALSA you are blissfully free of PulseAudio, PipeWire and JACK config limitations and only limited to what your hardware supports. However PipeWire supports using metadata commands to change your sample rate and buffers on the fly without changing your system-wide configs. How this works is… use your computer with the default PipeWire settings for regular desktop Audio, when you decide to record you use a metadata command to tell PipeWire to run at 44.1 instead of 48 and then record away at 44.1 with PipeWire JACK… I don’t know how Ubuntu Studio handles this, AV Linux has a simple UI to set it but you can also just run the commands in a terminal to get started and see if this works for you:

More info: Very easy way to set Pipewire sample rate and buffer size defaults! - LinuxMusicians

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#7

An alternative to GMaq’s suggestion is to start Ardour from the command line like this
pw-jack -p 512 -s 44100 /path/to/Ardour8

-p is “periods in samples” (same as Frames/Periods in QJackCtl) and -s is the sample rate