Hello. I have the following problem. When I open Ardour and play something, in Ardour or with Elisa, for example, I keep hearing cracking in the sound. If Ardour is closed, it doesn’t happen. At first I thought it was already due to the recording, so I exported it and played it on my smartphone and it was OK. The cracking only occurs when Ardour is running. I tested it with Ardour 9 and 8. That’s annoying because it cracks when I record and something is played in a different track. Maybe someone came to help. Thank you for your effort.
What settings do you use in Ardour Menu > Window > Audio/MIDI Setup?
Try Audio backend: ALSA, with a buffersize of 1024 at 48kHz Sample-rate. That should be fine with most soundcards on a system without dedicated tuning.
To be honest… I have similar with a similar setup. I run both pipewire & ALSA with the same result. I have not spent time chasing down the issue as yet. I’ve blamed the latest kernel updates as it has only been in the last few weeks (from late Jan) that this problem has manifested.
If I use these settings, playback is OK, but the latency is a bit high to record vocals or guitar. You always think you have a delay on it. The dsp gets quite high with many xruns if I set it to 512. With jack/pipewire 512 or 265 the dsp is much better with no xruns but i got this crackling.
Likely because pipewire mildly lies to you
JACK usually shows average (not worst-case) DSP load. Pipewire may also not set hardware latency to 5ms, but only run Ardour at that low rate, while in fact the hardware still uses large buffers; besides pipewire may also resample audio under the hood.
Unless you have a specific need for inter-application routing, prefer to use Ardour/ALSA.
I can confirm that. I run Ardour 8.12.0 with Debian 11 on a 20 years old Lenovo ThinkStation equipped with a 2,7 GHz Dual Core CPU and 8 GB memory. ALSA/Ardour is set by default. In the beginning the buffer size was 1024 by default which resulted in a considerable latency. After I reduced it to 512 the latency was gone and I still have no crackling whatsoever and very, very few xruns which I simply ignore. The DSP is within a reasonable limit, too, as long as I don’t do anything foolish.
Folks I can’t tell you often enough how great that tool is. 47 Years ago ago when I took up the guitar this was pure sience fiction. Now you can enjoy creative orgies without limits. And the best thing is: It works reliably if you set it up properly and give it a bit of maintenance every now and then.
Like I said before, congrats to the team for the releae of Ardour 9. A tremendous achievement! I know I’m a bit late for the party but nevertheless. A-hooga!
