What benefit is there to using PW’s JACK emulation vs PW’s ALSA interface?
When pipewire implements latency reporting, will that not work only with the jack interface, and not with ALSA?
From Ardour’s POV there’s no difference.
except Ardour/ALSA (no JACK) performs slightly better.
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Well, now, if I use Ardour+alsa, I can’t watch youtube(for ex.) because alsa kinda “captures” audio device… I thought this is expected by design, but I’m not sure now…(if we have pw intermediates, so it should mix sounds, right?). At least muscore + alsa works without hanging youtube… hm…
Using ALSA to access the actual hardware device always requires “exclusive access”, whether it is Ardour, Musescore, or Firefox doing it. So, if you are using software that demonstrably does not force exclusive access, then you know that it’s not using ALSA to access the actual hardware device.
A lot of software will just open the “default” ALSA device, which on many Linux systems these days is not a hardware device at all. Often, it’s the pseudo-device created by the PulseAudio server. This therefore allows several different applications to “use ALSA” at once, but it is just acting as a layer/bridge to PulseAudio (before ultimately going back through ALSA to an actual hardware device).
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Why would you want to watch youtube while recording or mixing or working on a production?
Ardour/ALSA requires exclusive access so that no other application can change hardware settings (samplerate, buffersize, etc) while Ardour is using it. Otherwise reliable IO, capture alignment and low latency cannot be guaranteed. For that reason Ardour/ALSA also refuses to use virtual or pseudo-devices.
For playback only, you could use Ardour’s pulseaudio backend.
This is a scenario that happens more often than you might think…
You want to email a mix to somebody and check it before you email… you want to watch a plugin tutorial or check what the solo or chords to a song are while you’re working in Ardour, you want to grab a bit of Audio online and record it into your Ardour session… I’ve done all of these things and for me it’s the only reason I still hold on to using JACK at all.
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Exactly! For me video lessons is the most efficient way to learn such kind of stuff. Couple months ago I didn’t know what DAW is at all. Ardour is my first one, to be honest…
Wow! Things are bit more complicated that I thought initially 
… Thanks for explanation!..
@x42 @paul
In the future it would be worth having native support for Pipewire API on Ardour?
Doesn’t CoreAudio (Mac) do this already for 10+ years?
That’s something people are discussing out there… I think everyone hopes that PipeWire could make linux reach out to the other operating systems at the forefront when it comes to pro audio and consumer audio.
If pipewire gets things right, there will be no native API. Applications will just see it as JACK or ALSA device.
This is why pulseaudio failed. PA never succeeded to expose a usable ALSA device nor reliable bridges, while at the same time pulseaudio had a native API that worked.
I expected you of all people to separate desktop audio and recording mixing by using different soundcards.
For sure you’re not going to have youtube blast out of studio monitor-speakers, nor use the PC’s onboard soundcard for recording 
I don’t think this is quite right. PA’s pseudo-ALSA device works perfectly fine for most desktop purposes. It doesn’t work for all purposes, and that’s certainly one of the issues.
Every day, my friend, every day
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Firefox and Skype were affected. That’s pretty much 90% of all desktop sound.
I think that was true in the “early” days of PA. Not sure there have been issues for several years now.
Pipewire can already provide an ALSA device that can can use. Pulse still cannot.
I use Skype and Firefox via Pulse all the time. But that maybe because of a native-pulse-module for both applications, which would leave me unaware of the problems with direct ALSA support.
It’s because of those apps (and gnome) needing pulseaudio, PA became widespread.
If pulse’s ALSA emulation would have worked, PA would still be mostly optional.
Anyway my point was that ideally Ardour will not have nor need a Pipewire backend.
And if Ardour could implement only the option to choose Pipewire ALSA? Like this:
So we could choose between ALSA (Ardour exclusive hardware), JACK, Pulse and PipeWire Sound Server (this way we can use MIDI, listen to a song or something else while record/playback or just use a plugin at the same time.
I can use JACK Audio Connection Kit instead if I want by removing the pipewire libraries for jack. So it would make sense to have this option to choose Pipewire ALSA, wouldn’t it?
That’s just ALSA.
Ardour won’t know the difference if it is a physical device, or pipewire virtual one.
Nothing new is needed.