Is there any way to have Ardour using ALSA (well Pipewire now I think) instead of Jack and still route MIDI output of some other program into it?
ALSA and Pipewire are very different. Pipewire is more like JACK, and in fact implements the same API, so you should be able to use Pipewire to route between Hydrogen and Ardour.
If you have explicitly selected ALSA as the Ardour Audio backend then no…
If you have PipeWire without ‘old JACK’ on your system and select JACK as the Ardour backend then…maybe…?
It very much depends on what Distro you are using and if they have taken the steps to properly make ‘pipewire-jack’ appear as regular JACK…
What Distro and what version of PipeWire are you using?
Yeah I can do it in JACK mode from Ardour through Pipewire, but I have been using the ALSA backend as its better for recording with realtime I thought.
ALSA is often the best option since it connects directly to the Audio hardware and bypasses any other sound servers BUT there’s the rub, it doesn’t allow for interconnecting any other Audio applications at the same time, you need JACK or PW for that.
Some comments from me w.r.t. Ardour and Hydrogen.
Originally I used to run that combination, too.
Eventually I migrated to drums inside Ardour without Hydrogen.
- With H2 and Ardour I had issues at tempo changes. Did not work
- I love having a single database for everything.
- Eventually I found programing the drums in Ardour much more convenient. Yes, once I got used to it, I found it very flexible.
- With LSP sampler I can load all H2 drumkits.
But mostly I use the AVL drumkits. And just recently some Ugritone drum kits - Don’t have to mess around with Jack and friends, just use ALSA
Will never go back. My 2 cents
Not really better, just much easier to configure properly.
I’m curious, are any of those plugins able to recreate the velocity/timing/swing options of Hydrogen? It’s the only thing that is holding me back to ditch Hydrogen when it comes to humanize drums.
With lsp multisampler you can add some randomess to time and velocity.
You can assign swing to midi notes in Ardour, though I sometimes seem to fail to do that correctly. (to use the right note resolution seems to be the key)
There is lollipop style velocity editor in Ardour
Drum Gizmo https://www.drumgizmo.org/ has some knobs for humanization, but I had trouble (introduced a large latency, which is not communicated to Ardour - no idea who`s fault and how to fix)
Recently I started to experiment with the Ugritone drum plugins (Ugritone Drums - Heavy Metal Drum Samples - not free, but on sale. They do not tell on the web site, but they have support for Linux, in case that’s important. Bought the Tight and the Total Studio Drums, useful also for non-metal music)
It has a humanize knob somewhere.
Just an opinion…
I’ve never used a humanize or swing control, making a machine simply play less precisely is not realistically human, well not from Hydrogen anyway. Humans are sloppy in a completely uncalculated way and humans do things like ‘play behind the beat’ or ‘play on top of the beat’ to enhance the pocket which is being intentionally sloppy or extremely precise on one kit piece (snare) to bring a relaxed or urgent feel to the groove depending on how it’s employed.
As @peter.zenk indicated with a little practice and care making actual human decisions using the note velocities and by programming swing beats in swing triplet timings in the first place you will sound far more ‘human’ than any algorithm I’m aware of in the Linux Audio world as it is now.
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