Recently upgraded from Kubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 and made the switch to Pipewire, but having an issue with sound input. I have a Scarlet 2x4 interface and it seems to be working correctly. I am using qpwgraph to watch my audio devices.
If I run Ardour configured in Alsa, then it takes over the my Scarlet and all the associated audio ports and I cannot see any of them in qpwgraph. But it works just fine and I can record and playback audio within Ardour. But I lose access to those audio interfaces and if I want to do something like queue up a video to check something, I can’t listen to it in the same audio interface I’m using, which might be my headphones. It’s workable, but just a little annoyance.
So I tried to configure Ardour with Pulseaudio and in this mode, Ardour shows up and plays nicely with my browser and I can listen to both at the same time on the same audio device, and can even map to other devices in qpwgraph, but in qpwgraph, Ardour does not show any inputs to hook my Scarlet audio up to, and the hardware tab is missing from Ardour’s routing table, not that I expected it, but I don’t see any input to it from other sources either, like some kind of pipewire input buss.
I read a recent similar thread on the forum to use Jack/Pipewire, but that didn’t solve anything. Same behavior as in just Alsa because the only driver I can use in that configuration is Alsa. None of the other options like NetJack worked and gave me errors that it couldn’t start the engine up. I also don’t think my browser will like Jack very much, but was hoping Pipewire would abstract all that out and allow all my sound sources to play at the same time, which does not seem to be the case.
The Pulseaudio option seems to be the closest to what I’m going for, except I can’t get any input into Ardour, so if I wanted to play guitar along side a music video, I can’t do that.
Any ideas? I do compile from source and there doesn’t seem to be any issues there. I did see that Alsa, Jack, Pulseaudio and Pipewire(think this was on the list) were all ‘yes’ in the dependency checks. I didn’t see any 'no’s that appeared to be related to sound devices, just extra stuff that I don’t use like extra controllers. I just compiled 8.7 to make sure I had the latest and it seems to be working ok except for this issue.