New to Ardour, cannot hear anything from virtual keyboard

Hello everyone,

I’m new to Ardour, and I cannot hear any sound from the virtual keyboard. I run Arch Linux with kernel 5.14.8-zen. My user is in audio group, I’ve installed pipewire, cadence, jack2 and ardour6. Here’s some of my config:

Output of aplay --list-devices:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 10: HDMI 4 [HDMI 4]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 11: HDMI 5 [HDMI 5]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC1220 Analog [ALC1220 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 1: ALC1220 Digital [ALC1220 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: Audigy2 [SB Audigy 5/Rx [SB1550]], device 0: emu10k1 [ADC Capture/Standard PCM Playback]

The catia bindings:

In Ardour I’m connected to Jack, but on a Midi track I cannot hear anything when I click on a key on the virtual keyboard. Sorry for the noob question but I’m far from being an expert, I’ve switched to Linux one year ago and I’m approaching to making music on this beautiful OS

If any other infos are required for solving this problem please ask

thanks

I forgot to post the cadence config:

Try turning on the metronome to see if you have any audio output at all (likely not).

Find the ALSA mixer app on your system and make sure the output channels are on and at full volume.

The device is shown as “Audigy2,3” which I thought meant sub-device 3 of the Audigy2, but the aplay output only shows device 0. Are you confident that the device selected maps to the output jack you are using?

Current recommendation from the developers is to use the Ardour native ALSA backend unless you specifically need to route audio or MIDI between applications (which still requires jackd). Trying the Ardour ALSA backend will eliminate one layer of complexity from the setup even if you do need to eventually use jack.

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Make sure that you have the monitor button at the top of the channel strip set to INPUT and not DISK.

It works, thank you guys. Running with ALSA backend solved the problem.

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