No Ardour connection with Pipewire

[Porrumentzio]

To try Pipewire out, I made this on Manjaro:

$ sudo pacman -Rdd pulseaudio jack2
$ sudo pacman -S pipewire pipewire-{alsa,jack,media-session,pulse}
$ yay -S pipewire-jack-dropin
$ reboot

After that, all worked incredibly well, even better than before with Pulse-Jack sinks… all except Ardour, which does not recognize output hardware[1] and thus can not play sound and Ardour is not displaying on Carla [2] neither on QJackCtl [3].
Is this expected when removing Jack, even if pipewire-jack-dropin is installed?

[1]

[2]

[3]

[unsafelyhotboots]

Have you restarted your machine since making these changes to the audio server? Are you using the AUR or the official repo version of Pipewire?

[Porrumentzio]

I did restart and I am using only pipewire-jack-dropin from AUR, all other packages from official repos.

I managed to make Ardour work:

1. Unable Try connecting audio engine automatically
2. Open Ardour and choose Jack (already running)
3. Enable Try connecting audio engine automatically
4. When restarting again, it should work

[UnixMan (Paolo Saggese)]

@Porrumentzio

I am using only pipewire-jack-dropin from AUR, all other packages from official repos.

mmh, that may be the source of your problems. Mixing pieces of the same software suite from different repos (which may be of different versions and/or use different build options, libraries, etc) is not a good idea, usually.

Try installing everything from the same repo (either one or the other).

[unsafelyhotboots]

I use that exact setup and it’s fine. The pipewire-jack-dropin package doesn’t exist on the official repos but the actual pipewire packages are out of date on the AUR

[ranjithshegde]

@UnixMan

mmh, that may be the source of your problems. Mixing pieces of the same software suite from different repos (which may be of different versions and/or use different build options, libraries, etc) is not a good idea, usually

I am not sure what the problem is but ^this is certainly not the problem. pipewire-jack-dropin just adds a ld.so.conf file pointing to pipewire libraries so that when jack is called, it is loading the correct libraries. its a sinlge file that says /usr/lib/pipewire-0.3/jack

Pipewire-jack support for ardour is still experimental. Most problems have to do with pw-jack not having freewheel ability that native jack has. This is required for jack transport among other functions.
Upstream know of this and is working on implementing freewheel. Should be implemented soon

[UnixMan (Paolo Saggese)]

@ranjithshegde

pipewire-jack-dropin just adds a ld.so.conf file pointing to pipewire libraries so that when jack is called, it is loading the correct libraries. its a sinlge file that says /usr/lib/pipewire-0.3/jack

I see. Then of course you’re right, that’s not the problem…

[nikgnomic]

Considering you are using pacman and yay instead of pamac you might have missed the Manjaro metapackage manjaro-pipewire , that installs all the required packages from Manjaro community repository
pipewire pipewire-alsa pipewire-pulse pipewire-jack sof-firmware gst-plugin-pipewire

So all that should be required to change to Pipewire on Manjaro is

pamac install manjaro-pipewire

or

sudo pacman -S manjaro-pipewire

[ranjithshegde]

Also, freewheel has been implemented in master branch. Ardour should export projects when on pw-jack.
It might be weeks before it shows up in releases. So if time is a concern, i would switch to AUR-git versions

[x42 (Robin Gareus)]

@ranjithshegde

freewheel has been implemented in master branch.

nice! So it’s slowly getting there.

Are you running the AUR-git version? If so, could you check if latency reporting for recording overdubs works?

• Play in Ardour → soundcard out → cable → soundcard in → Record on a track in Ardour

Does it align? (instead of a cable, you could substitute “headphone → play instrument along”) but that is harder to verify reliably.

[Bleuzen]

Hey @x42 ,
I tested this for you with newly released pipewire 0.3.28, which now has freewheel implemented.
Latency compensation is still not working perfectly.
I posted my result here:

Latency reporting to jack apps doesn't work (#1103) · Issues · PipeWire /...

Edit: pipewire maintainer said it is not implemented yet, but he is “starting with some sort of implementation now”

[unsafelyhotboots]

They are working on it, yeah. It’s been a known issue for a while. A recent interview with the lead developer showed that Wim was way more interested in the video streaming ala JACK than the pro audio side of things, but then he realized just how much JACK did about this time last year when people started reporting issues with the pipewire-jack implementation and he had to do a deep dive.

In general, the PW devs have been super responsive to my bug reports and questions, and are really awesome folks. I am super excited for the latest release to hit my distro so I can start doing audio work again.