Hi,
I’m using KDE Neon with Cadence, and PulseAudio. But yesterday my system updated to KDE Neon 24.04 and installed Pipewire. Apparently everything works, I start Cadence, jack… but what happen with pulseaudio? I need to remove? I need to keep? How is the proper way to work with only with Pipewire as a main audio server? I can stil use Cadence?
A lot of questions…
Hope somebody can bring some light.
Thanks.
Pipewire implements both Pulse and JACK server API, so you can use it for both desktop application audio and music production audio. In the audio setup application there should be a place to select a performance profile, and there you should select the pro audio profile when using music production software like Ardour. That uses more power, so you can change it back when just using normal desktop apps.
You can make connections within Ardour using the audio connections window, or you can use Jack applications like Cadence or QJackControl. Don’t try to start jackd or change settings with those apps, that no longer works for pipewire.
So, I need to uninstall pulseaudio completly, and use only pipewire-pulse?
Yes. The system update did not replace PulseAudio with pipewire-pulse? I expected that to be the upgrade path.
I’ve still pulseaudio installed. I will try to remove and will see.
For the other hand, I always used Cadence for control everything, sample
rate, start jack, start pulse. This will be the same with pipewire? Or I
don’t need cadence with pipewire?
No, very different with pipewire. Usually pipewire starts as soon as you login, so no need to start separately. Since pipewire implements jack and pulse interfaces all the software should work as you are used to for connections.
Setting sample rate or latency (buffer size) is slightly less convenient with most distributions at the moment.
You can set from a command terminal like this:
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.force-rate 44100
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.force-quantum 256
Or Glen McArthur (user @GMaq )made a simple script to help with that named pw-metadata.
Glen, is the version from September '23 still the latest, you did not find any reason to tweak?
This is the post describing the tool. You just take the text in the box and save to a file, name the file something you can remember (I named it pw-set on my machine), make the file executable, and then you can run it like any other application (i.e. invoke the file name from a terminal, or make a desktop shortcut to launch it).
That should still do what is needed, it evolved into a whole set of tools that comes in AV Linux as a Deb package (not in a Repo) but for simply changing metadata it should still do the trick as-is.
Many thanks for the feedback! I try today.
I uninstalled PulseAudio completly. But when I start Ardour ( Jack/Pipewire ) I don’t have audio in my desktop, only in Aradour. If I start Jack from Cadence, I have audio on both Ardour and System. I’m missing something?
Thanks.
If you’re using Ardour with it’s ALSA Audio backend then that is expected, Ardour has connected directly to your Audio hardware and PipeWire (and therefore regular Desktop Audio operations) cannot access it…
The base distribution I use (MX Linux) has a PipeWire setup metapackage that removes what is not needed and sets up proper startup scripts etc… so I’m afraid I don’t know all of the separate steps needed when upgrading from JACK/Pulse to PipeWire in a dist-upgrade situation on Ubuntu-based stuff…
Pipewire is modular, and you (or likely in your case whoever made the distribution upgrade selections) can choose which API modules are installed. Check if you have installed, or can install, modules with a name like pipewire-pulse and pipewire-jack. When you install those then desktop applications and ardour can be routed. You may need to check that all the routing is like you want (applications connected or not connected as desired, and desired interface device used).
Yes, I have all this packages installed. pipewire-pulse and
pipewire-jack… but honestly I don’t know who to route the desktop apps.
There should be no need.
How many audio interfaces do you use at one time?
Do you notice some difference about the sound quality, if you mix with alsa, pulse, jack or pipewire? Is alsa not the best, because it is the “root” of the sound?
There’s nothing that prevents any of those APIs from achieving bit-for-bit quality. There may be circumstances unde which one of them deliberately alters the data a little (or a lot), but there’s no inherent reason to prefer one or other based on “quality”.
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