Questions about Ardour 6 on Raspberry Pi

I just found there is an official build but I have not found yet any documentation so I decided to throw a few questions, I wonder if the Ardour Developers can share their comments.

  • Is Raspbian just fine or would you recommend any other distro?
  • Suggestions on linux/distro settings to improve performance?
  • Is jack required? Will the Ardour installer take care of installing jack or is there a doc on how to installing it on a Raspberry Pi before Ardour?
  • I think I won’t use any plugins with Ardour rigth now in a raspberry pi but what can be expected about using plugins both built in and 3rd party right now?

Thanks in advance.

It’s fine – unless you need very low latency (in which case you need a realtime kernel).

No, and you’re better off without JACK (unless you have a specific need for it).

Yes the installer asks, and can run apt-get.. for you. – Installing jack is the easiest way to setup real-time permissions for your user. So even if you don’t use jack, installing the jackd package is convenient.

Just like any debian sysem: sudo apt-get install jackd2
To change realtime-permissions later (in case jack was installed without those): sudo dpkg-reconfigure -p high jackd2 then re-login (or reboot).

It’s not too bad. For most plugin GUIs you will have to enable the openGL driver on the PI, but DSP works surprisingly well. Since it’s debian-based you can also get a lot of plugins:

sudo apt-get install zam-plugins x42-plugins eq10q ir.lv2 setbfree swh-lv2 guitarix-lv2

…and more. Keep in mind that the plugins must be compiled for ARM CPUs.

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