I upgraded to Ardour 8.6 on Linux as of today, yea! The audio subsystem is backed by Pipewire 1.0.4, which I upgraded the day before Ardour. My goal is to set up a sound design session with numerous applications for doing DSP and synthesis into dedicated channels. This is my first time doing a project of this size with a complex graph of realtime inputs and outputs. I think I need something to manage these connections rather than manually connecting them each time I open the sound design session.
I found someone who published some Lua scripts for Wireplumber with similar goals. Match a pattern of the input name, then link it to an output name. I couldn’t get it to work. Perhaps it’s user error. It seems like this is something Wireplumber was built to do but I’m not sure if this is the most straight forward system to accomplish my goal.
I moved onto Ardour’s own audio and MIDI connections. These don’t appear to persist across application sessions. Is there a preference to make Ardour the “connection coordinator” or something like that? Can it save the graph and listen for events to connect clients to channel inputs when their processes are started?
My third try was qpwgraph, which just…doesn’t do what it says it should. Activating a patch bay did not restore my saved connections. My hypothesis is that these three applications are overriding each other’s settings but I don’t have proof yet.
Halp!