I’ve recently upgraded to Fedora 34, like many of you.
Ardour has since then been intermittently locking up and segfaulting without error messages. Most of the time when opening sessions, I get no audio, but after a seemingly random amount of retries, there will be some audio (before it crashes again).
As far as I can tell, no other audio applications are affected.
I’m aware of the God Save Pipewire thread, but there’s a lot of back and forth going on in it, and I can’t seem to distill it down to a conclusive answer.
Does anyone here know the concrete steps to getting Ardour to work nicely with Pipewire, preferably using the ALSA audio system?
There may be two different answers depending on how you want to use Ardour.
Do you want to:
use Pipewire for routing, and connect Ardour through pipewire so other applications can share the audio interface
or
use Pipewire for system sounds, but have Ardour take over exclusive use of the audio interface when in use?
For the latter, make sure when you select the device for the ALSA backend you find the actual hardware device, and not the “default” audio device. The name default would usually refer to the ALSA interface emulation by pipewire.
I use Ardour with the JACK backend, running pipewire, pipewire-jack, and pipewire-jack-dropin (which edits the config files so JACK applications automatically start using pipewire-jack), and with all of the above I do not have the issue you are reporting. I also use Manjaro, so it may be a distro specific thing with how they have pipewire packaged.
If there is no pipewire-jack-dropin package, start ardour from the terminal using pipewire-jack ardour and see if the issue persists. Otherwise, this would be a good thing to report to the PW devs at Issues · PipeWire / pipewire · GitLab
Turns out all of these issues only exist in the version of Ardour that’s bundled with Fedora. When I used my licensed MixBus application, everything was working well.
Lesson learned. When it comes to Ardour, do not trust the distro’s repo.
Those are often symptoms of poorly written plugins causing the host application to crash.
Did you use the same plugins in your Ardour session and your Mixbus session?
I installed Ardour 6.7 on a fresh Fedora 34. Pipewire and the pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit was already installed, I added the qjackctl package.
I can run pw-jack qjackctl, configure it to use the R24, and I see all kinds of devices and ports (in particular, the ports of the Zoom R24). After starting ardour (without pw-jack) and configure the audio to use jack, all connections are functioning.
