Starting Ardour with pw-jack

I am using “Pro Audio” here with an 18i20, and that’s how it behaves. Keep in mind, I’ve only specified how JACK should behave. Clients using the PulseAudio, ALSA pseudo-device or (heaven help us all) native PipeWire APIs are not controlled by that.

It’s up to me to ensure the ordering. I suspect something could be done in wire<foo> for some value of <foo>.

Do I read you correctly that there is no place in PipeWire to specify, without ambiguity, “I want the interface to run at XXXXX Hz”, no matter what applications come and go"? If so, that reads as a DivideByZero failure to me for any use of PipeWire for “pro-audio.”

No, you can do that. It’s just not very useful from my POV. I’m fine with a YT video shifting the h/w to 48kHz if I’m doing nothing else, and then back to 44100 when I’m playing (most of) my music collection (again, if I’m doing nothing else).

That’s why I keep using regular JACK and Qjckctl no matter if the distro have Pipewire by default, I’m convinced Pipewire is good for multimedia stuff, but it’s still not ready for PrimeTime audio production.

I don’t see any reason not to use Pipewire at present.

I’m not sure which post in particular you’re replying to, but all of PW’s behavior is configurable. The only difference that matters that has been discussed here is that if a JACK client is NOT the first client of a pipewire-controlled hardware device, then the JACK API cannot be used to change the SR that the device is running at.

This is hardly a reason to dismiss PW for audio production, IMO (and in my experience).

If you want to force all PW clients to use 48kHz, you can do that. If you want to prevent PW from ever using anything except 44.1KHz with a given piece of hardware, or with ALSA in general, you can do that. You just can’t control the SR of a shared hardware device with the JACK API … and guess what, you can’t even use the JACK API to change the SR when JACK is already running anyway!

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I respect that point of view, PW is in advance and getting better, but for me, I’ve tried PW for ProAudio and I can say JACK with its disadvantages it stabler and more reliable at the hour of configure and connect my audio interface without the need of terminal or commands, as I say, If someone prefer PW, great, but for me, I think I’ll wait until PW be more polished and ready for PrimeTime ProAudio, also I going to stay in Ubnutu 22.04.5 lts until Canonical fix Ubuntu 24.04.X lts recent bugs, newer not necessarily means better.
I still think Debian 13 will be a better time to jump on the Piewire train.

I had to do a bit of text file configuration when I switched to PW, and that took some figuring out because pro-audio is still a niche case. Once I did that, it has been generally simpler to use than JACK, and broadly speaking, equally reliable. For “regular” users, having YT audio playing at the same as using Ardour via a single audio interface, with zero to little configuration to make it work is a gigantic win.

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I’ll wait until Debian 13 Trixie or Ubuntu 25.04 release and test it a little big, but for now, I just want to make music and not code.

I use Linux Mint 22.1, which is based on Ubuntu 24.04, and I installed the package ubuntustudio-pipewire-config to fix the startup with pw-jack. Everything works perfectly, Ardour rock !

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Hello Kontakt aPilger

Have you tried the LSP SEND and LSP RETURN plugins?

You can use ardour with pipewire-jack and then ardour can connect to applications that work with pipewire, but in some cases on some systems this does not work correctly.

For those cases there is a reasonably simple and elegant way to connect ardour with the “outside world”, that is, the sound of your pc in linux ubuntu.

Install the LSP plugins: Linux Studio Plugins Project, follow the instructions included in the readme to the letter.

Within the list of lsp plugins there are 3 plugins that interest us LSP SEND, LSP RETURN and some of the mixers offered by LSP.

These plugins in version 1.2.20. They offer the possibility of using the shared memory space of the system.

I use it in Ubuntustudio, currently in version 24.04lts.

When you have installed the lsp plugins you will have seen several folders, one of them is called jack, which is the standalone version that works in pipewire, that is the one we will choose and look for in our system menu (it will be there if you have installed it correctly) the LSP SEND.

Once opened, open QPWGRAPH: GitHub - rncbc/qpwgraph: qpwgraph - A PipeWire Graph Qt GUI Interface Or PATCHANCE: GitHub - Houston4444/Patchance: Jack Patchbay GUI , or COPPWR: GitHub - dimtpap/coppwr: Low level control GUI for the PipeWire multimedia server and inside you will see LSP waiting for you to connect it to something, you can open VLC or any other player, firefox, obs, etc and connect it to LSP SEND, you will probably have to lower the output volume of the plugin once you have verified that it is receiving a signal from vlc or the program you have used, as a sound source.

In the LSP SEND itself there is a space that says send, there you write a name for example vlc.

Then in Ardour create a track and insert the LSP RETURN plugin and in the space that says return you write the same name as in the send and in theory you should be able to listen in ardour what the send plugin sends, the only thing is that if you want to record what LSP return plays you will have to record it using another track connected to the LSP return track.

As I mentioned at the beginning, ardour works for me (linux) without much problem with the pw option, but I know that there are people for whom it does not work well or who do not want to make changes and modifications to the sound system, but do want to connect ardour with the rest of the sound on the PC.

Greetings