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Jack, while incredibly powerful has been a huge hurdle for pro audio on Linux. I'm looking forward to Pipewire being the default audio interface. Hopefully it d

Jack, while incredibly powerful has been a huge hurdle for pro audio on Linux. I'm looking forward to Pipewire being the default audio interface. Hopefully it drives a revival of the Linux sound engineering community and new software projects. Specifically the lack of a user friendly loop/sample-based recording tool like Ableton Live is glaring.

scns 7y ago
Check out Bitwig
- paulie_a 7y ago
  Does it work with a launchpad? Or is there any other options that do? Ableton and virtualdj are literally the only pieces of software I keep windows for. Edit: sidenote is there any software works with a mixtrax3
  - unixhero 7y ago
    Bitwig was created by Ableton employees.
cycloptic 7y ago
Can you describe what some of your hurdles have been? Pipewire is probably not going to solve your issues as it's not a complete replacement for JACK [0] and uses the same API anyway. Realistically, if you're writing a new DAW, you're still going to want to use the JACK API. If your problems are driver-related, that definitely won't be solved by switching to a different audio daemon. And for the record, the open source audio community is not dead. There is activity, but you have to know where to look. [0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#will-pipewire-ever-be-as-good-as-jack https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...
- cjsthompson 7y ago
  Before giving others lessons you should get your facts straight. PipeWire is meant to be a complete replacement for not only JACK, but also PulseAudio. One of it's goals is to merge the functionality of both of these and only provide a compatible API for apps as a convenience. It will be possible to write apps that don't use these. Internally it's different from JACK and PulseAudio. Other goals include better latency and better handling of dynamically plugged audio interfaces which is currently a mess with JACK. It's also an attempt at simplifying the linux audio stack.
  - cycloptic 7y ago
    I'm going by what's in the FAQ that I linked. I already gave you the primary source of whatever facts I have so take it up with them, not me. If it's wrong, and you have the ability to edit it, can you fix it?
    - mappu 7y ago
      I have no skin in this game but I presume a DAW would not use any of the dynamic graph configuration / format conversion stuff and just generate its own PCM buffers in userspace. In this case JACK's primary draw over PA/alsalib/whatever is solely the lower latency, for responsiveness in live performances. This FAQ makes Pipewire out to be very similar to JACK but with more features. It is full of references to how Pipewire can achieve low-latency. e.g. In the "is PipeWire another JACK implementation" it boasts ""Synchronous clients are providing data for the current processing cycle of the device(s). There is no extra period of latency."" Of your bullet points vs JACK, the first is a genuine latency issue but should be fixable (""we are not there yet""), maybe in the kernel driver or by special-casing this particularly simple path in Pipewire. The rest are CPU overheads but not really latency-specific, especially not in an ongoing way for an established / security-checked graph from the DAW. I think I read this FAQ quite differently from you, I see a lot of understated optimism here and I think it is reasonable to expect Pipewire to supplant JACK (and obviously Pulseaudio too) in the future for all use cases. It will be a phenomenal simplification of the Linux A/V stack to get behind a single comprehensive implementation.
jcelerier 7y ago
> Specifically the lack of a user friendly loop/sample-based recording tool like Ableton Live is glaring. Slowly I'm trying to get https://ossia.io https://ossia.io there... any help appreciated :D
- Intermernet 7y ago
  Wow, that's not a Live competitor, that's a new paradigm! Definitely going to check it out and see if I can help in any way!
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    It's a superset of loopers, timelines and patcher :) but i'm almost alone on it so development is not as fast as it could be
PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
The reasons why a tool like Live exists or does not exist on a platform has essentially zero relationship to the APIs used for audio and MIDI I/O. As others have noted, Bitwig already exists - in some ways, it is more powerful than Live (and in others, less). It is also proprietary. Also, Live is not the kind of tool that most people would associate the term user friendly with. It's quite hard to get started using Live, despite the program being basically 100% awesomesauce. Live is extremely friendly towards a certain kind of workflow for "in-the-box" music production, and has fundamentally changed the entire zeitgeist surrounding making music with computers. But it's not a replacement for linear timeline DAWs (like ProTools, Logic, Sonar, Ardour etc. etc.) and has its own foibles and certainly its own complexities and limitations. I anticipate that the next major release of Ardour will have some Live-like features starting to arrive.
- ivarv 7y ago
  > I anticipate that the next major release of Ardour will have some Live-like features starting to arrive. This is pretty intriguing - is there a public roadmap for these Live-like features ?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
    We don't have enough developer resources to make roadmaps a worthwhile thing to spend time on. I work on this stuff when I am inclined and when there don't seem to be more important things to work on. Also, just to be clear, I said "the next major release" because in my own head, 6.0 is "almost upon us". What I meant was the next major release after 6.0.
zokula 7y ago
I wouldn't be too quick to assume that Pipewire will be the default anywhere.
johnr2 7y ago
> Jack, while incredibly powerful has been a huge hurdle for pro audio on Linux. For me JACK was a huge step forward. After 25+ years of recording on tape, JACK allowed me to switch to computer based recording ~14 years ago. It did away with a lot of the arbitrary restrictions on what connections were allowed in the audio software that was around at the time (and which made me unwilling to switch until that point).

scns 7y ago

Check out Bitwig

paulie_a 7y ago
Does it work with a launchpad? Or is there any other options that do? Ableton and virtualdj are literally the only pieces of software I keep windows for. Edit: sidenote is there any software works with a mixtrax3
- unixhero 7y ago
  Bitwig was created by Ableton employees.

cycloptic 7y ago

Can you describe what some of your hurdles have been? Pipewire is probably not going to solve your issues as it's not a complete replacement for JACK [0] and uses the same API anyway. Realistically, if you're writing a new DAW, you're still going to want to use the JACK API. If your problems are driver-related, that definitely won't be solved by switching to a different audio daemon. And for the record, the open source audio community is not dead. There is activity, but you have to know where to look. [0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#will-pipewire-ever-be-as-good-as-jack https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...

cjsthompson 7y ago
Before giving others lessons you should get your facts straight. PipeWire is meant to be a complete replacement for not only JACK, but also PulseAudio. One of it's goals is to merge the functionality of both of these and only provide a compatible API for apps as a convenience. It will be possible to write apps that don't use these. Internally it's different from JACK and PulseAudio. Other goals include better latency and better handling of dynamically plugged audio interfaces which is currently a mess with JACK. It's also an attempt at simplifying the linux audio stack.
- cycloptic 7y ago
  I'm going by what's in the FAQ that I linked. I already gave you the primary source of whatever facts I have so take it up with them, not me. If it's wrong, and you have the ability to edit it, can you fix it?
  - mappu 7y ago
    I have no skin in this game but I presume a DAW would not use any of the dynamic graph configuration / format conversion stuff and just generate its own PCM buffers in userspace. In this case JACK's primary draw over PA/alsalib/whatever is solely the lower latency, for responsiveness in live performances. This FAQ makes Pipewire out to be very similar to JACK but with more features. It is full of references to how Pipewire can achieve low-latency. e.g. In the "is PipeWire another JACK implementation" it boasts ""Synchronous clients are providing data for the current processing cycle of the device(s). There is no extra period of latency."" Of your bullet points vs JACK, the first is a genuine latency issue but should be fixable (""we are not there yet""), maybe in the kernel driver or by special-casing this particularly simple path in Pipewire. The rest are CPU overheads but not really latency-specific, especially not in an ongoing way for an established / security-checked graph from the DAW. I think I read this FAQ quite differently from you, I see a lot of understated optimism here and I think it is reasonable to expect Pipewire to supplant JACK (and obviously Pulseaudio too) in the future for all use cases. It will be a phenomenal simplification of the Linux A/V stack to get behind a single comprehensive implementation.

jcelerier 7y ago

> Specifically the lack of a user friendly loop/sample-based recording tool like Ableton Live is glaring. Slowly I'm trying to get https://ossia.io https://ossia.io there... any help appreciated :D

Intermernet 7y ago
Wow, that's not a Live competitor, that's a new paradigm! Definitely going to check it out and see if I can help in any way!
- jcelerier 7y ago
  It's a superset of loopers, timelines and patcher :) but i'm almost alone on it so development is not as fast as it could be

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago

The reasons why a tool like Live exists or does not exist on a platform has essentially zero relationship to the APIs used for audio and MIDI I/O. As others have noted, Bitwig already exists - in some ways, it is more powerful than Live (and in others, less). It is also proprietary. Also, Live is not the kind of tool that most people would associate the term user friendly with. It's quite hard to get started using Live, despite the program being basically 100% awesomesauce. Live is extremely friendly towards a certain kind of workflow for "in-the-box" music production, and has fundamentally changed the entire zeitgeist surrounding making music with computers. But it's not a replacement for linear timeline DAWs (like ProTools, Logic, Sonar, Ardour etc. etc.) and has its own foibles and certainly its own complexities and limitations. I anticipate that the next major release of Ardour will have some Live-like features starting to arrive.

ivarv 7y ago
> I anticipate that the next major release of Ardour will have some Live-like features starting to arrive. This is pretty intriguing - is there a public roadmap for these Live-like features ?
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
  We don't have enough developer resources to make roadmaps a worthwhile thing to spend time on. I work on this stuff when I am inclined and when there don't seem to be more important things to work on. Also, just to be clear, I said "the next major release" because in my own head, 6.0 is "almost upon us". What I meant was the next major release after 6.0.

zokula 7y ago

I wouldn't be too quick to assume that Pipewire will be the default anywhere.

johnr2 7y ago

> Jack, while incredibly powerful has been a huge hurdle for pro audio on Linux. For me JACK was a huge step forward. After 25+ years of recording on tape, JACK allowed me to switch to computer based recording ~14 years ago. It did away with a lot of the arbitrary restrictions on what connections were allowed in the audio software that was around at the time (and which made me unwilling to switch until that point).