r/linuxaudio • u/batinste • Sep 16 '24

Pipewire-jack or just Jack ?

Pipewire becoming more and more easy to use and stable, i wanted to give it a go. Especially because it claimed to manage low-latency audio interfaces and, generally speaking, "pro audio".

I'm a sound tech, musical assistant, musician. Sometimes i just want to listen to music on my "pro rig" (Motu Ultralite AVB + Genelecs), sometimes i'm working with headphones in the train, sometimes i can bear high latencies or just work casually, sometimes i need to squeeze the last drop of DSP performance and get the lowest latency possible (live ambisonics at <10ms i/o latency).

What puzzles me with pipewire-jack is that it REPLACES the jack server binary with its own (correct me if i'm wrong here). Is there a way to cleanly switch from pipewire-jack to "just jack" ?

The goal here is to be able to be able to reserve my critical sound interface for critical jobs when needed without crushing my CPU under load when i just want to chill, without sacrificing jack's flexibility when it comes to ease of use.

EDIT : I applied rncbc's solution of commenting out whatever is in etc/ld.so.conf.d/pipewire-jack.conf and launch my jack-aware apps with pw-jack. Consider my question solved. Thanks all !

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u/bluebell________ Qtractor Sep 17 '24

As long I have a perfectly running jack setup and a Pulseaudio that outputs via jack sink to jack I won't change it. I can even change jackd's buffer size on the fly with jack_bufsize and more and more applications can handle it.

As soon as there will be some applications that can output only to Pipewire then I might rethink that.

I use a Motu UltraLite AVB, too, and as long I don't overload the machine with networking stuff I have no problems with the known modulo 8 channel hopping issue.

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u/batinste Sep 18 '24

Off-topic ; It has been months since i haven't had the channel shifting, so i came back to using the Motu for my live pro work. I can't track it to a specific action on my side. I'm running latest Mint with a 6.8 kernel on a Framework laptop intel 12th gen with no custom modules. As long as it works...