Hi everyone, I got my e-drum kit to successfully work in reaper, using yabridge for the VSTs. Shortly after, I found another way in which linux audio is different than windows. While using reaper, I am unable to play audio from any other source. Through research, I discovered that it’s because I’m using ALSA and that I need to use JACK instead. I looked up guides on how to setup JACK and qctl and was unsuccessful. I came across a video explaining different problems with JACK and it mentioned that using a pcs built in audio card may not be able to handle the audio in JACK. Right now, it seems like I need to come up with a different solution. But I thought I would ask here and see if I have any other options. I don’t have any external dacs, but I do have my desktop pc that still has windows so I’m thinking of giving up on using my linux laptop for my music needs.
Tldr- want to use reaper while watching YouTube vids. Alsa won’t allow that, and jack isn’t working on my laptop.
Maybe look into PipeWire, Reaper in jack mode works fine connected to PipeWire for me, without any of the problems you mentioned.
It is quite possible that your desktop audio already uses PipeWire depending on your distribution, you would need to look at latency settings if you want live playback.
Also works for me. Been using PipeWire as my audio server for over a year while doing music production and happy with it
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Oh yeah
I’m using linux mint. And sorry, but I’m a noob wktu audio software. I’m pretty sure I already have pipewire, but I’ll double check. Are you saying to try pipewire instead of qctl?
There is no need to use external programs anymore unless you want some kind of special behaviour (like the plugboard that qjackctl gives you). Pipewire has reimplemented Pulseaudio, ALSA, and JACK, which at one point in time were 3 separate projects.
Pipewire emulates all 3 seamlessly. So when you run a program through JACK, pipewire picks it up pretending to be normal JACK. To the program, it looks like you have a standard JACK server, but on the backend, it’s running through Pipewire instead. You should get the same low-latency too.
Do make sure you have pipewire-jack or the equivalent package installed.
Would you recommend JACK for low latency inputs and allowing me to play along to songs on YouTube? I was able to get it work with pulse audio but the latency was too high.
Alas, I have been defeated. My smooth brain wasn’t able to figure out linux audio. But I found another solution. My drum kit has audio pass through, so I connect my laptop via aux cable to my drum kit input and my headphones to my drum kit output. That allows me to play along with songs on my laptop. The trade off is I’m stuck with the built in drum sounds on my kit, which aren’t as good as VSTs in reaper… but at least I found a solution.
You need to use a dmix PCM for you card as output.
If you type
aplay -L | grep dmixit’ll show you a list of dmix devices. You can set one as the default if you create a file named.asoundrcin your homefolder with the content:pcm.!default { type plug slave.pcm "dmix:CARD=Set,DEV=0" }You of course replace the value of slave.pcm with your desired card name. I just gave one of mine as an example. The above default configuration also takes care of automatic conversion, via the
plugpcm, for different samplerates and formats to the settings the hardware is set up to use. Every program that use ALSA for output will read the above file, but you need to restart a program for changes to take effect.If you enjoy audio production I’m sure you’ll find some good use for Jack, but for audio mixing all you need is to use an ALSA dmix pcm for output.
