Comment by _qbjt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _qbjt | Hacker News Reader

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I don't run a2j or even have it installed so in my case it doesn't seem to be a problem. My audio production setup isn't highly complex FWIW but with the following configuration I have had no issues with audio or MIDI input and output. All of my devices are just plug-and-play for both Bitwig and qjackctl:

- Distro: Arch Linux

- Audio backend: JACK2 and PipeWire

- USB Audio Interface: Behringer U-Phoria UMC404HD

- USB controllers: Akai APC 40 mkii, Casio CTK-6200

- Microphone: Zoom H6

I run this exact setup on my Ryzen desktop and a Thinkpad T480 with no problems. I've also tried routing the audio output of various software directly into my DAW using qjackctl, works perfectly fine.

I kind of dropped out of Linux audiosome time ago. Can I ask why both pipewire and jack? I thought pipewire was supposed to implement most (all?) the stuff that jackd does.

Sorry, looking back at my wording I can see how that's confusing. You are correct. PipeWire replaces the standard JACK libraries with its own ABI-compatible implementations. This allows any JACK-compatible application to support audio through PipeWire using the same APIs it would normally use for JACK. This is also how PipeWire handles support for PulseAudio, ALSA and other multimedia libraries; it kinda reminds me of Wine for Linux audio protocols, if my understanding is correct anyway.

To use PipeWire in place of JACK, you have to install a specific package (`pipewire-jack` on Arch Linux) and run all of your audio applications using a wrapper command called `pw-jack`. You can update the `.desktop` entries for audio software on your system to automatically run this command; I've done that and everything I use launches correctly, tbh I forget that PipeWire is there. I just use Bitwig, qjackctl, Catia, etc. and they all think they're using JACK but really everything is being handled by PipeWire. Pretty kewl and it's been working perfectly for me for quite some time. :)

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