You can either use UbuntuStudio 24.10 which has Pipewire 1.2.4, but no long term support (LTS), or you can use this PPA giving you Pipewire 1.2.7: https://launchpad.net/~savoury1/+archive/ubuntu/pipewire

Ardour and Mixbus are the least trouble to me now, they're really good. Okay, I'm also very used to them.

yaBridge and LinVST are ways to run Windows VSTs, and for my very old 32bit collection this works well. You can't rely on every Windows-based plugin just working, however.

And as for Tim Cook & the like… they will experience that even Mr. Trump likes having beans sometimes… chose your surroundings well…

Patchance will give you an overview of what Pipewire has available in terms of ports… it's a bit funny that it groups those into stereo pairs.

Also make sure to set your audio interface to "pro audio"… can be done in the speaker icon menu from the KDE bar.

This will disable any audio processing like volume changes between applications using the Jack interface and the hardware.

Any media production oriented Linux will not succeed before people can't get started with something like a short manual fitting on one computer screen.

But then again… on Windows you don't need the pro audio trick simply for the reason that you *know* that you can't work with that audio interface of yours without the ASIO driver.

No sacrilege but perhaps a misunderstanding: Comparing a foss audio ecosystem on linux with proprietary billion dollar companies that have full industry support is like comparing a bike ride with a Ferrari on a highway. You take the bike to enjoy the view without a hurry.
Consider linuxaudio a limited system that can boost your creativity due to these limitations.
@nielso

This sounds like all these amateur bands that are like "we don't want to be good, we just wanna meet and have some beers and play some chords"

I'm doing this on a weekly basis, and yepp it's quite a nice thing to do, but it's not a thing that gets us far in terms of making a living.

Last year, I bought a used Apple Mac Mini M1. It took me three days, and one fruitless phone call to Apple, then I had an OS running on it. (Thanks to the help of my local Linux user group.)

The previous owner had reset the machine, and Apple had turned off the whatever-servers for that version of OS X, so I couldn't create an account on it.

So, this is the billion dollar Ferrari computing world.

The difference? RME provide device drivers for this world. They could so too, for Linux, but they don't want to.

Waves could provide their plugins for Linux – their Waves Server is a Linux-based system after all – as well as they could with SuperRack and SuperRack Performer. They don't want to.

What went wrong with Linux? Basically nothing, they just decided to switch Ubuntu to Pipewire too early.

Pipewire is very great, it's just not completely there yet for pro audio use. But it's getting closer.

I'm also married. To KDE, that is. This may sound weird to many people, but my KDE configured for me in my ways, is what I touch daily – since KDE 1 Beta 4. Both the general UIs of Windows and of OS X annoy me. (But at least OS X has a terminal window with a less annoying shell.)

Oh, and also Ardour was the first proper DAW I used and I stuck to it. (Nowadays using Mixbus a lot.)

I've been using Logic for some projects, because I had to, and it is for sure a good DAW, it's just not home to me.

So I really understand these reasons.

I use some audio plugins for many years now. These plugin hunter YouTube videos make me go mad. For each new plugin, I take some time to figure out how it actually sounds. I need to know my tools. I don't want to be interrupted.

One thing is: Many Linux nerds are working *on* their computers. Audio nerds are working *with* their computers.

One thing people forget all the time is that the actual listeners do not give a BEEP about any of this.

Constantly, enthusiasts will tell you what OS to use, what DAW, what microphone, what mixing console, what audio interface, what camera, what lens, what ever. If you ask musicians, be ready to listen on opinions on guitars, FX pedals, synths, vintage drum kits… it's not an entirely useless discussion, because sometimes it allows you to find that piece of equipment that really makes a difference. Many times, it's just old white men reassuring themselves they have the best p…iece of equipment.

I'm in year 6 now of my own full-time event tech business, and customers seldom ask for certain brands of gear. Listeners or viewers never ask. I get phone calls because the overall result is what clients like, including how well cables are fixed with gaffer tape in stage.

So the choice of DAW and OS remains a personal thing.

Hey, that's great!
So for our next cooperation we could even share ardour sessions instead of stems 😎

@nielso

Bread and Butter:
- Surge XT Effects (Multi effect, select delay on top)
- Calf Vintage Delay (see above, might not work without workaround)
- BollieDelay https://github.com/MrBollie/bolliedelayxt.lv2

Weirder stuff:
- LSP Artistic Delay
- DelayArchitect https://github.com/jpcima/DelayArchitect
- SevenDelay https://github.com/ryukau/VSTPlugins/tree/master/SevenDelay
- TAL-Dub III

Deep rabbit hole:
- CardinalFX has around 25 delay modules and you can connect a million effects the modular way

Not sure about Ardour, but it constantly happens to my VCVrack, too.

(Which, btw, has SurgeXT available ripped apart into modules)

Need to check if this happens with my Ardour, too. However, my system has lost the MIDI patchbay anyways with me disabling Pipewire-Jack.

Perhaps a pipewire issue, the ardour guys recommend to use the Alsa backend. For me it usually works, but I only use two MIDI devices. And I stop/start my projects always with the devices turned on and connected.
@nielso

You can ask the gurus in Ardour's IRC channel. Needs a little patience because their real humans and not always at the keyboard. 🤪

https://discourse.ardour.org/t/ardour-org-irc-chat-channel-has-moved/105996

Let us know how it turns out.

Me and myself, I have other tiny Linux troubles currently being more in the foreground.

You might be able to enforce soundcard order by kernel module configuration. Haven't done this for a while.

Sounds like you'd want to get an old Unitor 8 MK II. 😜 – one device, 8 ports in always the same order. 🤪

I still have an Kawai MAV8 as MIDI router, very oldskool.

But currently I only use an Akai LPD8 to control VCVrack (via USB directly, suffering from the problem you describe).

Perhaps future versions of Ardour could learn to address MIDI interfaces by name.