User:Actioninja

From ArchWiki

Hello.

I like to program and produce music. I also like sharing things I figure out with others. I'm currently working on trying to get the pages on professional audio and JACK on the wiki to a more modern standard. A lot of them are really outdated and have caused me a lot of headache in the past, and I would hope that future users wouldn't have to go through the same crap.


PRIVATE SANDBOX

Modern Linux systems are highly capable audio production systems when setup properly. Extremely low recording latencies such as 5ms to 1ms can be achieved, as well as complex audio and midi routing of multiple programs via a virtual patchbay without the necessity of any proprietary APIs such as ReWire.

Getting Started

Professional audio work on Linux is largely centered around JACK. JACK is roughly equivalent to the role that ASIO performs on Windows and Mac. Before getting anything else started, it's best to get a well functioning JACK setup installed and configured. Detailed instructions can be found on the JACK page. The rest of this page will assume you used the KXStudio suite.

System Configuration

Some configuration tweaks that are highly recommended are:

  • Add your user account to the audio user group to allow proper JACK scheduling.
  • Install the linux-rtAUR kernel which features some patches that can affect latency
  • Set the cpufreq governor to performance

Realtime configuration has mostly been automated. There is no longer any need to edit files like /etc/security/limits.conf for realtime access. However, if you must change the settings, see /etc/security/limits.d/99-audio.conf and /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/40-hpet-permissions.rules (these files are provided by jack or jack2). Additionaly, you may want to increase the highest requested RTC interrupt frequency (default is 64 Hz) by running the following at boot:

echo 2048 > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/max_user_freq
echo 2048 > /proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq

By default, swap frequency defined by "swappiness" is set to 60. By reducing this number to 10, the system will wait much longer before trying to write to disk. Then, there is inotify which watches for changes to files and reports them to applications requesting this information. When working with lots of audio data, a lot of watches will need to be kept track of, so they will need to be increased. These two settings can be adjusted in /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf.

vm.swappiness = 10
fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288

You may also want to maximize the PCI latency timer of the PCI sound card and raise the latency timer of all other PCI peripherals (default is 64).

$ setpci -v -d *:* latency_timer=b0
$ setpci -v -s $SOUND_CARD_PCI_ID latency_timer=ff # eg. SOUND_CARD_PCI_ID=03:00.0 (see below)

The SOUND_CARD_PCI_ID can be obtained like so:

$ lspci ¦ grep -i audio
03:00.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy (rev 03)
03:01.0 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies Inc. VT1720/24 [Envy24PT/HT] PCI Multi-Channel Audio Controller (rev 01)

System Configuration

You may want to consider the following often seen system optimizations:

Realtime configuration has mostly been automated. There is no longer any need to edit files like /etc/security/limits.conf for realtime access. However, if you must change the settings, see /etc/security/limits.d/99-audio.conf and /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/40-hpet-permissions.rules (these files are provided by jack or jack2). Additionaly, you may want to increase the highest requested RTC interrupt frequency (default is 64 Hz) by running the following at boot:

echo 2048 > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/max_user_freq
echo 2048 > /proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq

By default, swap frequency defined by "swappiness" is set to 60. By reducing this number to 10, the system will wait much longer before trying to write to disk. Then, there is inotify which watches for changes to files and reports them to applications requesting this information. When working with lots of audio data, a lot of watches will need to be kept track of, so they will need to be increased. These two settings can be adjusted in /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf.

vm.swappiness = 10
fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288

You may also want to maximize the PCI latency timer of the PCI sound card and raise the latency timer of all other PCI peripherals (default is 64).

$ setpci -v -d *:* latency_timer=b0
$ setpci -v -s $SOUND_CARD_PCI_ID latency_timer=ff # eg. SOUND_CARD_PCI_ID=03:00.0 (see below)

The SOUND_CARD_PCI_ID can be obtained like so:

$ lspci ¦ grep -i audio
03:00.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy (rev 03)
03:01.0 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies Inc. VT1720/24 [Envy24PT/HT] PCI Multi-Channel Audio Controller (rev 01)

Checklist

The steps below are mostly to double-check that you have a working multimedia system:

  • Have I set up sound properly? See ALSA or OSS.
$ speaker-test
  • Am I in the audio group? See ALSA or OSS.
$ groups | grep audio
  • Is PulseAudio, OSS or something else grabbing my device?
$ lsof +c 0 /dev/snd/pcm* /dev/dsp*

-OR-

$ fuser -fv /dev/snd/pcm* /dev/dsp*  
  • Is PAM-security and realtime working OK?

See: Realtime for Users#PAM-enabled login (Pay special attention especially if you do not run KDM, GDM or Slim.)

  • Have I rebooted after having done all that?

Realtime Kernel

Since a while ago, the stock Linux kernel has proven to be adequate for realtime uses. The stock kernel (with CONFIG_PREEMPT=y, default in Arch) can operate with a worst case latency of upto 10ms (time between the moment an interrupt occurs in hardware, and the moment the corresponding interrupt-thread gets running), although some device drivers can introduce latency much worse than that. So depending on your hardware and driver (and requirement), you might want a kernel with hard realtime capabilities.

The RT_PREEPMT patch by Ingo Molnar and Thomas Gleixner is an interesting option for hard and firm realtime applications, reaching from professional audio to industrial control. Most audio-specific distro Linux ships with this patch applied. A realtime-preemptible kernel will also make it possible to tweak priorities of IRQ handling threads and help ensure smooth audio almost regardless of the load.

If you are going to compile your own kernel, remember that removing modules/options does not equate to a "leaner and meaner" kernel. It is true that the size of the kernel image is reduced, but in today's systems it is not as much of an issue as it was back in 1995.

In any way, you should also ensure that:

  • Timer Frequency is set to 1000Hz (CONFIG_HZ_1000=y; if you do not do MIDI you can ignore this)
  • APM is DISABLED (CONFIG_APM=n; Troublesome with some hardware - default in x86_64)

If you truly want a slim system, we suggest you go your own way and deploy one with static /devs. You should, however, set your CPU architecture. Selecting "Core 2 Duo" for appropriate hardware will allow for a good deal of optimisation, but not so much as you go down the scale.

General issue(s) with (realtime) kernels:

  • Hyperthreading (if you suspect, disable in BIOS)

There are ready-to-run/compile patched kernels available in the AUR.

Note: Before you decide to use a patched kernel, see http://jackaudio.org/faq/realtime_vs_realtime_kernel.html.

AUR

From the AUR itself, you have the following options:

The first two are standard kernels with the CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch, while -ice includes patches some may consider to be nasty, while to others are a blessing.

See: Real-Time Linux Wiki

MIDI

To decrease MIDI jitter when using external MIDI equipment jack2's -Xalsarawmidi option should be used. When doing this you need to use a2jmidid, too.

With alsa-midi-latency-test you could test how much jitter you get. PCI and PCIe cards are usually much better than USB MIDI devices.

To work with MIDI, it is highly recommended that you install a2j (a2jmidid), a bridge between alsa midi and jack midi. It allows you to connect applications that only communicate with alsa midi to applications that only use jack midi. Laditray can also start/stop a2j.

See: JACK#MIDI

Environment Variables

If you install things to non-standard directories, it is often necessary to set environment path variables so that applications know where to look (for plug-ins and other libraries). This usually affects only VST since users might have a Wine or external Windows location.

We would usually not have Linux plug-ins (LADSPA, LV2, DSSI, LXVST) beyond standard paths, so it is not necessary to export them. But if you do, be sure to include those standard paths as well since Arch does not do anything for dssi or ladspa, and some applications like dssi-vst will not look anywhere else if it finds predefined paths.

~/.bashrc
...
export VST_PATH=/usr/lib/vst:/usr/local/lib/vst:~/.vst:/someother/custom/dir
export LXVST_PATH=/usr/lib/lxvst:/usr/local/lib/lxvst:~/.lxvst:/someother/custom/dir
export LADSPA_PATH=/usr/lib/ladspa:/usr/local/lib/ladspa:~/.ladspa:/someother/custom/dir
export LV2_PATH=/usr/lib/lv2:/usr/local/lib/lv2:~/.lv2:/someother/custom/dir
export DSSI_PATH=/usr/lib/dssi:/usr/local/lib/dssi:~/.dssi:/someother/custom/dir

Software

A decent amount of audio production software exists with Linux support.

DAWs

A good DAW is perhaps the most important piece of software in any digital music production environment.

FOSS

Ardour

Ardour is the most fully featured FOSS DAW for Linux. It is targeted mostly at people looking to record, but also has full midi support along with a piano roll and can be used for electronic music production.

ardour

LMMS

LMMS is a less fully featured DAW more intended for recreational music sequencing. It does not support direct recording, but does have a piano roll and tracking features.

lmms

Audacity

Audacity is not a true DAW as it only features recording and audio editing, but can be used for fairly simple of recording tasks.

audacity

Commercial

Bitwig Studio

Bitwig Studio is one of the only commercial DAW with officially released native Linux support. It is very fully featured and is most similar to Ableton Live. It can be downloaded via the bitwig-studioAUR package from the AUR, but it will need a purchased license in order to fully function.

Tracktion

Tracktion is an old DAW that has recently returned to production. It is primarily focused on ease of use and affordability compared to other DAWs. Tracktion is proprietary software, but Tracktion T6 is free to use. tracktion-6AUR tracktion-7AUR

Reaper

Reaper somewhat recently started releasing some unsupported builds of it for Linux. They are fully native builds, but as mentioned, no support is provided.

reaperAUR

Non-Native

You may have success getting other non-native DAWs to run via WINE. wineasioAUR is needed to properly wrap ASIO input and output of WINE programs to JACK.

Trackers/Sequencers

Trackers and Sequencers are typically less feature-rich than a DAW, but are more focused on midi sequencing and tracking. JACK features a global transport head that can be used to play, pause, and reposition on multiple connected clients at the same time, which allows trackers and sequencers to be more easily connected to DAWs and external synth programs.

Qtractor

Qtractor is a multitrack sequencer. It features robust sample manipulation and powerful midi editing tools.

qtractor

Synthesizers, Effects, and Other Tools

Along with actual production tools, synthesizers, effects, and other tools like drum machines form an essential part of a music production setup. Jack's audio routing and global transport head allow multiple independent programs to more easily route sound and midi information into each other, making it less necessary for software like this to exist as plugins.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is a software drum machine. It acts as its own sequencer and output that can then be routed to other programs.

hydrogen

Guitarix

Guitarix is a guitar amp and effect simulator. It can be used on DIed guitars and basses to simulate using an amp, or it can be used as an effect in electronic production.

guitarix2

Yoshimi

a fork of the ZynAddSubFX software synthesizer yoshimiAUR}

Calf

Calf is a suite of various plugins. It supports LV2, DSSI, LADSPA, and also has a standalone JACK host.

calf

Utilities

Many utilities for various usages exist as well

DSSI

DSSI is an audio plugin standard. It's not a program within its own right, as much as a set of libraries for plugins to build off of. It is loosely equivalent to the VSTi library.

[1]

WineAsio

WineAsio is an implementation of the ASIO driver standard for wine. This allows Windows DAWs and other programs that use ASIO to run in wine.

wineasioAUR

vst-bridge

vst-bridge is a program that bridges Windows VSTs to a Linux VST host. It generates individual WINE wrappers for each windows VST that are then routed to native linux VST plugins.

{{AUR|vst-bridge

Composition

Composition software is designed entirely to aid in music composition.

MuseScore

MuseScore is a sheet music composition tool that focuses entirely on composing solely sheet music. Along with its composition suite, there is a fully featured web component that allows for the sharing of composed works.

musescore

Rosegarden

Rosegarden is a sheet music composition aid that is based around a midi sequencer. The sequencer is used like many others, and then corresponding sheet music is generated.

rosegarden

TuxGuitar

TuxGuitar is a FOSS alternative to GuitarPro. It is primarily designed for creating guitar tabulature, and also features a sheet music display.

tuxguitar


More

See also List of applications#Audio systems, List of applications#Sound editing, and awesome-linuxaudio.

Tips and Tricks

  • Disable WiFi and close any programs that don't need to be open when recording such as browsers. Many have reported disabling WiFi has led to more reliable JACK performance.
  • Some USB audio hardware is known not to work properly when plugged into USB 3 ports so try USB 2/1 ports instead.
  • IRQ issues can occur and cause problems. An example is video hardware reserving the bus, causing needless interrupts in the system I/O path. See discussion at FFADO IRQ Priorities How-To. If you have a realtime or a recent kernel, you can use rtirqAUR to adjust priorities of IRQ handling threads.
  • Do not use the irqbalance daemon, or do so carefully [2].
  • If you need to use multiple audio devices with JACK2, the alsa_in and alsa_out utilities. can be used to have extra devices wrapped and show up as outputs in the JACK patchbay.
  • Some daemons/processes can unexpectedly cause xruns. If you do not need it - kill it. No questions asked.
$ ls /var/run/daemons
$ top # or htop, ps aux, whatever you are comfortable with
$ killall -9 $processname
# systemctl stop $daemonname
  • If you are facing a lot of xruns especially with nvidia, disable your GPU throttling. This can be done via the card's control applet and for nvidia it is "prefer maximum performance" (thanks to a mail in LAU by Frank Kober).

Hardware

The majority of sound cards and audio devices will work with no extra configuration or packages, simply set the sound card jack is using to them and restart.

This is not true for all devices, and so special cases are also listed.

M-Audio Delta 1010

The M-Audio Delta series cards are based on the VIA Ice1712 audio chipset. Cards using this chip require that you install the alsa-tools package, because it contains the envy24control program. Envy24control is a hardware level mixer/controller. You can use alsa-mixer but you will save yourself some hassle not to try it. Note that this section has no information on MIDI setup or usage.

Open the mixer application:

$ envy24control

This application can be more than a bit confusing; see envy24control for guidance on its use. That said, here is a very simple working setup for multitracking with Ardour.

  1. On the "Monitor Inputs" and "Monitor PCMs" tabs, set all monitor inputs and monitor PCM's to around 20.
  2. On the "Patchbay / Router" tab, set all to PCM out.
  3. On the "Hardware Settings" tab, verify that the Master Clock setting matches what is set in Qjackctl. If these do not match you will have xruns out of control!

M-Audio Fast Track Pro

The M-Audio Fast Track Pro is an USB 4x4 audio interface, working at 24bit/96kHz. Due to limitation of USB 1, this device requires additional setup to get access to all its features. Device works in one of two configuration:

  • Configuration 1, or "Class compliant mode" - with reduced functionality, only 16bit, 48kHz, analogue input (2 channels) and digital/analogue output (4 channels).
  • Configuration 2 - with access to all features of interface.

Currently with stock kernel it runs in configuration 2, but if you want to make sure in what mode you are, you can check kernel log for entries:

usb-audio: Fast Track Pro switching to config #2
usb-audio: Fast Track Pro config OK

The interface also needs extra step of cofiguration to switch modes. It is done using option device_setup during module loading. The recommended way to setup the interface is using file in modprobe.d:

/etc/modprobe.d/ftp.conf
options snd_usb_audio vid=0x763 pid=0x2012 device_setup=XXX index=YYY enable=1

where vid and pid are vendor and product id for M-Audio Fast Track Pro, index is desired device number and device_setup is desired device setup. Possible values for device_setup are:

device modes
device_setup value bit depth frequency analog output digital output analog input digital input IO mode
0x0 16 bit 48kHz + + + + 4x4
0x9 24 bit 48kHz + + + - 2x4
0x13 24 bit 48kHz + + - + 2x4
0x5 24 bit 96kHz * * * * 2x0 or 0x2

The 24 bit/96kHz mode is special: it provides all input/output, but you can open only one of 4 interfaces at a time. If you for example open output interface and then try to open second output or input interface, you will see error in kernel log:

cannot submit datapipe for urb 0, error -28: not enough bandwidth

which is perfectly normal, because this is USB 1 device and cannot provide enough bandwidth to support more than single (2 channel) destination/source of that quality at a time.

Depending on the value of index it will setup two devices: hwYYY:0 and hwYYY:1, which will contain available inputs and outputs. First device is most likely to contain analog output and digital input, while second one will contain analog input and digital output. To find out which devices are linked where and if they are setup correctly, you can check /proc/asound/cardYYY/stream{0,1} . Below is list of important endpoints that will help in correctly identifying card connections (it easy to mistake analog and digital input or output connections before you get used to the device):

EP 3 (analgoue output = TRS on back, mirrored on RCA outputs 1 and 2 on back)
EP 4 (digital output = S/PDIF output on back, mirrored on RCA outputs 3 and 4 on back)
EP 5 (analogue input = balanced TRS or XLR microphone, unbalanced TS line on front)
EP 6 (digital input = S/PDIF input on back)

This .asoundrc file enables 24-bit IO on the fast-track pro (and I'm sure it could be modified to work with other 3-byte usb devices) within the context of jack's 32-bit interface while routing default alsa traffic to jack outputs on the audio interface. Alsa will be in S24_3BE mode but jack can plug S32_LE data in and out of the interface and other alsa programs will be able to plug almost anything into jack.

### ~/.asoundrc
### default alsa config file, for a fast-track pro configured in 24-bit mode as so:
### options snd_usb_audio device_setup=0x9
### invoke jack with: (if you use -r48000, change the rate in the plugs as well)
### $jackd -dalsa -P"hw:Pro" -C"hw:Pro,1" -r44100

## setup input and output plugs so jack can write S24_3BE data to the audio interface

pcm.maud0 {
	type hw
	card Pro
	 }

#jack_out plug makes sure that S32_LE data can be written to hw:Pro
pcm.jack_out{
	type plug
	format S32_LE
	channels 2
	rate 44100
	slave pcm.maud0
}

pcm.maud1 {
	type hw
	card Pro
	device 1
}
## jack_in plug makes sure that hw:Pro,1 can read S32_LE data
pcm.jack_in {
	type plug
	format S32_LE
	channels 2
	rate 44100
	slave pcm.maud1
}
#####
# route default alsa traffic through jack system io

pcm.jack {
    type jack
    playback_ports {
        0 system:playback_1
        1 system:playback_2
    }
    capture_ports {
        0 system:capture_1
        1 system:capture_2
    }
} 
pcm.amix {
	type asym
	playback.pcm "jack"
	capture.pcm "jack"
	}
pcm.!default {
	type plug
	slave.pcm amix
}

PreSonus Firepod

  1. Startup: Either from command line or QjackCtl, the driver is called firewire.
  2. Specs: The card contains 8/8 preamp'ed XLR plus a stereo pair, in total 10 channels.
  3. Linking: Cards can be linked together without any problems.
  4. Hardware Settings: Nothing particular, tweak the settings in QjackCtl to your likings.

Volume levels are hardware and routing can be done through QjackCtl, even with more cards linked together, this is not a problem. The ffadomixer does not work with this card yet, hopefully in the future we can control more aspects of the card through a software interface like that.

PreSonus AudioBox USB

  1. Startup: It is called "USB" by ALSA.
  2. Specs: Two mono TRS+XLR in, two mono TRS out, MIDI in and out, plus separate stereo headphone jack. Knob controls for both inputs, for main out, and for headphone, four in all.
  3. Hardware: Works very well, audio and MIDI too. No software mixer controls at all.

Tascam US-122

This does not apply to the US-122L

  1. Required packages: alsa-tools alsa-firmware fxloadAUR
  2. udev rules: create the following rules file, then reload udev rules, Udev#Loading new rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/51-tascam-us-122.rules
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idProduct}=="8006", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1604", RUN+="/bin/sh -c '/sbin/fxload -D %N -s /usr/share/alsa/firmware/usx2yloader/tascam_loader.ihx -I /usr/share/alsa/firmware/usx2yloader/us122fw.ihx'"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idProduct}=="8007", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1604", RUN+="/bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/usx2yloader'"

Plug in the unit The device should now be working, there are no software mixer controls

RME Babyface

It works very well at low latencies (~5ms) with alsa-utils, jack2 and linux-rtAUR. Running on ALSA only with the standard kernel may cause crackling at lower latencies.

To be recognized and work, the firmware version of the Babyface needs to be >= 200, which introduces the Class Compliant Mode. To enter Class Compliant Mode hold the "Select" and "Recall" buttons while connecting the Babyface to the computer via USB. It should now be recognized.

To check if it is recognized:

grep -i baby /proc/asound/cards

For more info about the Class Compliant Mode visit RME's website, they have PDF which covers all the functionality.

The Babyface does not need any special Jack Settings. But if you want to use the built in MIDI In/Out then you need to set the "MIDI Driver" to "seq" and optionally disable "Enable Alsa Sequencer Support" to use it in combination with other MIDI Devices (a USB Midi Keyboard for example).

Restricted Software

Steinberg's SDKs

It is very clear - we can distribute neither the VST nor the ASIO headers in binary package form. However, whenever you are building a program which would host Windows .dll VST plug-ins, check for the following hints (that do not require use of any SDK):

  • dssi-vst
  • fst
  • vestige

With that said, if you are building a program which would host native .so VST plug-ins, then there is no escape. For such cases, Arch yet again allows us to maintain a uniform local software database. We can "install" the SDK system-wide - you simply have to download it yourself and place it in the packaging directory.

Get them from AUR

Note: Steinberg does not forbid redistribution of resulting products, nor dictate what license they can be under. There are many GPL-licensed VST plug-ins. As such, distributing binary packages of software built with these restricted headers is not a problem, because the headers are simply buildtime dependencies.


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