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@nielso@digitalcourage.social · 3 days ago

The "Pro Audio" profile in #Pipewire has vanished for my #mAudio #airHub.

I have Pipewire 1.4.10 from a PPA. on #UbuntuStudio 24.04

I don't have time right now to look into this. But things like this make me nervous. What if this happens on my Laptop just the day I need to record a show from a digital console via USB?

"Pro Audio" also went away for my 100% professional and much needed Dante AVIO USB audio interface. WTF?

EDIT: So, I ran the UbuntuStudio audio config something and selected "switch configuration" and found out I was not using Pipewire at all! I was using only PulseAudio. Which has no Pro Audio of course. The really crazy thing about this however is: Something made the switch automatically, likely by (un)insdalling some packages. It's kind of a dark magic! This is Windows 11 behaviour, not #Linux… argl!

Morten Mosgaard

@mosgaard@uddannelse.social replied · 3 days ago

@nielso does Ubuntu Studio come with Pipewire?

Nielso

@nielso@digitalcourage.social replied · 3 days ago

@mosgaard

Even worse. 🤪 Ubuntu always comes with Pipewire these days, and it is impossible for UbuntuStudio to change that. Which also means that UbuntuStudio does not want to exchange the outdated Pipewire version of Ubuntu, but there's a PPA that does so. At my own risk. Which is probably what I have experienced…

When in trouble you can use good old Jack for recording and have Pipewire talking to that. Specific to UbuntuStudio is a little GUI config system allowing you to do so. (And then you need QJackCtl, too). It's not fancy but it does the job.

Morten Mosgaard

@mosgaard@uddannelse.social replied · 3 days ago

@nielso uh, I'm glad I didn't went down that route. But it also sounds like you sometime benefit from older packages for compability of plugins and hardware, is that right?

Nielso

@nielso@digitalcourage.social replied · 3 days ago

@mosgaard

Ubuntu is pretty stupid with one thing… if you want more recent software, you are supposed to upgrade your entire distro. Which basically means that you're mostly not using a long term support (LTS) version. Which I wouldn't recommend.

(While, if you talk to devs about your problem, they always bill we like: First, use the latest version and see if the issue has gone already.)

Ubuntu Studio can't change that thing in Ubuntu. It's something all Ubuntu-based distros suffer from.

It's not a big deal if, say, your KDE is outdated. But in the audio/video world on Linux, things are still moving fast, like ffmpeg supporting new file formats (and you using a PPA to get a recent ffmpeg), or, say… Darktable supporting a recent camera RAW format… and so on.

Nielso

@nielso@digitalcourage.social replied · 3 days ago

@mosgaard

So I just installed #Darktable 5.2 from a #PPA on my #UbuntuStudio in order to see if it produces TIFF files that actually are technically correct enough for #NeatImage to understand them.

Result is that now #Gimp does not launch Darktable anymore when I try to open a RAW file. Because this is apparently Ubuntu(Studio) magic that I lost.

“Luckily” also Darktable 5.2 cannot create proper 32bit float TIFF files, it seems to do perfect EXR files, but NeatImage can't read that. So I can roll back the entire maneuver…

Morten Mosgaard

@mosgaard@uddannelse.social replied · 3 days ago

@nielso it seems like some kind of constant dilemma to get support?

I jumped an Arch-based distro because I really liked the speed of it mostly - and I got all my drivers right out of the box. And I hope that I can keep updating my distro and all packages, so I'm on top of all the changes.

I know it can break things, but I'm sure the changes that will come to pipewire will be worth it.

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