Having trouble setting up JACK and my VSTs with Bitwig on Manjaro

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EvilPudding
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Having trouble setting up JACK and my VSTs with Bitwig on Manjaro

Post by EvilPudding »

I built my first PC running KDE Manjaro at the beginning of summer and recently I got Bitwig to use on it (previously I was on Mac and I'm coming from Logic Pro X). Almost everything has been working well and it's a lot of fun learning how to do everything, but I'm having trouble setting up all the audio stuff.
I have two issues, the second one is much more important but it would be nice to be able to figure out the first one too:

- I only own a few VSTs and none of them are native on Linux, I decided to try them in wine and the iZotope ones weren't able to install, but Superior Drummer seems to work perfectly outside of Bitwig. I tried using Carla to get it running in Bitwig but I can't install the tools that allow windows VSTs to work in Carla (carla-bridge-win32 and carla-bridge-win64). All of the tutorials I've seen show how to get it from the KXStudio repository, I found the same things I need in the AUR but they aren't installing properly.

- I need to be able to record from my audio interface so I tried JACK but I'm having trouble getting it to work with pulseaudio, currently cadence says pulseaudio is running but not bridged. Because of this I either can't hear anything at all (this happens once pulseaudio starts) or if pulseaudio isn't running but JACK is I can hear audio but can't change the volume and JACK, ASLA, and Pulseaudio don't work on Bitwig.

Sorry if this isn't enough information I still don't know a lot of the terminology.
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Linuxmusician01
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Re: Having trouble setting up JACK and my VSTs with Bitwig on Manjaro

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Your second prob. is starting Jack on a system w/ PulseAudio. I'll try to help you w/ that.

But first: you say you have troubles w/ Carla and bridging Windows VST's. You say that the needed packages don't work/don't install. Since you use Manjaro Linux you cannot use the KXStudio repositories. That's a big problem. If I'm not mistaken the developer of KXStudio is the dev of Carla. Packages like Carla don't work if they're not the latest and the greatest, so the versions that a distro gives you out of he box usually suck. You really need the KXStudio repo's if you ask me. Unfortunately that requires you to install a Debian or Ubuntu based distro and to uninstall Manjaro. Sorry, man.

Now for Jack. This is what I always do to trouble shoot:

1. Kill PulseAudio:

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pulseaudio --kill
Pray that it will not respawn. Sometimes this will help against a PA respawn:

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echo "autospawn = no" > $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf
2. Start Jack the minimal easy way:

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jackd -d alsa --device hw:0
That is, if you have only one sound card/audio device (i.e. device number 0). If you have an external usb audio device it's probably device number 1 (instead of 0) so then you start it w/ (notice the hw:1 instead of hw:0):

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jackd -d alsa --device hw:1


3. One might try to use Jack together w/ PA. Install the package "pulseaudio-module-jack". Then on the command line do (after starting Jack when you have PA already running):

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pactl load-module module-jack-sink &
pactl set-default-sink jack_out &
No in the PA Mixer (pavucontrol) choose "Jack sink" as playback device for Chome (Youtube!) etc.

Good luck! :)
Last edited by Linuxmusician01 on Fri Jul 12, 2019 12:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
rghvdberg
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Re: Having trouble setting up JACK and my VSTs with Bitwig on Manjaro

Post by rghvdberg »

Falktx stuff in the Arch/AUR is pretty up to date.
The packager and falktx reguraly communicate about this on irc.
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Linuxmusician01
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Re: Having trouble setting up JACK and my VSTs with Bitwig on Manjaro

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

rghvdberg wrote:Falktx stuff in the Arch/AUR is pretty up to date.
The packager and falktx reguraly communicate about this on irc.
I didn't know that! Thought one could only use the KXStudio repo's for that stuff. Learned something today, thank you. :)
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khz
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Re: Having trouble setting up JACK and my VSTs with Bitwig on Manjaro

Post by khz »

Since a system update from Debian I switch off Pulseaudio as described here: Pulseaudio and JACK >> viewtopic.php?p=103154#p103154
Jack without pulseaudio:
In qjackctl Setup:
  • Setup >> Options > [X] Execute script at startup: "systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket && systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service"
  • Setup >> Options > [X] Run script after shutdown: "killall -9 jackdbus && systemctl --user start pulseaudio.socket && systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service")
.
Before I had done it the way Linuxmusician01 described it.
. . . FZ - Does humor belongs in Music?
. . GNU/LINUX@AUDIO ~ /Wiki $ Howto.Info && GNU/Linux Debian installing >> Linux Audio Workstation LAW
  • I don't care about the freedom of speech because I have nothing to say.
EvilPudding
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Re: Having trouble setting up JACK and my VSTs with Bitwig on Manjaro

Post by EvilPudding »

Sorry I didn't respond sooner, right after I posted this topic I ran into a non audio related issue on manjaro (I swear before this week I had no issues) that meant I couldn't login through the login screen. I could have reinstalled Manjaro but I decided I might as well try Debian since I haven't tried any other Linux distros yet. So now I'm on Debian trying to set everything up, I've seen a lot more tutorials for what I was trying to do on Debian based distros so it should be easier but I'll post here again if I run into any of the same issues.
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