Unable to Export JACK Projects (Freewheeling)

Pipewire runs great now that we resolved how to get it running in Arch. From a pro-audio perspective, this is amazing for live performance in the current state - it runs better than JACK, until you go to export a recording. Ardour will make like it's going to do a bounce of the recording, but then stops - does not freeze - and never gets past the first frame of the audio.

Thanks again for what you're doing Pipewire devs.

I think this is called freewheeling in JACK, which is not implemented (yet). I thought people didn't use this anymore..

Hi, Yes it's freeweeling for process out of sync with hardware. I use it also for render my projects with or without Ardour and some other jack clients. I think it is a very useful feature for pro audio, allowing to not wait the time of the project at the render and use the full CPU ! E.g. export in 15 min (or less) a 1h project is mandatory in pro usage, when time is money... All the other softwares (in all plateform) allow this. Remove this feature will make difficult to use pipewire in pro situations, i think.

Thank you for the work !

Ok, I will implement this.

changed title from Unable to export JACK projects to Unable to Export JACK Projects (Freewheeling)

added To Do label

Update, tried exporting a project now, unable to export either via realtime or non-realtime exports. The non realtime export hangs at the first frame, the realtime export hangs at the last frame of the project and causes Ardour to freeze completely. This includes exporting individual sections, individual tracks, ect.

@unsaph3 I have been experimenting in Ardour 6.5 and have the same issue. In default export mode (freewheeling) the UI freezes on the first frame, and in rt mode it freezes on the last frame before it can complete the export.

This was using PipeWire from nightly pipewire-0.3.21+nightly-210209.fc33

What is the status here? Any place where I could help to bring this forward (but I'm not familiar with the pipewire code at all)?

It's on the TODO list, talk to Wim on IRC about it if you would like to submit a MR.

libpipewire 0.3.22 Ardour6.6.0

I know it's in the TO-DO list, has there been a submit to the GIT already?

There has been no change in the status of this bug.

I also look forward to this implementation. For now,I'm working only with Alsa until this arrival.

Me too! Had to revert to reaper meanwhile

I started to implement something... stay tuned..

Is this implementation in a branch somewhere or is it being worked on privately?

This looks like it here https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wtaymans/pipewire/-/tree/freewheel.

As a workaround you can switch to the alsa backend in ardour to do the export.

Launching Ardour with ARDOUR_ALSA_DEVICE=pipewire seems to be a decent temporary solution.

I'm using Fedora Jam 34 with Ardour 6.6 I am unable to export either normally or in real-time. Export hangs at end of playing the session during export.
I am unable to switch to the alsa backend in ardour 6.6. It only provides me the choice of JACK (pipewire).
Setting the environment variable ARDOUR_ALSA_DEVICE=pipewire and then running ardour 6.6 from a terminal didn't work either.
I'm very interested in adding freewheeling to pipewire as I currently can not export from ardour 6.6 and I really rather not have to install JACK. Thank you for developing pipewire, it seems to in general work better than Jack/Pulseaudio

Set the variable and select the ALSA backend in Ardour. Make sure the pipewire ALSA compatibility is installed.

I already have pipewire-alsa installed, I checked that the env successfully set ARDOUR_ALSA_DEVICE=pipewire. Once Ardour 6.6 starts (from the same terminal) I went to the "Window->Audio/MIDI setup". The Audio system is set to JACK, there are no other choices in the drop-down (doesn't matter if I first disconnect JACK, or not). Unless there is another way to do this, it doesn't seem to be working for me. Thanks for your help.

Very strange, there should be an ALSA and Pulseaudio option in the drop down for audio systems as well.

The issue appears to be that neither the dummy or the alsa Ardour backends were installed on my Fedora Jam 34 (upgraded from 33) for Ardour 6.6.

the command:

"dnf install ardour6-backend-dummy"

installs the dummy backend, but it still didn't show up (maybe a developer setting in ardour is required?)

"dnf install ardour6-backend-alsa" installed the alsa backend and this then did provide alsa in the Ardour Audio System drop down.

I tested it and I can now export audio files just fine. Only problem is that it takes over my audio system and I had to quite Ardour to get sound output back (maybe there's another way to do this).

So although I had pipewire-alsa already installed, I also needed ardour6-backend-alsa. I don't know if a fresh install of Fedora Jam 34 would have included the backend or not (i.e. is this just an upgrade issue?)

Thanks for everyone's help. -Keith

master now supports freewheeling. For me export in ardour6 works now.

closing, please reopen if it does not work for you.

@wtaymans thanks I can confirm export works for me in Ardour 6.6 with "ardour6-backend-jack" on Fedora 34 using the with pipewire built from the latest master.

Was this included in 0.3.27 or will it be the next release.

Thanks!

Never mind, I dug through the commits and see this was merged just after 0.3.27.

closed

mentioned in issue #1965 (closed)