[opyate]

It would be helpful if folks on here who say "works for me"/"doesn't work for me" would indicate which flavour/version of Linux they use.

Some distros don't have the latest pipewire stack, and you're left to fend for yourself, having to follow some incomplete or poorly written blog post to side-step what your distro does and put pipewire on top.

Me: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and happily using carla, ardour, lmms and a bunch of midi devices with pw-jack. (I'm aware pw-jack is not required anymore, but that was my old workflow, and it speaks to the backwards-compatibility that the stack offers.)

[kristopolous]

Understood but I thought it was clear at least from my post that this isn't a distribution problem. I've certainly tried the distribution version, building from source, and various other things.

I have a counter-request: It's really frustrating when people are like "It just works! I had no problem! It's so easy!" in response to someone who has clearly struggled to get things working. It'd be like someone telling you they just had a car crash from a mechanical failure and you responding "Well I didn't! I drove home just fine!"

Instead, if you're going to respond at all, something like "I'm sorry, don't give up. I hope you figure it out" would be nice.

[woolion]

Have you tried Linux audio forums/community? I think the problem is that, by experience, regular musicians will just say "you need to use windows (or mac) to do anything serious" so it's complicated to find enough people that are competent in both skills.

[kristopolous]

> Have you tried Linux audio forums/community

Actually I've gotten everything to work adequately but claiming the alsa/pulse/jack to pipewire transition wasn't just a new nightmare would be wrong, well for me.

> "you need to use windows (or mac) to do anything serious"

Correct and maybe! Serious as in commercial or production? Yes!

Serious as in exploration in HCI and digital instrument creation and what kind of new sounds can come from that? Now we're back into Linux!

I try to (poorly in my opinion) explore the uncharted, I'm not really looking to make a single penny.

Take for instance, the classic chaotic pendulum (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yQeQwwXXa7A), you can hook that up to an Arduino sensor pack and convert the values to midi notes that get piped through a synthesizer or they can be the filter control of the synthesizer.

How can the arrangement of the chaotic magnet surface affect the aesthetics of the sound?

For instance, if you hook the values up to a sequencer playing arpeggiators and limit the chord choice wisely, it kinda sounds like bach. Especially if you do time dilation and don't try for things to be real-time.

Recording a composition is a sequence of 2D diagrams with time signatures.

Here's another one, this time with synesthesia. You take a number of sticky notes in various colors and aim a camera at a wall and then assign different roles and rules to the colors and their adjacencies and do a similar pipeline but this time you're playing a concert by sticking post-its to a wall on top of each other.

And yet a 3rd. You take a couple hour capture of rush hour from a freeway traffic camera and assign instruments to the lanes, scale signatures to their densities and then you can hear an orchestration of Friday traffic.

In all these you're still "playing" music because you're taking an active role in a bunch of aesthetic decisions and constraints, it's just a new relationship.

[woolion]

Do you have some repos and/or write-ups on these projects? That sound pretty cool.

[kristopolous]

I really want people to do their own!

Maybe I'll do a write-up on the setup to make it easier.

Really I look at things like musique concrete, BBC radiophonic workshop and John Cage and think that's where, a few decades removed, all the modern sound has come from that's been so dominant for the past 40 years or so.

I want to embrace the new and weird so 30 years from now I can help be a historical part of building whatever is coming next.

Tomorrow's all we got!

[lloeki]

> which flavour/version of Linux they use.

> this isn't a distribution problem

Exactly. This all shouldn't be distro dependent when the only things involved are ALSA (kernel) and pipewire/pulseaudio.

Both unfortunately have distros do "things" to them all. Some default to dmix, some to direct hardware with PW/PA dynamically spawned and thus getting exclusive access for a single Unix user while the others are SOL, and other painful conundrums because they thought "we'll just do this and then it just works" for a single basic use case.

[opyate]

I hope you figure it out :)

I think the stars just aligned for me, and it worked. Not an expert at all on these things.