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Old 10-09-2020, 12:06 PM   #1
Tobbe
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Default Better perfomance on ALSA then JACK?

Hi,

Can someone shine a light why there's a better perfomance (xruns) when I use ALSA? I've been using it for sometime now and today I installed JACK with CADENCE to see how that worked. A soon I go under 1024 I get Xruns. I had ALSA to 512 and even 256 and never had any Xruns. Shouldn't JACK be more effective? Seems to me that ALSA is way better on my U-PHORIA UMC22 than JACK is.

Well...back to ALSA again.

Wonder when PIPEWIRE comes out to the light? Is that gonna change everything for the better?
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Old 10-09-2020, 03:32 PM   #2
JamesPeters
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ALSA is lower-level. Jack works "through" ALSA. Better performance with ALSA should be expected.

However you should also be able to get Jack working well without much additional performance detriment or latency. Your Jack configuration is probably not optimal in some way. I don't use Jack for much (and not at all for Reaper) so I don't have any particular advice about it.

I run Reaper with a USB audio device at 4 periods of 64 samples and it's stable even with high CPU use. I could get similar performance when I tried Jack with Reaper, but ALSA was a bit better.

Since in your signature it says you're using Manjaro, you might want to read about my system configuration (I'm using Manjaro too).

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....11#post2349311

There aren't many things I needed to do in Manjaro (or other distros based on Ubuntu) to make Reaper perform really well. There may be more steps required to make Jack work really well, if you're connecting various "standalone" synths and effects with Jack. But just "as a starting point" for how to make Reaper work well with ALSA: it's really straightforward.

One of the first things you may need to do is use the "realtime" kernel from the Manjaro repo.

Last edited by JamesPeters; 10-09-2020 at 03:38 PM.
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Old 10-10-2020, 11:17 PM   #3
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Installed latest rt kernel and jack with all that comes with it. Problem with pulseaudio...it aint bridge. Searching internet to solve that problem. Thanks for the TLP thing. Didn't know about that. Seems to work ok at 512 so far. I only use SFZ files via Sfizz so not really heavy load...I hope.

Thanks James
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Old 10-10-2020, 11:41 PM   #4
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"It ain't bridge"--I don't know what you mean. Pulse Audio works fine for me, for normal use anyway (VLC, Firefox, etc.) I don't use Pulse Audio for Reaper (I only use ALSA with Reaper). 512 samples is quite large for a blocksize; you should be able to use a much smaller blocksize than that (but you'll probably need multiples, for instance 4 periods of 64 samples, which is what I use).
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Old 10-11-2020, 12:23 AM   #5
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It's was in Cadence that PulseAudio isn't bridge so I couldn't here sound from Youtube and at the same time have Reaper loaded. But now it's bridge. Did some reinstall of pulseaudio-jack and rebooted. I test lower sample rate.

Happend again: PulseAudio Started but not bridge. I'm still searching to fix this problem. I went down to 256 and 6 periods/buffers. More testing until I found the right settings.
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Last edited by Tobbe; 10-11-2020 at 12:37 AM.
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Old 10-11-2020, 08:47 AM   #6
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I don't use Jack, Cadence or any kind of bridge. When Reaper is running I use the ALSA setting for auto-disabling Pulse Audio, and the other setting that releases the audio system when Reaper isn't focused and Reaper playback is stopped (so that it will allow Pulse to resume when I click on another app's window). That works for me since I never want playback from a DAW simultaneously while there is playback from any other source.
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Old 10-12-2020, 02:41 AM   #7
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For the general thread topic I wonder if something else is at play because I definitely get better performance with Jack than with alsa.

For the pulseaudio bridge problem, are you running cadence on startup? If so then I think you might need to delay it by a few seconds. I don't use cadence anymore since qjackctl included graph support (and because it has the patchbay for persistent connections) but I seem to remember that if pulseaudio hasn't fully started when cadence is launched then it has problems creating the bridge.
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Old 10-12-2020, 06:58 AM   #8
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Couldn't use Manjaro for some reason. My computer rebooted now and then without any warning. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu Studio and the rebooting thing is gone. Not once has it rebooted. Very strange. Manjaro and my computer was/is isn't best mates.

Everything is as it should be. Running smoooth.
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Old 10-12-2020, 07:50 AM   #9
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I used JACK for almost a year when I had two M-Audio Delta 2496 cards, because that was the only way to combine them. I still ran REAPER using a 64 sample buffer, and latency was very tight.

When I switched to an eight channel external USB audio device, I used ALSA because it works in ALSA and it's a layer closer to the hardware.

Is the performance difference between JACK and ALSA noticeable? Nope, but ALSA is one less hoop to jump through.
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