How to bridge pulseaudio to jack?

[veprovina]

Hello! New to Manjaro (and Arch in general), but i’m trying several distros to see which one i’ll like best for audio production. I’ve been trying pop os for a month, and i got it kinda to work for me, but it had several annoyances that aren’t a dealbreaker but i’d rather do without.
So i’m trying an Arch based distro to see if i can make it work better (and also KDE plasma is extremely beautiful). It already has less of some of those annoyances, but like with any linux, i know i need to set it up for specialised tasks.

I’m following this tutorial to set up audio:
(can’t post links but the video is from unfa - How do i prepare Manjaro KDE for audio production?)

But i can’t get pulseaudio to work with jack, and i need that functionality.
I installed pulseaudio-jack from Pamac, but i think that needs some sort of configuration that’s above me for now and i need help.

Cadence says Pulseaudio is started but not bridged.
And when i start Jack (even if i set Alsa->pulseaudio->jack bridge), pulseaudio stops and all the applications using it stop as well.

Can anyone walk me through it?
Or point me in the right direction? Googling didn’t really yield any results i can follow or understand.

The endgoal would be to start jack at startup, and have pulseaudio bridged to jack, so i can use the computer normally, but then plug in my guitar and start recording whnever without having to start jack myself. That’s what i’m trying to do.

The audio interface (if that matters) is Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 2nd gen.
neofetch:

██████████████████  ████████   veprovina@manjaro-linux 
██████████████████  ████████   ----------------------- 
██████████████████  ████████   OS: Manjaro Linux x86_64 
██████████████████  ████████   Host: B550M Pro4 
████████            ████████   Kernel: 6.1.0-1-MANJARO 
████████  ████████  ████████   Uptime: 41 mins 
████████  ████████  ████████   Packages: 1483 (pacman) 
████████  ████████  ████████   Shell: bash 5.1.16 
████████  ████████  ████████   Resolution: 2560x1440, 2560x1440 
████████  ████████  ████████   DE: Plasma 5.26.4 
████████  ████████  ████████   WM: KWin 
████████  ████████  ████████   Theme: [Plasma], Breeze [GTK2/3] 
████████  ████████  ████████   Icons: [Plasma], breeze [GTK2/3] 
████████  ████████  ████████   Terminal: konsole 
                               CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G with Radeon Graphics (12) @ 3.900GHz 
                               GPU: AMD ATI Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series 
                               Memory: 5327MiB / 15358MiB 

Thanks in advance!

[Anpan]

I think what you want is pipewire. Simply install the manjaro-pipewire package. It will replace pulseaudio and keep compatibility with applications that use pulseaudio by default.

Additionally, install the optional dependency pipewire-jack to provide support for applications using JACK.
Was a painless drop-in replacement for me and I have successfully used it with Ardour.

A useful tool to look at active audio streams and their metadata is pw-top, it comes as part of the package.

[veprovina]

Ah, so when i start jack with Cadence it should just work then?

[oguere]

Hi,

Create a file called .alsoftrc (I assume you don’t have it) in your home folder and put this in it:

[pulse]
allow-moves=true

This is what made the trick for me

[Anpan]

I have never used Cadence, but it should detect a running JACK and be able to use it. Or at least that’s how it was for me with Ardour.

[veprovina]

This is for pulse audio or pipewire?

EDIT: evermind, i’m just now noticing [pulse] lol
I’ll try it.

[veprovina]

Thanks! I’ll definitely consider pipewire as an option then. But i never really used it (unless pop os comes with pipewire?) so i’ll have to do some reasearch on it.
If its the same as on pop os then pipewire won’t work, cadence couldn’t even find an alsa driver, let alone configure anything or start jack. Qjackctl could start jack, and it did run alongside youtube, but the audio was laggy… That’s why i’m trying manjaro now.

So for now i’ll ask for options with pulse, but if i run out of options, i’ll definitely try pipewire.

Did you notice any latency when using pipewire with jack?

[veprovina]

Oh my god, this did it!
I just started jack with cadence, then opened up a youtube video, and youtube video played with sound!
Then i checked Cadence, and under “pulse” it now says “Pulse audio is started and bridged to jack”!
Thank you so much!!!

[Anpan]

Glad it worked out for you. Regarding the latency: I have not noticed any substantial delays, but I am by no means a professional user, I just dabbled a little bit in it and ran into the same issue you had and pipewire solved it for me.

Supposedly it’s easier on the CPU than pulseaudio, too.

Also for clarification: Pipewire is your sound server (if you install it). Pulse and JACK are simply offered as an API to applications, but it’s still all pipewire regardless.