Server won't start: Pipewire on Ubuntu 22.10

Questions
1

Hi there

The community very kindly just helped me through building / installing SC on a laptop running Kubuntu 22.10, which uses Pipewire.

I open the IDE and I see this:

*** Welcome to SuperCollider 3.14.0-rc1. *** For help press Ctrl-D.
Couldn't set realtime scheduling priority 1: Operation not permitted
SCDoc: Indexing help-files...
SCDoc: Indexed 1372 documents in 1.13 seconds

I then run my standard line for starting the server:

s.options.numInputBusChannels_(20);s.reboot;

It tries to boot the server but fails after a second or so:

Booting server 'localhost' on address 127.0.0.1:57110.
could not initialize audio.
Server 'localhost' exited with exit code 0.

Any suggestions how I get some diagnostic information to see what’s up?

2

Potentially useful observation. IIRC, the meter you get by running s.meter shows input levels to my audio interface even before I’ve booted the server.

I’m running that meter now, and it shows nothing, even though I’ve got a synth playing loudly through the interface.

3

Audio/TheAudioGroup - Ubuntu Wiki – for SC, you should definitely do this.

I don’t know, but this may be of interest:

Note, he’s not using Ubuntu so some package names may be different.

Also note that it takes almost 15 minutes of the video just to hook up audio devices to pipewire… but that was a year ago, maybe it’s improved since then.

hjh

4

If you have pipewire installed, you don’t need to start jackd. If you’ve installed a jack2 package, you’ll have a jackd somewhere, but starting this starts up the jack system instead, with pipewire already running ( usually ). Distros start up pipewire in different ways. If you have a running pipewire system, don’t install jackd, but if you do, don’t start jackd.

It may be that supercollider isn’t compiled with the current pipewire-jack which is supposed to have all the header files for any jack based audio project, so you’ll have to compile supercollider with jack, but with the proper location to the header files in place, such that pkg-config can find it. Usually that’s a .pc file in a pkg conf directory detailing where the header files are located. On the other hand, if there’s a ubuntu studio release that matches the current ubuntu version, maybe use the supercollider there instead.

5

Hi jamshark

I’d seen this video before but missed the key part. pw-jack can start another application, swapping out JACK config for PW.

So running this command:

pw-jack scide

…opened an instance of SC where the server starts!

().play; never sounded quite so good! Thanks for your suggestion!