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Old 08-18-2022, 02:23 PM   #1
matidfk
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Default Reaper kills all other audio with ALSA

Im on arch linux, running latest reaper from pacman.
im using pulseaudio, and ALSA in reaper.
With the option auto suspend PA on, reaper works but no other sound does.
with it off, reaper cant open ALSA
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Old 08-18-2022, 02:26 PM   #2
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Originally Posted by matidfk View Post
Im on arch linux, running latest reaper from pacman.
im using pulseaudio, and ALSA in reaper.
With the option auto suspend PA on, reaper works but no other sound does.
with it off, reaper cant open ALSA
Yes, this seems like normal behavior. If you want to multi-task REAPER and other application audio, say from a browser, you are best using JACK or pipewire-jack. Unless you are on the road with no access to a proper audio interface, I'd recommend avoiding pulseaudio all together. Use ALSA only if you can but if you need simultaneous audio from other parts of your system, again, use JACK or pipewire-jack.

Hope that helps.
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Old 08-18-2022, 02:32 PM   #3
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would you recommend jack or pipewire-jack? im playing around with things to see if fully switching to linux is possible so im open to experimenting with things
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Old 08-18-2022, 02:37 PM   #4
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would you recommend jack or pipewire-jack? im playing around with things to see if fully switching to linux is possible so im open to experimenting with things
At this point pipewire, pipewire-alsa and pipewire-jack seem great from my perspective. Some distros are now shipping it as default. Coupled with qpwgraph which allows you to make connections to all your applications, you have a setup where everything just seems to work¹. You'd want to follow one of my guides when you do make the switch. I run Arch but I can also highly recommend Manjaro (Arch-based) and Ubuntu Studio.

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¹ I'm also currently investigating Agordejo as a session manager (uses New Session Manager daemon under the hood) and will add to the guides once I'm satisfied it works as advertised.
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Last edited by chmaha; 08-18-2022 at 02:45 PM.
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Old 08-18-2022, 03:00 PM   #5
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ok ive managed to get all sound working with pipewire-alsa, pipewire and pipewire-jack, can now play both youtube and use reaper at once. however theres now around 100ms latency which is almost unusable, any idea what could be causing it?
also the audio settings in reaper dont give me options for buffer size etc
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Old 08-18-2022, 03:07 PM   #6
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Originally Posted by matidfk View Post
ok ive managed to get all sound working with pipewire-alsa, pipewire and pipewire-jack, can now play both youtube and use reaper at once. however theres now around 100ms latency which is almost unusable, any idea what could be causing it?
also the audio settings in reaper dont give me options for buffer size etc
Follow this from my guide: https://github.com/ElizabethHarmon/M...-configuration

It's important to set your preferred samplerate and buffersize in the config file given pipewire defaults to 48k and 1024 "quantum" (buffer size). Whatever you pick, you can also change on the fly using the listed commands in my guide that start with pw-metadata. Without knowing your system and what it is capable of, it's hard to suggest a number but some of us run at 64 samples most of the time. If your system can't handle that try starting at 512 and moving down through 256, 128 and 64 as long as you don't get x-runs/audio dropouts. That will get you much better latency.

It shouldn't matter which distro you are on as the pipewire config part is universal. BTW, which distro are you on? What audio interface? 100ms latency even at 1024 quantum sounds very high unless it was just a rough guess...
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Last edited by chmaha; 08-18-2022 at 03:16 PM.
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Old 08-18-2022, 03:15 PM   #7
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yep, that seemed to work, sample rate was fine so i just turned quantum down to 256 and the latency is unnoticeable now. *i use arch btw*
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Old 08-18-2022, 03:17 PM   #8
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yep, that seemed to work, sample rate was fine so i just turned quantum down to 256 and the latency is unnoticeable now. *i use arch btw*
Fantastic. Glad it is working. And nice to have another Arch user here
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Old 11-23-2023, 09:53 PM   #9
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hi necroing this thread because this is still an issue. No other application has a problem sharing ALSA, and I prefer to use it since it is lowest latency. But Reaper not only demands all of it's attention, it also breaks it. The only way I've found to switch back to normal audio after a Reaper session is to restart. There has got to be a reason why only Reaper does this.
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Old 11-24-2023, 02:03 AM   #10
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hi necroing this thread because this is still an issue. No other application has a problem sharing ALSA, and I prefer to use it since it is lowest latency. But Reaper not only demands all of it's attention, it also breaks it. The only way I've found to switch back to normal audio after a Reaper session is to restart. There has got to be a reason why only Reaper does this.
As for not sharing audio, that is just how ALSA works. It is an old system that was not designed for modern desktop solutions. If your other software is fine sharing audio, then my guess is that they might not actually be using pure ALSA. If you're on a fairly modern distro, it might be using pipewire-alsa. If this is the case, REAPER doesn't offer it as a default output, but you can manually enter "default" in the output/input device fields to make it go through pipewire-alsa.

As for breaking audio afterwards, that definitely should not happen. I'm not sure what that's about. Back in the days of pulseaudio, if I tried to play audio in, say, a browser while REAPER had control of the soundcard, that could break the system and require me to restart pulseaudio. But that would only happen if I tried to use different applications simultaneously, so it was easy to work around.

In any case, if you want people to troubleshoot your issues, you really should provide more information about your system. There's a lot of variables here.
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