I have a question about JACK. I've been looking through posts in the forum, but I don't see much luck (or maybe I just see all the problems) with JACK and Solus. Is this a over generalization? I just got a nice pair of headphones and wanted to get the best experience out of them with my Solus setup.

I have been trying and failing along two routes:

  1. pulseaudio-equalizer: Seemed like the output device it created had some artifacts and also it would not pick up applications that would open up and play audio (like Discord).
  2. pulseeffects (flatpak): I had some success here, but ultimately I had the same issue with other applications opening and not being able to play audio.

So I've just been editing my daemon.conf file to tweak it for a better sound quality, but I want to do some playing with EQ. I read a little about JACK and the implementation looks very interesting with latency being one of their buzz words.

Anyone replaced PulseAudio with JACK and had a good experience? Recommend it?

Any help would be appreciated!

I don't think it is a good thing to do at the moment because I am pretty sure that something broke JACK realtime support a while back and I haven't quite figured out what yet. But apart from this it probably could be done, I don't know exactly how well it would work as it isn't something that I have put in much effort into trying. I just use JACK to the side of PulseAudio for audio production workflows like piping sound from a synth plugin to other plugins, then to the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and then out to my speakers. However, I do have some notes that I have found while trying to use JACK more in day to day usage.

One major issue that you might encounter is that our firefox build doesn't support JACK (might be worth enabling in the future though) which means that you get no sound if you cleanly rip out PulseAudio. To get sound from it (or any other software without JACK support for that matter), you would need to use a converter between between the two audio backends. This can relatively easily be done by using Cadence (I am working on soon getting it into the repo) and then installing pulseaudio-module-jack from the repository. Please note that in my little test session with using it in cadence, it totally messed up my regular PulseAudio setup when not using JACK, so there might be some commitment here to do. I won't take any responsibility if you need to reinstall (like I had to do) to get audio back when not using JACK and the converter. You will also need to, for most applications, need to manually wire every program to the output using software like Cadence or Qjackctl (in the repository).

The short answer really is no, but maybe at the moment. It could work and be very useful because you could pipe all your sound through an equalizer before sending the equalizer output to the speakers. However, at the moment I think you would be relying on conversion programs that may or may not mess with the regular default PulseAudio setup. The piping of sound is great when you need to pipe audio between stuff, but might get in the way of normal day to day usage. There are people out there that are way better with using JACK than I am so they might have much better tips and tricks to using it, but this is my opinion of the situation.

Jacalz Thank you so much for such a detailed explanation of your thoughts and opinions as someone who has messed with JACK and PulseAudio. I'm literally just getting started, and today turned on my Solus box to a black screen after login simply because of some settings in my /.config/pulse/daemon.conf file. I'm still figuring out the basics, but I'm glad there are others like yourself who have tried some avenues.

Cadence, you mentioned that's coming down the line, right?

      Bhibb Oh yes. Cadence needs to have JACK2 in order to work, so I was waiting for it to land first, but then I totally forgot about Cadence. Will post a differential revision later today or tomorrow. Then it’s just up to the core team how fast they review and land it.

        The revision for adding Cadence to the repository is now up, see https://dev.getsol.us/D8963. A bit of further information on the messing up PulseAudio stuff mentioned above, just delete the ~/.pulse/ folder and log in and out to get the default PulseAudio setup back 😀

          Jacalz I stumbled upon this trick last week and it has saved me! Question though, I don't see a ~/.pulse/ folder I see only a ~/.config/pulse/ folder, does that sound right because that's what I've been manipulating and it is recognized by my system.

            6 days later

            Sorry, for the late reply @Bhibb. I was certain that I answered you a little while back, but apparently I was wrong.

            Anyhow, I think it might be cadence that uses ~/.pulse/ so that might be why you aren't seeing it. I haven't been modifying any PulseAudio configs myself and can't really commend on if it is correct or not, but configs are usually ~/.config so it is probably fine.

              Jacalz Thanks for the reply! Can't wait to give cadence a shot when it's in stable.

                  Bhibb I honestly think it might be already. Should have landed yesterday unless I am mistaken 🙂

                      Jacalz I've successfully installed JACK as a PulseAudio plugin on my system and everything seems stable! That guide you posted was very helpful. I have my work cut out for me playing with this new setup. Thanks for your help and Cadence works like a charm!

                      I suppose after some quick playing around I've found that my audio output is much lower than it was with just PulseAudio. I used to listen at about 20%-40% to my music in my headphones, but now it needs to be about 60%-80% but I'm sure it just requires some tweaking somewhere.

                      Also, I've found that my audio controls no longer show up in the Raven drawer in Budgie. So now if I need to control the audio, I need to go directly to the application.

                          Bhibb Thanks for sharing your success. It is great that you found it useful 😀
                          I don't know anything about audio levels, but as you saw, I don't really think that Budgie is hooked up to take advantage of a full JACK setup without a regular PulseAudio configuration. You might have better luck with KDE Plasma there, but I don't know...