13 Feb
2026
13 Feb
'26
10:43 p.m.
I went ahead and put issues on pipewire and csound's repos. Turns out, in csound 7
there is a new pipewire backend, so when that comes out I can use that and see what
happens. In the meantime, alsa and pulse both work fine so I can rely on that and render
to disk.
Thanks for the suggestions, they were helpful!
Feb 5, 2026 4:44:42 PM Nils Tonnätt <ntonnatt(a)ccrma.Stanford.EDU>DU>:
Did you try setting the buffer size with the
PIPEWIRE_LATENCY environment variable? What you describe sounds like it should work and
should be reported to the pipewire developers, but maybe that gets it running for now.
-- Nils
On 2/5/26 11:06 AM, Brandon Hale wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Has anyone been using csound with -+rtaudio=jack while using pipewire as their jack
backend? I've found that it leads to some weirdness, including not playing back sound
at all sometimes (this was happening in non-predictable ways). Also, it seems to require
the -B buffer size to be 2048 for my machine, even though pw-top says it's running at
1024 as its buffer size.
>
> Csound has been working great using -+rtaudio=pulse, but when I want to use it for
live midi stuff, I definitely will need to use the -+rtaudio=alsa, or -+rtaudio=jack for
that lower latency.
>
> Thank you again for your help,
> Brandon Hale
>