Re: Using Csound Jack Backend with Pipewire

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 <[email protected]>:

> 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
>>