Zrythm 1.0 Released For Powerful Open-Source Digital Audio Workstation

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zrythm 1.0 Released For Powerful Open-Source Digital Audio Workstation

Zrythm 1.0 released today as a big milestone for this open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software that caters from professional users down to beginners...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zrythm-1.0

[Mitch]

Can we just install this software on Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. and be ready to go or do we need some kind of RT/kernel tweaks or special distros to get latency down?

I've wanted to dabble in audio again but I've been out of the loop since I joined the Linux community years ago.

[Colocqui]

Can we just install this software on Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. and be ready to go or do we need some kind of RT/kernel tweaks or special distros to get latency down?

I've wanted to dabble in audio again but I've been out of the loop since I joined the Linux community years ago.

From my experience, the only thing I'd look out for is intel p-states driver. Purge that evil away. Otherwise Linux audio is pretty great. I am using it professionally.

[ayumu]

Pairs well with PREEMPT_RT now available in mainline Linux kernel 6.12 onward.

A realtime enabled kernel is generally available as an alternative kernel package in most distributions' own repositories.

It should be the default for workstation installs, but alas.

[tenchrio]

Can we just install this software on Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. and be ready to go or do we need some kind of RT/kernel tweaks or special distros to get latency down?

I've wanted to dabble in audio again but I've been out of the loop since I joined the Linux community years ago.

Ubuntu studio is geared towards this type of use.
But you can easily install the Low-latency kernel and all Studio packages onto a normal Ubuntu install.
With Ubuntu 24.04, the generic kernel has also started to take on parts of the low latency kernel (and eventually the low latency one will be phased out entirely).

Honestly it is pretty easy to do audio workloads on Linux now. Pipewire has made the JACK struggle non existent (especially if you wanted to run a system that also ran Pulse for other purposes like gaming) and that was honestly the hardest part when switching to Linux (my midi equipment and focusrite worked out of the box, no need to install drivers).

[caligula]

Ubuntu studio is geared towards this type of use.
But you can easily install the Low-latency kernel and all Studio packages onto a normal Ubuntu install.
With Ubuntu 24.04, the generic kernel has also started to take on parts of the low latency kernel (and eventually the low latency one will be phased out entirely).

Honestly it is pretty easy to do audio workloads on Linux now. Pipewire has made the JACK struggle non existent (especially if you wanted to run a system that also ran Pulse for other purposes like gaming) and that was honestly the hardest part when switching to Linux (my midi equipment and focusrite worked out of the box, no need to install drivers).

Which one is better? Arch or Ubuntu Studio?

Arch
Kernel 6.12 with full official support for RT
Pipewire 1.2.6 with official support for async processing
Carla 2.5.9
Native quickly launch is DAW apps

Ubuntu Studio LTS
Kernel 6.8 without official RT support, only NIH Canonical patches
Pipewire 1.0.5 without support for async processing
Carla 2.5.8
Slow snaps developed with NIH Canonical technology

[sb56637]

Can we just install this software on Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. and be ready to go or do we need some kind of RT/kernel tweaks or special distros to get latency down?

You do need to make quite a few low-level tweaks, but your distro's standard kernel will probably work just fine.

The most important tweak is to use Pipewire with JACK emulation (unless you will only use some app that natively uses Pipewire). And then Pipewire needs at least one config tweak to reduce its latency time. There are of course a million ways to skin a cat, but my preference is to do it by creating a file named low-latency.conf (name doesn't matter) in /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/ with the following content:

context.properties = {
    default.clock.quantum = 256
}​

After that there are several other tweaks with varying levels of importance to improve the system's capability of processing audio events with low latency, I like this tool that checks your system's configuration and offers suggestions to tweak a bunch of other low-level stuff: https://codeberg.org/rtcqs/rtcqs

BTW all of these tweaks are what I include out-of-the-box for low latency audio with my SpiralLinux spin on Debian. You just need to enable the performance CPU governor which is not the default since most users just want optimal battery life:
sudo systemctl enable cpupower.service && sudo systemctl start cpupower.service

Overall I'm really happy with the way a modern Linux system can be configured with Pipewire to achieve a no-compromises general purpose desktop system (support for normal apps that expect PulseAudio support) that also works great as a low-latency audio workstation without jumping through any hoops or having competing audio sub-systems with bridges like in the bad old days of PulseAudio + JACK.

[tenchrio]

Which one is better? Arch or Ubuntu Studio?

Arch
Kernel 6.12 with full official support for RT
Pipewire 1.2.6 with official support for async processing
Carla 2.5.9
Native quickly launch is DAW apps

Ubuntu Studio LTS
Kernel 6.8 without official RT support, only NIH Canonical patches
Pipewire 1.0.5 without support for async processing
Carla 2.5.8
Slow snaps developed with NIH Canonical technology

On Ubuntu (studio) you can install mainline kernels to use and switch between newer versions of kernels (including 6.12).
You can use Rob Savour's Pipewire ppa to get Pipewire to version 1.2.6-1.
Kxstudios (creators of Carla) even provide a repository for Debian and Ubuntu to install newer versions (which are tested for Ubuntu and Debian).
And granted snaps suck, however not all applications are snaps (some are still good old deb) and you can just setup flathub/packs on Ubuntu (I don't think a single DAW I installed has ever been a Snap, a lot of them are just deb and the main one I use is Reaper which is installed through an official install script just like Zrythm). By the way there exist official install instructions for Arch by Snapcraft and snapd is on the second page of the AUR when listed by popularity (seems like Arch users want Snaps lol).

Also don't compare a rolling release with an LTS release. The latest Ubuntu Studio 24.10 has Pipewire 1.2.4, Carla 2.5.9 and the 6.11 kernel (and 6.12 was released like 6 days ago so it can hardly be called tested). Rolling-release, stable and LTS distro's are an apples to bananas to oranges comparison and honestly just childish if done out of context.

I used to run Arch (btw) but had a couple of times running "sudo pacman -Syu" broke an AUR package that was required for some software part or hardware to function (the last one that broke the camels back was that I could no longer run my Wacom drawing tablet together with my XP-Pen display drawing tablet, nothing I did fixed it, one or the other could not be used, it was at the end of a workday, I just wanted to sculpt on the wacom and texture paint on the XP-pen afterwards so I just opted to reinstall with Ubuntu, which has worked ever since).

The AUR is a PITA but almost required to run some parts of software properly, Carla might be in the actual Arch extra repositories but carla-bridge-win32/64 isn't (and I use it to run Windows VSTs like Room Piano V3 without issue) so you have to hope it is properly maintained in conjunction to the Carla in the extra repo (and an orphaned one is already present in the AUR). Carla-git is also only available in the AUR but hasn't been updated since 2023 (version 2.5.1, so orphaned but no substitute) meanwhile the Carla-git in the kxstudio repositories for Debian/Ubuntu is listed as version 2.6.0~git20240921 (and the Kxstudios repo also updates carla-bridge for me at the same time as Carla, meaning there is less chance of incompatibility, this also means that technically Ubuntu has the most bleeding edge version of Carla available). Carla-bridge-wine32/64 (to use Carla with Wine/Windows programs so you can use those with Linux only plugins) is absent entirely from the AUR.

Now it would be real awkward if the outdated AUR Carla-Git was listed as the Carla dependency you install with the AUR entry for the software of this article: Zrythm, which is actually the case, if you install Zrythm through the AUR you basically get an even older Carla version than the Ubuntu LTS and it conflicts with Carla.... In fairness the Zrythm build is also outdated (still 1.0.0-RC1, we already had RC2 and full release, comments also indicate build failures). You could install the latest version through flathub but then again that is the same with Ubuntu/Debian (or just run the official Zrythm install script that you download from their site but all this kinda shows how the AUR isn't all that it is cracked up to be, and the alternative methods are the same as for Ubuntu).

Base Arch is rather limited in its packages. For certain use cases luck exists you can add the repositories that Arch based distros added back onto a standard install (e.g. Chaotic-AUR from Garuda Linux can be added onto a normal Arch install... but then why not just use Garuda?) but 0 audio focused Arch distributions exist (only one that did died in 2019), for both gaming and hacking you have distro's galore (and arguably if these are your only use cases Arch is a good choice), but for audio production you have to hope that a multitude of random individuals will continue to support the extra packages you need and everything keeps working with each other (or you can just install Ubuntu Studio where said packages are present in the main repository and also build against each other and use the latest if you want more up to date performance or add in additional PPAs which if unstable you can remove with ppa-purge to revert any updated packages back to the official ones).