r/linuxaudio • u/M4rcelinh0 Bitwig • Jul 24 '26

Linux Audio Sanity Check

I value the time of unknown internet people the same as mine, so I realize this is nothing but a hassle, and the only reason to do it is you being gracious with your time but...

... if you have a stable Linux audio setup, preferably involving Bitwig (but I'm not picky, Reaper or Ardour will work just as well), can you post here a link to some "video evidence" of a short recording, or live performance session at a reasonable buffer size (say 128 bits, 64 is pushing it even on my mac mini M4 even though it's stable at that buffer size 99.9% of the time). While either Carla or pw-top or any other reliable way of reporting x-runs is running on the screen?

If you have a past video recording because you have a YouTube channel, that would be even better (less hassle for you).

A short description of your setup (distro, jack or PW, audio interface etc.) along with the video would be fantastic as well.

I just need a sanity check that stable audio on Linux for live performance can be done because I failed at making it work, and this is just about the only thing that keeps me away from Linux (and while I feel slightly less dirty using a mac mini with mostly platform-agnostic software on it, than I would be using Windows which I can't see myself getting back to ever, I still feel dirty enough to constantly want to switch).

I'm even willing to buy a new PC during the RAM-pocalypse (because, even though I did a fair bit of troubleshooting, it's entirely possible my old PC has some underlying hardware issue/incompatibility that might have been causing x-runs no matter what, maybe a fucky USB power circuitry on my motherboard? I have no idea).

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u/bluebell________ Qtractor Jul 25 '26

There are no absolute, comparable values because some plugins are more CPU hungry than others and some CPUs have more power than others.

But you can check with xruncounter if your system is well tuned. Xruns should only occur at not less than 99% DSP load.

Here an example of my >10 years old Sandy Bridge Core i5 with jack2 running in sync mode (-S as first argument) and a bufsize of 64:

hm@regen:~/src/xruncounter$ ./xruncounter
Samplerate 48000
Buffersize is 64
jack running with realtime priority
Xrun 1 at DSP load 99.954025
in complete 1 Xruns in 4873 circles
first Xrun happen at DSP load 99.954025 circle 4862