Me documenting my issues installing sonic-pi on arch.
https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/sonic_pi_music
For context, I use pulseaudio, not alsa.
After running: yay -S sonic-pi
The default sonic-pi package from community failed to launch because of JACK errors; errorlog
JACK is running in realtime mode, but you are not allowed to use realtime scheduling.
Please check your /etc/security/limits.conf for the following line
and correct/add it if necessary:
@audio - rtprio 99
After applying these changes, please re-login in order for them to take effect.
You don't appear to have a sane system configuration. It is very likely that you
encounter xruns. Please apply all the above mentioned changes and start jack again!
connect(2) call to /dev/shm/jack-1000/default/jack_0 failed (err=No such file or directory)
JACK is running in realtime mode, but you are not allowed to use realtime scheduling.
Please check your /etc/security/limits.conf for the following line
and correct/add it if necessary:
@audio - rtprio 99
After applying these changes, please re-login in order for them to take effect.``
After adding that line to /etc/security/limits.conf and restarting, it errored with:
JACK is running in realtime mode, but you are not allowed to use realtime scheduling.
Your system has an audio group, but you are not a member of it.
Please add yourself to the audio group by executing (as root):
usermod -a -G audio sean
So, I ran: sudo usermod -aG audio "$(whoami)"
Should be noted that the arch wiki says to instead manually add your user to the realtime group, but sonic-pi needs you to be running this manually, so, not going to do that.
After restarting:
$ groups
docker users video audio wheel
After that, running sonic-pi causes this error:
connect(2) call to /dev/shm/jack-1000/default/jack_0 failed (err=No such file or directory)
could not open driver .so '/usr/lib/jack/jack_net.so': libcelt0.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
could not open driver .so '/usr/lib/jack/jack_firewire.so': libffado.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I use pulseaudio instead of alsa. Seems that JACK works better with alsa (i.e. it has a backend for it, see man jackd).
Doesn’t seem that there’s a jack daemon running in the background, not sure if there should be:
[ ~ ] $ ps -ef | grep jack
sean 1959 1934 0 11:14 pts/9 00:00:00 grep jack
I found the solution to this on this issue; which is to run jackd and qjackctl manually:
$ cat "$(which sonic-pi-run)"
#!/bin/bash
jackd -R -d alsa -d hw:1 &
qjackctl & # (yay -S qjackctl)
# wait for jackd and qjackctl to be up
sleep 5
sonic-pi # block
# kill background jobs
kill -15 $(jobs -p)
If something is already using hw:1 (e.g. you have mpv playing some audio), this causes jackd to not be able to use hw:1, so it fails to acquire that, and sonic-pi fails with an error again.
Without qjackctl, it seems that this causes pulseaudio to break… ? and it becomes ‘dummy output’:
So, what I typically do is:
- make sure I’ve used
pulseaudio at least once since the computer has started (just play some song in mpv and then quit) - quit everything that is using
pulseaudio actively - run
sonic-pi-run (the script above)
And then, when I exit, pulseaudio takes back over.
Success!
Downsides:
- Have to be a bit careful about mistakenly opening multiple instances of
sonic-pi. If I open it and then quit quickly, something may have been acquired but not released, which causes pulseaudio to become ‘dummy output’, or jack to fail to acquire hw:1. - ‘breaks’ system audio/
pulseaudio while sonic-pi is open, so its the only thing that can use audio
References: