Comment by ndiddy

1 day ago

I think the situation has flipped in the past few years. Since Pipewire came out, I haven't had any problems with audio on Linux and I can dial the latency down to single-digit ms. Meanwhile, on Mac audio has gotten far worse, especially since Tahoe. The latency is tens of ms and I get crackling and skipping when there's high CPU usage.

Audio is still broken pretty regularly in davinci resolve on Linux. Sometimes I need to restart the application to make audio work. And I can’t record sound within resolve at all.

It doesn’t help that they only officially support rocky Linux. I use mint. I assume there’s some magic pipewire / alsa / pulseaudio commands I can run that would glue everything together properly. But I can’t figure it out. It just seems so complicated.

  • This sounds like a hardware / firmware problem specific to your particular sound chip / card.

    Similarly, Bluetooth on my Thinkpad T14 is slightly wonky, and it sometimes fails to register a Bluetooth mouse on wake-up (I have to switch the mouse off and back on). This mouse registers fine on my other Linux machines. The logs show a report from a kernel driver saying that the BT chip behaved weirdly.

    Binary-blob firmware, and physical hardware, do have bugs, and there's little an OS can do about that, Linux or otherwise. Macs have less hardware variety and higher prices, which makes their hardware errata lists shorter, but not empty.

    • That’s possible, but the hardware (a rodecaster pro 2 connected over usb) works just fine in other Linux apps. I can record audio in audacity. And I can play back audio in resolve. I just can’t record audio in resolve.

      I think it’s a software issue in how resolve uses the Linux audio stack. But I have no idea how to get started debugging it. I’ve never had any problems with the same hardware in windows, or the same software (resolve) on macOS.

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