Not sure how many of you will care about this (except for Adam Holquist), but… I’ve just taken a long look at the newest release of Ubuntu Studio for Linux. In fact, I wrestled it to the ground, and here’s what I learned.

The biggest change is that they’ve managed to harmonize PulseAudio and JACK under the same roof, pretty much out of the box. Also, PulseAudio sources and sinks show up as ALSA capture and playback ports in (eg.) Patchage or other patchbay tools, which is a huge convenience and long overdue.

As to interfaces: if you’re using only one external sound card/audio interface, it’s going to work really well for you without much fiddling around. And the fiddling around is pretty much concentrated in an app called “Ubuntu Studio Controls”, which pretty much takes the place of all the configuration that most of us used to do in QJackCtl or some other pretty face for JACK. They have also provided an app called Carla that takes the place of whatever effects-rack application you’ve been using, and promises to support Windows VSTs. I haven’t tried that yet, but will report back once I have.

I, unfortunately, use two external interface devices — a Scarlett 18i20 that I configure as the main sound card, and an iConnectMIDI4+ to grab audio and MIDI from iPads. That — along with exceedingly poor documentation of Ubuntu Studio Controls — cost me a couple hours of head-scratching. Here’s what I finally figured out (or didn’t):

It’s easiest to think of Ubuntu Studio Controls (USC) as a replacement for QJackCtl that fires up at boot time. JACK is configured via the USC interface. USC allows you to configure one sound card/interface as the “JACK Master”, which is basically the primary sound card you used to specify either at the command line or in a GUI like QJackCtl. USC also lets you set numbers of channels, sample rates, and so on, just like any friendly interface to JACK. And again, if that’s all you need to do, you’ll love this thing. Other conveniences include a checkbox that will cause USC to automatically load ajmidid at boot time, and another that you enable to cause USC to hot-plug any USB audio devices you connect post-boot. This latter is the cause of some trouble, as we shall see.

There is also a listbox that lets you tell JACK about other soundcards you’d like to use, but it’s important to note that it only shows *internal* sound cards (that is, those that are part of whatever hardware you’re running Ubuntu Studio on). It does not detect, or allow you to configure, other interfaces that are supported in software.

And there’s one respect in which USC is deceptive. I use an iConnectMIDI4+ to talk back and forth with two iPads and to send MIDI to a shifting population of hardware synths. To get audio from the iPads into the Linux box, I use the alsa_in drivers. If the hot-plug-all-my-USB-stuff checkbox is checked, it creates JACK ports for the devices but does not seem to load any drivers. The result is that the devices show up in (eg.) Patchage, but don’t actually pass any audio. It’s quite possible that I missed a trick here, and that it’s possible to load the drivers somehow automatically, but if there is such a trick I have yet to find it — and again, the USC documentation is weak.

I have not yet figured out much about Carla, except that it does seem to offer a patchbay similar to Patchage and a rack-type metaphor similar to Calf Rack. If in fact it offers good VST hosting, that’d be a thing. Haven’t tried that yet, though. Another side note: this seems to be the first version of Ubuntu that will run Giada without crashing (and I think Giada has a *lot* of promise).

Obviously this is just a superficial rundown, but it should be enough to let you decide whether you want to make use of USC or not (I wish I could offer advice on uninstalling it, but I can’t, yet). Overall it seems like a win.