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Ubuntu 20.04.1 (upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 -> 18.04 -> 20.04 if that matters)...

I have just done default install plus gnome-session-flashback and other non-audio related packages (Gimp, Blender, etc). Aside from Yoshimi soft synthesizer, I have not intentionally played with or installed any additional audio [things], whatever PulseAudio, ALSA, Jack are.

How would I know if I'm using PulseAudio, ALSA, or Jack? For example dmesg output mentions none of the three, where else do I check?

(needed to move along this question along, as per a follow-up question in the comments)

Martin Moops
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1 Answers1

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If you are able to hear audio from things like the web browser (ie youtube), you are almost certainly running pulse. However, to be sure, try running

pactl list

on the terminal. If pulse isn't running, you'll get an error, or if it is running, it will give you a lot of information, which we can ignore for now.

For Jack, qjackctl is a very useful GUI app for controlling jack and doing audio and MIDI routing. When you start it, it will tell you if you're running jack or not.

It's possible to use jack and pulse at the same time, however, this is sometimes fiddly. What this means is that if you can hear web audio, this doesn't tell you whether or not you're running jack. However, it may be the case that when you start jack, all non-jack audio stops.

Depending on your audio app, you may need to tell it to use jack rather than pulse (or alsa). For Yoshimi, this may be under the settings menu, which has tabs for Jack and ALSA.

Les_h
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