I am setting up a system for audio production. I initially wiped Ubuntu 22.10 and installed Ubuntu Studio 22.10, but discovered that they did not implement Pipewire as the default server, as happened in the mainline version - I had already played around with it and I want to go with the future rather than past, so I just finished putting regular Ubuntu back. I considered trying to just switch Studio over to Pipewire myself, but they've put so much infrastructure into controlling Jack and tuning the kernel, and I won't be running billions of plugins or anything, so I figured, let's just install their audio app collection to the regular one and see if we have problems first.
I've got Bitwig installed and it's working fine, I'm using a Scarlett 6i6 and all inputs and outputs are visible and usable under Jack as you would expect. This is actually a very minor quibble, but it's quibble nonetheless.
To wit, there's this annoying thing about the OS audio Settings (Bitwig sees Pipewire so might as well stay native, right?), which is that you can only choose various X.1 Surround settings as your speaker AND Input configuration, and when you choose your inputs in Bitwig, the names reflect the Surround functions - [audio device]_FL/FR/LFE, for instance, if you choose 2.1, rather than Input1/Input2/Input3 etc.
So basically, in order to let Bitwig see all the available inputs on the interface, I need to tell the OS that I'm using "4.1 Capture" as my input, which is absolutely absurd. I would prefer to have the OS consider these to just be four (actually six, but two are digital and therefore useless to me) and name them accordingly.
It's less irritating on the Outputs, because I am in fact running a 2.1 monitor system, BUT it's a stereo feed going to the sub, which sends the signal on to the monitors, so if the OS is mucking around with freq splitting, that's a thing I also do not want.
If this is just a current quirk of Pipewire because of how it's wrangling Pulseaudio into the picture I can definitely live with it - in the bigger picture, Pipewire is beautiful and simple compared to the QJACKCTL world I stepped into about ten years ago. I am 100% functional, it's just a pebble in the system's shoe, and this is Linux where we walk on legos every morning to stay tough.
That said, it's also possible that all I need to do is familiarize myself with some specific config file I don't know about yet in order to make this act exactly the way I want it to. Or this might even be the one where I can actually go in there and make a little code contribution of my own, who knows. One of these days I'll find one I can handle lol