No Sound from SuperCollider; Linux Mint 22

Installation help
1

Hello,

I've actually already solved this problem, but I thought I would make a post about it in case anyone else is looking for the same solution - or maybe we could get this step added to the install / startup instructions for Linux.

I had a real heck of a time trying to get this working. In short, my problem was that the SuperCollider server, by default, tries to output sound via Jack, but Linux Mint ships with Pipewire (as of 22) or PulseAudio (21 and below). I was able to get it working with Pipewire by installing pipewire-jack and adding the line Server.program = "pw-jack scsynth"; to the SuperCollider startup file. I also installed qpwgraph to make sure it was routing the audio to the correct place, but that might be an optional step.

So if anyone else is on a Linux distro that uses Pipewire (you can use inxi -A in the terminal to check) and cannot get any sound of SuperCollider, please try the above. If you're using PulseAudio I think you might need to route Jack through PulseAudio via some other program (cadence?) but I was not able to get any of that to work.

2

Can you confirm if you have WirePlumber as a session manager? And, on what file you entered that line on? I did not have that problem on Garuda Linux (Arch based), but wonder why that is (both the problem and the absence of it).

3

Yes, WirePlumber is installed. I originally started on Mint 21.3 with PulseAudio, but upgraded to Mint 22 (which came with a switch to Pipewire) while trying to get this to work.

I only started getting sound out of SuperCollider after adding that one line though. I have it in the SuperCollider startup file ~/.config/SuperCollider/startup.scd, above the s.reboot call that was added by the ansible playbook.

4

Thanks for sharing this fix - As a new user, I found this info really helpful for dealing with Pipewire on Linux Mint. It’s great to have such clear instructions....