Running Renoise on a Chromebook Through Linux

Hello everyone,

I have been running Renoise on my desktop windows pc for a long time now flawlessly. I have not encountered any issues with it on my windows pc, although I am about to embark on a lengthy plane ride and having Renoise on the plane would be a great way for me to pass the time. Due to the un-portable nature of my computer, however, I thought about using a Samsung Chromebook 2 I have. I heard that you can run linux through a chromebook using crouton, and since Renoise is a linux compatible program, I thought it would work.

I was able to get linux installed and I am running ubuntu and xfce smoothly on the machine, however using Renoise has proven to be a little bit of a problem. I downloaded the linux version of renoise and booted it up, only to receive the error message that “No ALSA drivers were found”. Because Renoise does not detect ALSA, no audio can play.This led me to make sure I had ALSA correctly installed on my chromebook, which I am fairly certain I do. I am able to run sound through other programs such as Linux Multimedia Studio, Firefox, and Audacity on the chromebook without a problem. After some tinkering to no avail I tried downloading the windows version of Renoise and running it through Wine to see if that would bypass the ALSA issue. It did, and I was able to run the windows version of Renoise with audio, although when I pressed play the framerate came to a near stop and the audio clipped and paused. The only way to fix this is to turn up the audio latency in the settings, although that led to unworkable latency and a near 5 second delay on any audio feedback.

Anyway, the reason I am posting here is to see if anybody has tried running Renoise through linux on a chromebook and if they have had any success. I am fairly unexperienced with linux and if anybody can point me in the right direction on using Renoise in this nature I would greatly appreciate it. I understand this is a specific question, although any advice or help would be great.

Thanks.

I’ve never used renoise with alsa directly, I always just JACK. I would recommend adding the kxstudio repos, installing cadence and using that as a front end to turn JACK on and off (or use it all the time and bridge everything through JACK). Then just change the output in renoise to JACK.

You could also just use qjackctl instead of cadence but I’ve always found cadence to be much easier and intuitive.

Thank you for the reply. I did try to use jack at one point instead of ALSA through qjackctl. I configured it, although when I tried to launch jack it said it was unable to connect to the jack server. This led me down a rabbit hole of fixes that yielded no success. I will try cadence and see if that works any better, though.

Probably offtopic, but installing Windows is an option as well.

Probably offtopic, but installing Windows is an option as well.

Huh, I didn’t know that was possible. I’m looking into it, and it seems a tad more unstable than running linux on a chromebook. I might try that down the road, but I’m hoping I can get linux working.