Hello, I recently switched to Linux (Fedora 43) and struggled for a few days with getting Renoise to work on that system, so for the edification of my fellow noobs, here is the course of action that led me to success;
Foreword
I do not know much about audio on Linux; this is not a full guide but rather just the few steps that allowed me to get Renoise to work starting from a fresh Fedora 43 install. If you tinkered with your system a bit, chances are your setup is a bit different so you may have other problems and/or need other fixes.
RealTime priority threads
When starting Renoise, you may be greeted with the following error message;
Failed to create a RealTime priority thread for ALSA. Will create a non RT thread instead...
This is just a matter of setup, and that setup can be done automatically by the realtime-setup package, so install it;
sudo dnf install realtime-setup
This will create a realtime group, that is allowed to create a RealTime priority thread. You also need to add your user to that group, and also to the audio group;
sudo usermod -a -G audio YOUR_USERNAME
sudo usermod -a -G realtime YOUR_USERNAME
This should fix the error message about RealTime priority thread.
Note: if you’re on Arch btw, there is a similar fix
Crackling sound
Even after fixing the first issue, you may experience warped sound when running Renoise, as if there was something like a ringmod over everything.
If you start from a fresh install, chances are you do not have a local pipewire config file for your user (it is supposed to be in ~/.config/pipewire/). If so, copy the one from /usr/share/pipewire;
cp /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf ~/.config/pipewire/
(you may also have to create ~/.config/pipewire first)
This config file will be where you define the quantum size with which pipewire will interact with renoise. You can also see what quantum size is actually used by running pw-top in parallel with Renoise. If the sound is crackling, there may be two explanations;
- You experience xruns; there will be shown in the ERR column of
pw-top. I have not encountered this issue but as far as I know they could be solved by adjusting the quantum size defined in the pipewire.conf file - There is a mismatch between pipewire’s quantum size and Renoise’s buffer size (that was that in my case); to fix that, go to Renoise’s preferences and set the buffer size to pipewire’s quantum size
And voilĂ , that should be it