@jwcph We're into the weeds a bit because I know nothing about Zorin or how attached you are to it.

But put it this way: if Zorin's arms appear to require twisting, if they have not implemented it in a way that is clearly documented (or else 100% works how Pipewire's devs intended, and therefore Pipewire's documentation will apply)... consider a different distro.

You can also DM me with more specific questions if you end up at a wall, I can probably help.

edit: I've been using NixOS the last year (not recommended for noobs, unless you are already a coder) but fundamentally I like Debian. But I am also willing to build from source (less hard than you might think in many cases) as needed to get bleeding edge stuff - Debian's reliability comes at a cost of everything being slightly older than you get from Ubuntu.

@jwcph Yah, you can tell your apps it's anything you like, and Jack is generally what you like lol

I'm still struggling with native Pipewire a bit, moving anything I've traditionally used the root account for into user accounts is always a brain twister for me. But you always have the option to just use pipewire-alsa or pipewire-jack or pipewire-pulse, generally.

@jwcph I am going to introduce a statement that contradicts someone else's statement, but which I believe to be correct: Pipewire replaces (ie. emulates) Alsa as well as Jack and Pulse.

Opinion now: you should run a distro with Pipewire, and use it. It will take some mental labour, possibly.

Very simplified:

Alsa is fantastic, but can only handle one process feeding it audio at a time, so ends up pretty limited.

Pulseaudio was developed to address that, and generally introduce some much-needed features to the Linux desktop. Its major weakness is latency, it's got tons and tons of latency, and that is completely a no-go for musicians and audio professionals and the like, leading to

Jack, which is rather clunky and not easy to use like Pulse, but is "realtime" capable in terms of performance. It is what we audio perverts have been using for our DAWs and stuff for a long long time.

Jack's major hatefuel is that you have to connect up your inputs and outputs of the card as well as every app, using one of a number of patching manager apps (Qjackctl, Carla I think, uhh.. Cadence was/is another) with varying degrees of ease. Likewise all your midi connections. It was fiddly and pretty much a non-seller to any Windows ASIO or Mac [whatever] users.

This is all more or less solved with Pipewire. Along with the Pipewire server (which seems to prefer to run as a user rather than a system process, presumably for security) you need to run what is called a Session Manager (Wireguard the usual and best, so far as I know) which creates a more or less ASIO-like experience for native Pipewire apps, they just work, and also, as others have said, it emulates the previous three systems, while retaining the realtime or near-realtime performance of Jack.

Bottom line, every previous system had its place, but Pipewire is our master now. It takes care of us, precious.

@jwcph It's not just for synths - it implements the complete MOD devices guitar processing system, for instance, and can be used as a DSP (guitar effects, vocal processing, etc). They implemented an audio-to-midi converter as well, I haven't tested it but it works I'm told.

Best part? You don't need the hardware device, if you've got a Raspberry Pi and any USB audio interface you can test it out, there's a screen-only UI mod and you can connect to that by VNC with any touchscreen device, or just use a mouse. You can also, since all the sound engines are just Linux software, access the native UIs of all the software by VNC.

I have the hardware device, and I do play keys so it's definitely more relevant to my life, but it was building my own that got me excited enough to buy it.

edit: if you decide to get ride of that Akai device, not sure where you're located, but maybe I buy it? Like I said, these controllers have amazing support from Zynthian devs.

@jwcph You know what has amazing support for this device? Zynthian does. I'm planning to pick one up at some point, but Akai's smaller devices have really good driver support for Zynthian's clip launcher, looper, etc.