I’m curious to hear from people who are successfully using sound (mainly interested in playing recorded files and recording with a microphone) on any linux distribution. I had things working well for about a year but now it’s broken and I’m not entirely sure why. Frankly, we can’t do anything (in a speech perception and production lab) without sound and PsychoPy has really become a nightmare the last few years for us. I am willing to do the python development work to improve PsychoPy’s support for sound on Linux, but it would be helpful to have a clearer picture of what other people have working and how idiosyncratic my headaches have been.
So: if you have PsychoPy successfully working with sound on Linux, I’d love it if you could tell me:
What kind of physical audio device are you using?
Do you use PTB, SoundDevice, PYO, or PyGame?
What distribution do you use?
Do you use Gnome or KDE?
Wayland or X11?
Do you use PipeWire, JACK, or PulseAudio?
Does it work well or do you have strange behavior (e.g. recording a wav file results in a file with 128 tracks, Sound objects will only play 44.8k sample rate, stereo files or experiments crash at run time, etc.)
I’ll go first and describe my last known-working configuration.
What kind of physical audio device are you using: Steinberg UR-22 mkii usb audio interface
Do you use PTB, SoundDevice, PYO, or PyGame: PTB
What distribution do you use: Debian 12
Do you use Gnome or KDE: KDE, I can’t even have GNOME desktop installed or audio wouldn’t work.
Wayland or X11? X11 so that experiments can position and hide the mouse
Do you use PipeWire, JACK, or PulseAudio: I have to uninstall PipeWire and install PulseAudio to make sound work. This is also the reason I can’t use GNOME desktop, Ubuntu, PopOS, Redhat, etc. because they use PipeWire.