PSA: Debian 13's default Pipewire-JACK configuration is broken, and some DAW's like Ardour and Reaper will not work with the JACK setting without user intervention!
If you are a Debian musician and encountered odd behavior when trying to use the JACK backend in Reaper or Ardour, you're not alone!
Debian 13's Pipewire configuration does not properly make Pipewire's JACK emulation discoverable by any DAW that has yet to directly support Pipewire.
I am unsure as to what exactly is wrong with Debian's configuration, but I do know how to work around it at least. To fix:
- Make sure you install the Pipewire-jack package from the defualt debian repos with you preferred package manager/store app. While on every other distro having that package installed is usually enough, on Debian, you have to do an additional step
- The emulated JACK server now needs to be activated upon every opening of the DAW. You can do this manually by adding the command 'pw-jack' before the executable command in the terminal (for example, 'pw-jack reaper' would open Reaper with JACK backend now active).
- To avoid having to do that command manually every time, you'll need to add the pw-jack argument to the start of the command to execute the app. If you have a desktop environment that lets you modify that from right-clicking the DAW in your app launcher, then you just need to add pw-jack to the start of the Command section, and you're good to go! If your DE doesn't let you do that, then you'll need to edit the DAW's .Desktop file, adding pw-jack to the start of the exec= section.
For reaper users specifically, if you want to edit the sample rate when using the JACK backend, you'll have to do that manually as well in the .Desktop file, putting it right after the pw-jack command. This guide goes into detail of what the command needs to be.
I've been seeing multiple posts here over the past few months that are experiencing this issue, so hopefully this helps some people.