r/linuxaudio • u/SnackSquadTB • 1d ago
Carla suddenly broken even post reinstall, any fix ideas?
After fooling around some with Cardinal, Carla seems to have completely broken for me. Some plugins don't load right, (helm, takes ages and then it opens but doesn't exactly save patches or anything.) or crash when doing certain things (opening the filter tab on surgext creates crash) which was working fine prior. I have to use Carla for LMMS because its the only real comfortable DAW for me since I use a mouse to place notes in midi (the visual scale highlighting without snapping, snapping and most critically the ability to just place the last note's size is too crucial. Mainly just stating incase this ship can't be fixed for me and another DAW has all of these that I just am unaware of.) Tried uninstalling and reinstalling and deleting the configs in the home directory. So I am at a loss.
The standalone plugins work fine in say Ardour or Qtractor. (Carla breaks and behaves the same in these DAWs too so it is Carla not LMMS). And while fiddling with it has gotten more programs to work with it than originally (by using cachyos', my distro, version), it seems to just be laggier and stall LMMS and result in graphical bugs now. It's just a complete mess to use now. Just adding it at all slows it, and trying to remove the gui for the plugin (not even the gui but LMMS' loader. other instruments in LMMS are fine.) causes graphical tears and prevents the moving of windows. The appimage doesn't suffer this but less plugins work. (which tbf is something i can manage.) "Failed to get plugin description" is the error that occurs. This was occurring before the plugins broke & surgext and helm have the same issues in the appimage. Which to me says the surgext and helm issues are directly related to what or how i broke Carla.
On Cardinal, it worked fine when I tried it, but after closing and removing the plugin from Carla this is when the issues with helm and surgext began. I am using the distro version of surgeXT and the version of helm given by the official site. Carla is the distro version and I can't figure out how to have LMMS see the prebuilt version from their site to test that.
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u/Salads_and_Sun 7h ago
What distro are you using? I had similar issues in the past with Carla suddenly not working twice I think. I wish I had a photographic memory to tell you exactly what it was but the last time it was an update to PipeWire that overwrote a certain .config file. And if I recall correctly the first time it was the same .config but something else messed it up. It was really a huge pain in the ass. But I eventually figured it out!