Sonicpi does not work with AMD processor on Ubuntu

Hello,

I have a hard drive on which I have Ubuntu Linux installed. I have installed SonicPi from the Ubuntu repositories. If I run this on a machine having Intel processor, Sonic Pi works fine! But if I run this on a machine with AMD processor, SonicPi fails to start. Am I right in narrowing down the problem to specific hardware? Here’s the snippet from the logs, the messages keep repeating. Any help in getting this to work is appreciated!

Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server request channel
jack server is not running or cannot be started
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server request channel
jack server is not running or cannot be started
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
Cannot create RT messagebuffer thread: Operation not permitted (1)
Retrying messagebuffer thread without RT scheduling
Messagebuffer not realtime; consider enabling RT scheduling for user
no message buffer overruns
Cannot create RT messagebuffer thread: Operation not permitted (1)
Retrying messagebuffer thread without RT scheduling
Messagebuffer not realtime; consider enabling RT scheduling for user
no message buffer overruns
Cannot create RT messagebuffer thread: Operation not permitted (1)
Retrying messagebuffer thread without RT scheduling
Messagebuffer not realtime; consider enabling RT scheduling for user
no message buffer overruns
ALSA: Cannot open PCM device alsa_pcm for playback. Falling back to capture-only mode
JackTemporaryException : now quits...
Cannot initialize driver
JackServer::Open failed with -1
Failed to open server
Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server request channel
jack server is not running or cannot be started
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock

Hi @kphs,

EDIT: Oh, I forgot: Welcome to the forum and to Sonic Pi!!

One thing is, that if you installed Sonic Pi (SP) from via apt (i. e. from a repository) you must have installed a very old version (something like 2.1 or 2.3, I am not sure).

The other thing is: jack server is not running or cannot be started says that Jack (the Linux Audio Server) is not running. Without it SP won’t start.

So you could compile SP (there is help here to compile recent SP versions on Ubuntu) and you should get Jack running (which I recommend should be the first thing to do because even the old SP version should be usable).

Hope that helps to narrow down the problems.

Thanks @Martin! I will try to compile SonicPi from sources, but it looks like there are lot of dependencies to be resolved and quite an arduous task.

But do you have any clues why my current SonicPi (which is 2.10) would work fine when running on an Intel platform, but fail on an AMD platform? Once a software is installed I was presuming that it might work fine irrespective of underlying hardware, which might be a wrong assumption.

It looks like the permissions to run jackd in real time for your system may be wrong, Ubuntu install for QjackCtl (which includes jackd) asks you and confdigures it on install. You may find this article helpful
https://jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html
Building for Linux is getting easier, and once Sonic Pi 3.2 is released at the end of the month I think there will be some scripts and or articles forthcoming to show how to use the new cmake based building process.

Hi @kphs,

I am sure that you will need Jack running to start SP, so I am also quite sure that this has nothing to do with your hardware. It is certainly a good idea to follow Robin’s hint. If you need some information about Jack and its configuration Tutorial: JACK Audio Server might be a good and concise startiing point. The HowToJACKConfiguration might also be a good starting point if you’ll use qjackctl as GUI allthough I at some point couldn’t start Jack properly with it so I just used the command line (this is quite some time ago and I did not investigate but as I generally since then never had an issue starting Jack I use a simple shell script doing some things whenever I want to start Jack).