Do you happen to have a good reference on using the Pi3 for audio? I spent a lot of Saturday trying to make mine do some stuff, and while a lot of the technical snafus were the usual sort, I did end up burning a lot of time googling around until I finally found someone who suggested turning off CPU performance scaling. Which was a forehead slap moment for me after that, but, still, it'd be nice if there was somewhere I could go that had that stuff more laid out.
(As implied, I've googled already. A lot.)
(The Pi3 seems to have more than enough CPU power for it to do what I want but I was having trouble just routing audio in a USB mic straight out to the speakers without dropouts and failures two or three times a second, even though the CPU is barely at 10%. I think turning off the scaling seemed to fix that, though I ran out of time just as I tried that to be sure.)
You may want to check out some of the posts at https://autostatic.com/ and the forums for zynthian https://discourse.zynthian.org/ . If memory serves both sites focused on some of the version 2 revisions of the Pi, but they may also help with your board as well.
It would be nice if Ubuntu pruned dead / barely working products from their repos. There's an astonishing number of frustratingly bad audio apps in their main repo.
I'd say that's part of their issue, the other side is that they don't seem to track the development of projects all that well. In some cases this simply is shipping old versions with known and long fixed bugs and in other cases they miss the evolution of various projects as maintainers change over. The latter case includes some abandoned/nearly-abandoned standalone tools getting converted to plugins (generally LV2) and receiving more active development.
More active package repositories such as kxstudio seem to resolve at least some of this friction.
I think this has to with community. The Arch community moves pretty fast and forces users to go look up packages online and comment/vote on their state which results in packages being both promoted to default repos and getting thrown out of the default repos.
