[Jack-Devel] stepping down

[Paul Davis]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 11:50 AM, Benjamin Schmaus <
benjamin.schmaus at gmail.com> wrote:

> + jack-devel
>
> pls see question for Paul below.
>
> On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 8:48 AM Benjamin Schmaus <
> benjamin.schmaus at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  as the years have gone on, although I am still delighted by the
>> technical quality and
>>    the conception of JACK, I no longer think that it is a particularly
>> good idea for most users. There
>>    are times when it is useful
>>
>> Could you elaborate on this?  Curious to know more.
>>
>>
JACK was developed in part because of the absence of a viable plugin API on
Linux. It allowed people to "glue together" whole applications rather than
load plugins into a host. This is pretty cool, no question. But the session
management aspects of it are not that cool, and despite both the JACK
session API and the Non session manager and other things that falktx
(Filipe) have done, the situation for users really hasn't ever gotten to
the point where reloading a "JACK session" comprised of many individual
applications is as easy as it ought to be.

By contrast, we now have a fairly excellent plugin API (LV2) that is
supported by several hosts, a number of which offer up quite different
models of plugin loading, control, management and usage (Contrast, for
example, Ardour, Carla, Qtractor, Non-foo and jalv). I think that most
users are better served by developers creating LV2 plugins and the users
loading them into one or more hosts of their choice (the so-called
"monolithic environment" approach). This allows save+reload to be simple,
fast, and reliable.

There will continue to be times when using JACK to glue together
applications is still a really useful thing, and I hope that JACK will
continue to be there to support those times. But I don't think JACK is
generally the right solution for most users, most of the time. The one big
positive it still offers: multiple applications can access the audio device
at the same time, with low latency and synchronous behaviour. This is an
important feature not offered by ALSA or PulseAudio, and for that reason
alone, JACK remains important. It also the case that JACK is the only
cross-platform system for doing inter-application audio.
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