[Jack-Devel] Jack Problems

[liebrecht at grossmann-venter.com]

Thanks a lot Ralf,
I am moving to Motu which will really6 ease things up. The Presonus gear 
is not very well thought through, but it is not the problem here.

I am hesitant to use jack as it almost never work consistently, 
pulseaudio at least works. If I uninstall pulseaudio I will lose all my 
bluetooth enabled ipads and galaxys etc. That works just great. Pulse 
has other problems being a systemd applicat5ion there is a lot of built 
in garbage I agree, but wihout it I dont think anything can take its 
place currently.

If jack would just be deterministic, I can work with it. I wrote some of 
the most complex software on this planet, but it is difficult for me to 
understand jack as it has no consistent specification. I have read all I 
could find on the web, and it is involved and well done, but with no 
consistent specification a uesr can actually get a handle on how to use 
it creatively.

I used pulse and jack together for about a month with no problems, then 
jacki just went awol for no apparent reason with no updates or software 
installed in that period. I dont know what triggered it.

Since you say pulse does it, what is the exact mechanism by which pulse 
interfere with jack. I f there were a rigorous specification for jack, 
it would be easy to understand and work through these problems.

I would love for jack to work, but it keeps biting me, and i am willing 
to understand it but it seems to be etherware, which works very well 
just outside userspace.

As I understand it jack should be an either/or/add switch for audio 
streams but that functionality is not properly declared. I found that 
jack seemingly does not really do direct hardware access, which further 
complicates things. If it in principle rely on alsa then those 
interfaces needs to be very well documented how it communicates with 
alsa, what the exceptions and conditions are etc.

Without Jack Linuxaudio becomes rigid and an everyone competes for the 
same port type of situation, that is why I stick to it, but if there was 
e.g. just a hard patchbay application that would replace jack I would 
use it in an instant. It would not be elegant but would clearly route 
signals by hand.

That is maybe what is needed until jack becomes user friendly.




On 2019-03-22 03:46, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 03:06:07 -0400, wrote:
>> The jack community must start doing something not to endorse qjackctl.
>> It creates way more trouble than it solves.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> you have bad luck, but usually qjackctl does it's job without causing
> trouble.
> 
>> The 1818VSL flawlessly works at least within its specs. I can use it 
>> on
>> linux to play through it with pulseaudio, but NOT with jack.
> 
> A while back I tested the 1818VSL with jack2 and it worked without
> issues for me. On my machine pulseaudio wasn't installed, still isn't
> installed and it unlikely will ever be installed.
> 
> I can't test the 1818VSL on an up to date install, because a while back
> I tested a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 2nd gen, too and decided to buy the
> 18i20. The 18i20 can be used with lower latency than the 1818VSL and
> important to me, it can be used with my iPads, too. However, the
> 1818VSL worked here. Btw. both are using the same class compliant
> driver.
> 
> Could it be that pulseaudio grabs the device on your machine?
> 
> If you should need pulseaudio, you perhaps need to learn how to handle
> two sound servers for one install, if not consider to remove it.
> 
> Regards,
> Ralf