[Jack-Devel] Jack Problems

[David Nielson]

On Fri, 2019-03-22 at 18:30 -0400, liebrecht at grossmann-venter.com wrote:
> Dont want to sound disrespectful, but I need to ask.
> 
> Who are the experts that will be using Jack.
> 
> I havent been on an audio related usergroup where anything positive has 
> been said (except largely what I posted) about jack. By large 95% of 
> users complain about jack.
> 

It's just selection bias. I'll write more positive things, I promise. :)

> I wrote some of the most complex numerical software on Linux for 
> clusters. I am well educated with three postgraduate degrees one of 
> which is numerical methods. Audio has been a lifelong interest, and 
> still is semi-professionally as I have been a performing musician my 
> entire life.
> 
> If I cannot make sense of it and become an "expert" who will unless they 
> have special information. Do the expert study the coded, basically 
> become a developer. ?
> 

I started with Linux much later (2005) but my approach was very different. I've never
looked at the source code to either jackd implementation. My career with Linux revolved
around system administration tasks and doing weird-but-interesting experiments involving
doing things over the network that should never be done over the network. I consider myself
an "expert" in using Jack, either by itself or with Pulseaudio, unless firewire is at play;
I have no experience there. My expertise is in knowing the right things to ask Google, from
having built the whole Linux audio stack from source many, many times, and from discovering
basically every way to do it wrong before finding the right solution.

It's just like learning a piece of music: you're going to play it wrong a bunch of times in
a bunch of ways before you play it right.

Don't be afraid to embarrass yourself in #lad either. We're a friendly bunch; just be
polite.

> With software, a lack of proper specification and scriptable advice, 
> leads to no one being able to come to grips unless they go study the 
> code - even if the application is dead simple. I dont want to do that 
> and shouldnt need to as just need to be a user in this case that wants 
> to become an expert if possible.

Documentation is lacking. I offered to help a while ago but the wiki was unusable for some
reason. (Is that still the case?) Maybe I'll start one of my own, focusing on specific use
cases people might encounter. I've probably run into all of them at some point...

David Nielson