[Jack-Devel] Is JACK suitable for this?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 17:09:49 +0200, Robin Gareus wrote:
>The hard part is usually setting up JACK and tweaking a system for low
>latency.

Hi,

IMO setting up jack is no issue at all (assuming there are no other
sound servers installed, that could cause trouble), but I agree that
tweaking the system for lowlatency could be hard, but not necessarily
is hard to do. In my bad and good experiences it depends on luck related
to the mobo and audio device.

If you should have good luck, all you need is a vanilla kernel booted
with 'threadirqs' or a real-time patched
kernel, https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/rt/
and what ever kernel you run, the rtirq script,
https://github.com/rncbc/rtirq .

If you should have bad luck with the hardware, you could try a lot of
other things that might or might not improve audio latency and/or MIDI
jitter. For me migrating from AMD based hardware, to Intel based
hardware and avoiding the usage of a professional, but bad supported RME
PCIe card by an USB class compliant prosumer device was the most
successful step.

"hundreds of audio channels", at least when using Ardour, are no big
deal, even not with an energy-efficient CPU, with less horsepower.
However, I wonder what you consider to be "lowlatency" and what else
apart from the amount of audio channels might have impact on the load.
Some people expect latency way lower, than any usual digital stomp
box or 19" effect provides. 

YMMV!
Ralf

-- 
pacman -Q linux{,-rt{-cornflower,-pussytoes,,-securityink}}|cut -d\  -f2
5.2.11.arch1-1
5.2_rt1-0
5.0.21_rt16-1
5.2.10_rt5-1
4.19.59_rt24-0