[linux-audio-dev] Modular Jack patch bay

[Nathaniel Virgo]

Dave Robillard wrote:

>Screenshot:
>http://chat.carleton.ca/~drobilla/patchbay.png
>
>Waiting on the Jack callback issue to make a pre-release.  Anyway,
>basically I need a name for this thing, and any (UI) suggestions anyone
>has.
>
>Eventually it will be a combined jack/alsa patch bay, so it'd be nice if
>the name reflected both jack and alsa, but I'd rather not have "Linux"
>in the title.
>
>Any interface ideas (other than the color of the modules ;) ) are
>welcome... and if anyone has ideas for an elegant
>automatic-module-placement solution, I'd love to hear them.  Right now
>they're just randomly placed.  (Are there known algorithms in graph
>theory for this sort of thing?)
>
>-Dave
>
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>
>
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>
Wow.  That's really cool.  It's exactly what I wanted to do ages ago.
The best names I thought of were JackBay and MetaModular - you're
welcome to either.

Here are some GUI ideas I thought might be cool or useful:

The wires would look even cooler if they were splines, so that they came 
out of their ports horizontally and gracefully curved their way to their 
destination :) It looks cool and feedback loops display better.  (if 
you're using something like a GTK canvas it's pretty easy too)

When ardour is in use I imagine a feature where the output ports of a
program can appear as a seperate module from the input ports would be
handy (so that [ardour output]->[effects chain]->[ardour input] can be 
drawn without a loop).

Being able to shift-drag to move all the wires connected to one port 
directly to another would be really handy sometimes, as would click-drag 
to copy connections (I often find myself doing these things by hand in 
other apps).

Another potentially handy idea is to make it so that if a module is put 
next to another so that the input ports of one line up to the output 
ports of another, they automatically become connected.


A very ambitious idea would be to allow LADSPA plugins to be embedded
into the UI so that to the user it looks as if they've been put straight
into the JACK graph. In reality they would not be connected via JACK at 
all of course.


Anyway, it looks great, I can't wait to try it out.

-Nathaniel