[LAD] "El-Cheapo" software-only equivalent

[rom]

Hi, last night i finally managed to try jackd+alsa_in and yes, it works!
I used an intermittent beep as a test signal. One thing i've noticed, is
that the master stream is about 450-500 frames early in respect to the
slave streams, while the gap among the 3 slave streams is within 35-40
frames. I'll try to tune things up a bit, and see if it get better.

> theoretically your tool could achieve better sound quality than alsa_in,
> because it doesnt need to be realtime. (it could also do perfect phase
> alignment)
>   
...hmm, it would require some serious math skills that i don't have :-( 
And moreover, i don't think it would make much sense to seek for sound
quality in this context.
It is enough to be able to get something barely decent, using only some
junk computer parts that were laying around in your attic (...the first
version was able to record 4 channels on a Pentium 166 with 24MB of ram
:-D )

> so the basic question is, if you are still motivated to continue working
> on it
yeah, actually, i had already stopped working on the core functionality
of my program because it was just good enough for my purpose. Now that i
know of the existence of alsa_in, i don't think i'm going to release a
new project to confuse people even more.

Instead, now i was wondering if it could be useful to move the alsa_in
functionality to a lower level, like an alsa plugin. But from what you
said, i guess the alsa_in algorithm prefers the "always-on" behaviour of
jack (it starts capturing immediately as you start the daemon), instead
of the start-stop behaviour of a typical pure-alsa recording
application. So, i think the answer is no, and alsa_in is simply the
perfect tool i've never heard of before! Aaargh :-D
(...well, i started putting together my program in dec-2008, so maybe it
just wasn't there at the time...)

thanks very much to all of you.

i'll see if i can create some documentation to make that
"alsa_in/alsa_out" tools less ignored, instead of releasing a new
software. Obviously, with all the proper disclaimers stating that it's
not a substitute for a real multitrack ;-)

bye
alberto