[LAD] First release of zita-njbridge

[Len Ovens]

On Tue, 5 Aug 2014, Reuben Martin wrote:

> On Monday, August 04, 2014 03:20:11 PM Fons Adriaensen wrote:
>> Zita-njbridge-0.1.0 is now available.
>
> I've had very little use for netjack, so I'm not very familiar with it's
> limitations, but I can only assume it was not sufficient for your use case. So
> out of curiosity, what was the motivation behind creating this?

There are a number of differences. I can't tell for sure as I have a newer 
computer since I was playing with netjack  ;)  but njbridge seems to use 
less CPU, It is easy to set up, seems to affect jack less (on both ends) 
because it is a client and not internal like the -net backend for jack. 
njbridge can work with any jack on any end: it does not matter which one 
is master, but there could be three computers with jackdbus, jackd2 and 
jackd1 all bridged. There is no limitation of audio interface on only one 
(master) server. There is no requirement for all servers to be phyically 
synced. With netjack, both ends not only had to be the same jack (jack1 or 
2) they also had to be the same version. (I had more differences in my 
mind but lost them while typing)

The link can be lost without killing one end's jack server... or even the 
connections within jack. Multi-casting is possible, one server can send 5 
outputs that one server can collect channel 1and2 while the next has 3and4 
while another takes 5 only... and maybe another grabs 12and5 and another 
grabs 34and5. (think two stereo mixes and a tally line) none of them needs 
to process the channels they don't use.

Think of a radio station with three studios (CBC in Frobisher Bay in 1979 
or so but analog everything) each studio has its own audio interface and 
computer with a jackserver. In many ways they are separate and work on 
there own, one of them being the on air control and the others for making 
commercials or prerecording shows. But sometimes it is also needed to send 
audio from one studio to the next. Jack does not have to be stopped, just 
njbridge started... and ports connected... the on air control may have 
njbridge running all the time... maybe even two of them that the other 
studios just connect to when needed.

This does not make netjack outmoded, netjack has it's own uses where two 
fully synced machines are used. This just opens up a lot of new uses or 
works better for some uses than netjack could.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net