[linux-audio-user] how to invest sensible to get more stability for JACK

[Lee Azzarello]

I'm running KDE under Gentoo and I've only had problems with one program
and jack xruns: Swami and FluidSynth running a 119MB drum set patch. It
began to produce so many xruns I could hit a crash cymbal without
droupouts. But whatever, the developers say it's beta software. On the
other hand I've run Rosegarden triggering Hydrogen, Zynaddsubfx and a MIDI
synth with no droupouts and came up with a good tune, recorded it in
Audacity. So it's workig out well. Swami and fluidsynth will be grand in
due time...

Also, I'm using jacko.py, a python script that gives a nice GUI to the
jack server. It's been great, along with QTjackconnect and ALSA patch bay.
This whole collection of windows take up a desktop, so I'm thinking of
trying to put them into one interface...like a "start audio system" GUI.

-l[e^2]
------------------------------
http://www.fallingforward.net/
people experimenting with music, art and technology

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Mark Knecht wrote:

> > Hello,
> > i am working quite intense on lerning ARDOUR by doing. Using its beta i
> > exrerience some bugs that are more or less tolerablein such great an App
> > for no cost (crashes when trying some adventurous routing-stuff, some
> > lesser gui-issues).
> > After all there are only 2 really serious problems:
> >
> > 1.)Importing .wav-files fails too often (regardless if these files are
> > written by Samplitude, Audacity, rezound or even Ardour itself)
> >
> > How is that on your setups out there?
>
> Many similar problems earlier. I haven't used the program since it went to
> it's first release. I expect its gotten better.
>
> >
> > 2.)Many xruns, (some after 2 seconds, others after 2 mins, mostly within
> > 40 secs or so - sometimes i had testrecordings of unbroken 10 minutes)
> >
> > I use Ardour on SuSE 8.2 pro with jack0.74 as root only on runlevel 3 in
> > Windowmaker, all networking is off, no kdeinit is running.
>
> I somehow doubt this is due to your hardware. More likely it's some set of
> interactions between the software that is running on your machine, or
> possibly the way you have your hardware configured. I would really try to
> understand this before you spend another penny, or you're likely to spend
> many dollars and make no forward progress.
>
> Overall, I would suggest that most xrun problems are caused by latency
> issues, and not by raw bandwidth until you get to the point where you are
> running many, many audio tracks. I think you are not at that point yet.
>
> Many things can effect this:
>
> 1) Gnome/KDE are compicated environments. For test purposes at least try
> something like fluxbox which runs almost nothing by defualt. (I don't know
> windowmaker - it may be pretty minimal already.)
>
> 2) Look at how you have your existing hardware installed and configured. Are
> you sharing interrupts? Are you using APIC, APIC-IO or ACPI? All of these
> can have major effects.
>
> 3) Test your existing hard drive/drives for bandwidth capabilities. (hdparm
> or Benno's disk test programs)
>
> 4) Do your xruns correspond to other things happening on the PC?
>
> Best of luck in finding the solution. Folks are here to help.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
>