[linux-audio-user] Great news for JACK & KDE

[Jack O'Quin]

Steve Harris <S.W.Harris at ecs.soton.ac.uk> writes:

> > 2.)would jack be as stable and powerfull than as it is when optimized
> > for pro-Apps only ?
> 
> No - adding things like sample format negotiation and sample rate
> conversion would seriously hurt JACK.

JACK developers have been trying for a long time to explain these
issues to the many people who want to use it for everything.  It works
great for ardour, so why not do "beeps" and "tadas" that way?  The
answer is that JACK achieves low latency by placing non-negotiable
realtime deadlines on its clients.  They must make a serious effort to
meet these requirements lest they get kicked out by jackd, the JACK
server daemon.  Consumer sound really needs an extra layer of
buffering, format conversion, and hand-holding between it and jackd.

Arts is one solution for that problem.  Having never used it I can't
speak about its strengths or weaknesses.  But, it is integrated into
the KDE desktop, which is valuable in its own right.

The current problems with artsd and jackd occur when a user tries to
start jackd but artsd is already running, so the audio device is busy.
Hopefully, the KDE developers will configure things so that this works
smoothly.  

I do wonder how they will do it, though.  Will they expect jackd to be
running all the time?  Most users don't run it that way today.
Perhaps by the time KDE 3.3 comes out jackd will have evolved a config
file so it can start automatically as needed.
-- 
  joq