[LAU] A year of Linux Audio revisited - would like to know your oppinion

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Thu Dec 13 13:46:01 EST 2007


On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 10:08 -0800, Robert Persson wrote:
> Looking at my (non-)workflow yesterday, it is clear to me that the most
> time-wasting problems I am having are with jack. I start jack, I open
> the various clients, I plug them into each other and I start working.
> Then jack boots some of its clients off, or even crashes, and I have to
> start again.
> 
> Time spent setting up jack etc:    90%
> Time doing productive work:        10%

Most people's time spent setting up JACK is because they are on a Linux
distribution that doesn't come configured correctly for using realtime
media applications. On systems that are, running JACK is essentially
trivial unless you insist on using USB audio interfaces which, partly
because of their terrible h/w design and partly because of ALSA's poor
driver support for them (compared to OS X and Windows), tend to be more
problematic.

> better even when I was using the official ubuntu deb. Things weren't
> getting booted off as much, but horrible distortions would creep in that
> would only go away when I disconnected or killed something.

this is not a known feature of JACK SVN.

> I know this is not something anyone really wants to hear, particularly
> since jack is already in the process of being completely redesigned
> (jackdmp), 

its not in process, and its not strictly a redesign.

> but it is the limitations of jack that are the biggest
> obstacles to FOSS being adopted in the pro-audio world.

wierd that. the pro-audio world seems to love JACK.

>  Unless jack is
> fixed (or extended) so that it can recover from errors (including
> letting its latency be adjusted on the fly)

i guess you must have missed jack_set_buffer_size(). or perhaps you're
stuck with JACK clients that don't want to handle such things, and JACK
is just being respectful of their limitations. who really knows?

> additional features in the world will make your application suitable for
> pro-audio use.

> To an extent you can forget about windows. 

that must be why all the commercial companies i interact with want
windows versions.

JACK has a number of problems, some of them significant. The things
you've spoken about are not among them.

--p





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