[LAU] bare minimum session handling

[michael noble]

Just some notes:

>   1. custom-written bash scripts for your setup.
>

a good beginner tutorial that covers this can be found here:

http://digitaldub.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/linux-audio-session-scripting/

for more advanced examples, the folks at openoctave have kindly made
their scripts available here:

http://www.openoctave.org/downloads/ooscripts


>   2. LADI
>

Personal experience from having installed the 0.2 preview release is
mixed. Certainly the functionality is great, and having a complex
setup load at a couple of clicks and populate the gladish graph is a
buzz. It takes some initial setting up in terms of having to specify
the full commands for apps with their respective file arguments, but
once that's done the session loads fine. I've found that jack-dbus
stops responding sometimes, though. That is, if I boot the machine,
but don't run a studio, then attempt to load a studio and run it after
the machine has been on for an extended period, the dbus doesn't seem
to respond. I have to kill the process and restart it. It may be just
my setup.

At the moment , ladish is my preferred session management. That might
change soon, as I'm heading more toward a headless networked approach
for which dbus is not suited it seems. I'll probably move towards
scripting in this case.

>   3. qjackctl has a cool patchbay feature that
>      handles most of my needs.  You set up some
>      basic connections/rules, and whenever some
>      ports appear that match your rules it
>      will connect them.

Admittedly I gave up a couple of major versions ago, but I could never
seem to get this to do anything meaningful. It seemed a convoluted
process of creating ports only to create a snapshot that would never
match up to the way I had my session arranged. I suspect it has
improved.

As a general note and question, does anyone know if there is a general
way to disable autoconnection? I know some apps have this as a
setting, like Ardour, but many do not. It seems that session
management and autoconnection are not necessarily synergistic. I
recall reading somewhere there was a CLI option to disable client
autoconnect clients in JACK2 but I can't seem to find where I read
that. Any ideas?

-m