[LAU] Fedora 12 & CCRMA

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Sun, 2010-05-16 at 15:59 -0400, Rick Green wrote:
> ...continuation of my adventures with Fedora12 + CCRMA:
> 
> OK, so I rebooted to get rid of the zombified jack.

What sort of sound card do you have? This is starting to look like a
sound card problem, jack should not get zombified. What soundcard do you
have? What parameters did you use to start jack?

("cat /proc/asound/cards" to see which cards you have installed). 

> I again launch qjackctl, and press the start button.
> Progress!  No SELinux messages, and jack starts up.
> 
> I launch Ardour.  It presents a window new to me, asking about 'audio 
> setup'. 

That is wrong. If jack is running you should not see anything from
ardour. 

> I leave it at the defaults, and press 'start audio engine'.  It 
> then tells me that jack is already running as another user.  Doh!

Yup. Maybe as root? You should never use anything as root, there is no
need. Just start everything from the normal user (not root) that you
login as normally. 

> So I think "Hey, they've improved Ardour, so I no longer need to use 
> qjackctl to get jack started first.  Why won't they connect to an 
> already-running jack, though??"  I close Ardour.
>    I go back to qjackctl, and press 'stop'.  The display changes from 
> 'started' to 'stopping'.  I wait.  Nothing more happens, and it appears 
> that after all the trouble getting jack started, now it won't stop!
> 
> ...another reboot.  This is not acceptable.  It's looking too much like 
> another OS I hate...

... yup...
Usually you don't need to reboot. I don't know why jack is having
problems. 

> Now I launch Ardour, and let it start jack for me.  I open a little test 
> session containing only a single short track.  I press the 'play' button, 
> and nothing happens.  I try hitting the space bar, and nothing happens.  I 
> click on the timeline, and the playhead moves as expected.  I press the 
> 'return to zero' button, and nothing happens.
> This was a session recorded with another version of Ardour (on US 10.04), 
> so I think it might be a compatibility issue. 

Unlikely (there is some basic problem with jack). 

> So I stop ardour, and then 
> re-start it to open a new session and try that.  It gives me a message 
> that it couldn't start jack because it was already running as another 
> user.  This jack won't die, either:
> 
> [rtg at angel ~]$ killall jackd
> [rtg at angel ~]$ ps aux | grep jack
> rtg       2109 75.4  3.7  91232 77064 ?        RLsl 15:29  19:28 
> /usr/bin/jackd -T -ndefault -p 128 -R -P 60 -T -d alsa -n 2 -r 48000 -p 
> 1024 -d hw:0,0
> rtg       2206  0.0  0.0   4212   712 pts/1    S+   15:55   0:00 grep jack
> [rtg at angel ~]$ kill 2109
> [rtg at angel ~]$ ps aux | grep jack
> rtg       2109 75.8  3.7  91232 77064 ?        RLsl 15:29  19:55 
> /usr/bin/jackd -T -ndefault -p 128 -R -P 60 -T -d alsa -n 2 -r 48000 -p 
> 1024 -d hw:0,0
> rtg       2208  0.0  0.0   4212   716 pts/1    S+   15:55   0:00 grep jack
> [rtg at angel ~]$ kill -s 9 2109
> [rtg at angel ~]$ ps aux | grep jack
> rtg       2109 77.4  3.7  91232 77064 ?        RLs  15:29  21:54 
> /usr/bin/jackd -T -ndefault -p 128 -R -P 60 -T -d alsa -n 2 -r 48000 -p 
> 1024 -d hw:0,0
> rtg       2210  0.0  0.0   4212   716 pts/1    S+   15:57   0:00 grep jack
> 
> ...I'm getting pretty sick of these reboots!

I also would be sick of rebooting if I were in your shoes!

You should try the simplest possible way to start jack first, from the
command line of a terminal:

  jackd -R -d alsa -d hw:0

That should start it with 1024 frames per period, 2 periods at 44100 Hz
sampling rate. See what happens when you do that. The problems you are
having suggests some issue with the soundcard, specially the hung jack
processes. Always run jackd as a normal user (not root). 

You could also look at /var/log/messages or the output of dmesg to see
if there any kernel error messages like "Oops" or "BUG" statements. 

-- Fernando