[LAU] Mulitple sound caards with Jackd

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 09/19/2010 07:32 AM, Jonathan E. Brickman wrote:
>   I thought there probably would be a buffer-size conflict problem with
> an alsa-multi situation.  But netjack over localhost is an interesting
> thought.

netjack over localhost does not make sense. you can just use jackd on 
your primary soundcard and alsa_[in|out] on your secondary. but the 
realtime resampling will either chew up insane amounts of cpu, or 
degrade the sound, or both. ok for telephony or for listening to 
unimportant stuff over small speakers, but not for serious work.

generally, multiple soundcards make sense in three scenarios:
a) you have professional soundcards that can sync to an external source 
(sometimes, that could even be spdif), in which case you can use an alsa 
multi device without sound degradation.
b) you want to fiddle (possibly including soldering the oscillator 
output of one card to the clock in of the next...)
c) you really don't care about the sound quality of the secondary card.

if you want to get real work done, shop for a single multichannel card 
instead.