[LAU] More jack woes

[Len Ovens]

On Wed, February 13, 2013 5:08 am, Harry van Haaren wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 5:28 AM, Len Ovens <len at ovenwerks.net> wrote:
>
>> Exactly. Audacity has no need of jack...
>>
>
> Perhaps, but I need Audacity to work with JACK. I'm not starting and
> stopping JACK every time I want to switch between Ardour and Audacity.
> Ardour affords much more professional multi-tracking features, but
> Audacity
> excels in finalizing and error checking the final master: therefore I need
> both at the same time, do an export, check for improvements, do
> improvements in Ardour, export, check for improvements, etc.

Ok, that is reasonable. Jack's latency will need to at least match what
audacity is using. I was playing around with bios settings and jack last
night (yes turning hyperthreading off does allow lower latency) and had
jack's latency set to 32 frames. I was able to play audacious through
pulse then jack with no problems (cpu was quite high, but no xruns). When
I tried gtreamer though (an ogg from a web page), the sound started to
chop up or stutter. There were still no xruns in jack, but I would guess
pulse was hiding the problem from jack. Raising the latency to even 64
frames (128 is better) takes care of this. In the case of Audacity,
portaudio is used to connect to jack (or alsa or pulse). As a mentioned
before Ardour does allow changing latency on the fly, it may be less
convenient to change this every time before using audacity, but it may
work too.

I don't know about your work flow, but in mine I change latency from
tracking to mixing anyway. I track with no effects and then as I add
effects I relax latency so my older computer can handle the extra workload
of eq, amp/box emulation, reverb, etc. Just getting the most out of what I
have.


-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net