[LAU] [Bulk] Re: Audacity on Ubuntu 14.04 is REALLY unstable

[Fons Adriaensen]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 02:21:56PM +0200, Philipp Überbacher wrote:

> You can also try jack. Audacity uses jack in a very weird way, as soon
> as you roll audacity autoconnects to the first outputs it finds and
> disconnects once you stop rolling,

That's only one of the many apps that claim to support Jack but
get it completely wrong. In many cases, but not always, portaudio
is to blame. 

All that after ten years of Jack. IMHO it's time for some experiments
in ballistics, using rotten tomatos. 

The wole point of using Jack is to allow the user to make arbitrary
connections. Any way of 'supporting' Jack that does not allow this
gets it wrong. Even if connecting to the first two physical outputs
or something similar covers 99% of use cases. Because to do that
you don't need Jack at all. If users want Jack it's because their
requirements are in the remaining 1%. 

No doubt someone will reply 'just submit a patch'. That's easier
said than done. In almost all cases I've investigated it's not
just the 'audio interface' part of an app that needs changes, not
even if that is well abstracted as it usually is. In many cases the
logic that gets it wrong is hidden deeply inside the app, and fixing
it will affect more or less everything, including the user interface.
Any attempt to do that would require knowing the entire app inside
out. Only the original authors can do that in reasonable time. Even
if I were to submit a patch to e.g. Audacity, VLC or fldigi that would
really fix the way those broken apps handle Jack, there is zero chance
that it would be accepted, because it would be very invasive.

Ciao,

-- 
FA

A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia.
It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris
and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)