[LAU] Status of lisalo/lisaloQt and calfbox?

[Jonathan E Brickman]

Greetings, Len, and thanks for writing.  Reponses below.

>
>I was surprised that you include X and a wm at all. I would suggest
>running screen from dbus-launch could do the same thing so long as all
>your applications are CLI. I have set a box up this way and been able 
>to
>run pulseaudio, jackdbus and other things (before I ran out of memory 
>on
>the old P300). I would not suggest pulse in your case though. There are
>some very good CLI tools for keeping track of jack connections.
It is a perennial question for me, whether or not to start going CLI.  
So far every time I have begun to look there, I have found yet another 
tweak I want to do NOW which is very easy in GUI and rather arcane in 
CLI.  One of the better examples is the use of Calfjackhost, most of my 
patches use a single CJH with three plugins (usually EQ, reverb, and 
compression), and I haven't found a way to handle that anywhere near as 
easily in CLI, and the visualizations help.  Similarly I use Yoshimi a 
lot, three simultaneous instances in two different patches, and although 
I could run it CLI, I could not easily configure it CLI.  I have also 
thought about setting up two different major modes, CLI and GUI, using 
the same patchset items, but it seemed to me like a lot of 
time-expenditure and complexity for minimal gain; the current hardware 
is not very CPU- or RAM-limited, and it does seem best to use exactly 
the same setup in production as on the bench.  So I mix, CLI for some 
things, GUI when it's just easier.  And figuring out Jack connections is 
a lot easier in GUI :-)  I don't keep qjackctl or one of the newer ones 
running all the time, but it sure is nice to have it one click away.

>
>It is relatively easy using sys v init, upstart or systemd to run a 
>shell
>script as a user that would start dbus and screen (or another cli 
>session
>manager) with a number of screens open and running some predefined
>program. Ssh login to the box and type:
>screen -df
>will connect you to the already running screen instance running as your
>user. I have done this from an android phone, though the text was 
>really
>too small :) but a tablet would be better. If you run out of buttons on
>your keyboard, USB keyboards (qwerty) are cheap and the controller 
>inside
>can be directly connected to stomp switches. Actkbd can assign keypress 
>to
>CLI command or with the extension I am working on (it is far enough 
>along
>to be useful to you I think) send a jack midi command to your midi
>filter/combiner or direct to an app.
I have been wondering how much capacity I'm wasting keeping the desktop 
manager up.  I have a good graphics card so that isn't a limiter, but 
obviously there is some motherboard bandwidth being taken.  It may be 
that I should do something like the Archbang default, which is just 
enough.

>
>There are also a number of MIDI control apps that send MIDI via
>ethernet/wireless some of them for android. qmidinet should now be able 
>to
>run headless too.
>
>Just a note and you may already know this, you can stack commands with
>jack_control. For example I start jackdbus like this:
>jack_control ds $DRIVER dps device $DEV dps rate $RATE dps period 
>$FRAME \
>          dps nperiods $PERIOD start
>From a script.
Wow, I had forgotten about that, although I think I saw it in a doc once 
or twice.

>
>I understand using 96k for this project, but in the case of pops and 
>such
>have you tried setting 48k just to see if it goes away? Then setting
>period 32 would give the same latency, but may still give cleaner 
>sound.
>You can use jack_bufsize to change period on the fly, but note that 
>there
>will be audiable artifacts and some applications (rakarrack for 
>example)
>never recover and need to be restarted.
>
>--
>Len Ovens
>www.ovenwerks.net

Aha, did not think of reducing to 48k for just the one patch, that 
should work just fine, because I have found that to keep Jack completely 
stable I have to kill the process and restart between patches anyhow.  
I'll have to keep that one in the bag of tricks!

Jonathan E. Brickman
Ponderworthy Music | jeb at ponderworthy.com | (785)233-9977 | 
http://ponderworthy.com <http://ponderworthy.com/>
>