[LAU] Ardour session with plain ALSA, without JACK

[Robin Gareus]

On 02/19/2016 08:28 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> if I chose "Audio System: JACK" I can start a new session, but if I
> chose "Audio System: ALSA", I get "Failed to open audio device".
> 
> Perhaps I make a mistake.

Maybe the device is busy (used by jack)?

Could you run this diagnostic tool:

  wget http://jackaudio.org/downloads/adevices.sh && bash ./adevices.sh

It'll print all soundcards, processes that currently use them and settings.

If you launch Ardour from a terminal, maybe there's also more info
printed to the console.  Last but not least try a demo debug version
from http://nightly.ardour.org/ to rule out potential mistakes from
distro packages.

> There's no special reason that I want to use ALSA instead of JACK, I
> just want to test it. I never tried to do it before, with any other
> version of Ardour.

One reason would be to compensate for systemic midi latency (Ardour's
ALSA backend can do that, jack can't).

best,
robin