[LAU] JACK Freewheel mode thoughts

[Lorenzo Sutton]

Hi all,

I was recently thinking about how powerful, yet maybe underestimated, 
the JCAK freewheel mode [1] is.
As far as I know this is used by Ardour, Qtractor and MusE for 
export/bounce, 'internally'.

Call me old school, but I like to use various (lots) of audio software 
on Linux in a modular way. I have stated many times that, in my humble 
opinion, modularity plus inter-connectability of applications though 
JACK is, from a creative point of view, a killer feature.

So, coming to the freewheel point. Wouldn't it be great if 'all jack 
audio' software were freewheel-ready, so that if I activate a switch, 
all applications enter freewheel mode and when I activate recording in 
my favourite DAW, connected to some of my favourite (standalone!) 
synths, connected to my favourite sequencer, everything is recorded 
'faster than realtime' in the DAW?

Or also: isn't it startling that in the digital era one should 'record' 
stuff internally in real-time??

What kind of work/burden would becoming freewheel-ready pose on existing 
applications?

I do can see some cases where this just wouldn't work or might not even 
be desirable: for example Pure Data and similar software which by 
definition is realtime.

Hopefully this can start some (civilized!) debate on the topic and it 
also includes other topics such as (creative) workflow, etc.

Lorenzo.

[1] 
http://www.jackaudio.org/api/group__ServerControl.html#gad65c741a1d1d2fb09efacf51437b841a