Clutterered or not, this functionality is something
pulseaudio/windows/osx all provide, but not jack. Is jack better
because it doesn't provide this? No, it's worse. Granted, a properly
But JACK is not trying to be and arguably should not be like pulseaudio.
And I argue that that it is better off trying to force every client to carry their own volume controls.
made mix-master client seems like a better solution, actually a much
I agree with this
better solution, but a mix-master client requires that all clients
autoconnect to the mix-master and not to the physical output ports.
This can of course be hacked by monitoring the clients and so forth,
but that would also be a hack that guaranteed would create
frustrations, so first of all jack needs functionalities for providing
default ports for the clients to connect to, and then all clients need
to support connecting to the default ports.
I have rigged up a system which allows me to autoconnect sets of ports, a user could use this behind some gui to select the ports of clients to connect to the master mix via some scheme, perhaps disconnect them from the main outputs if necessary. perhaps even signal the master mixer to create new ports if you wished
Probably not. You would need many many thousands of jack ports, or run
some kind of tiny embedded device, for the memory usage to be of any
size anyone would care about. Most people probably have no more than
around 20 custom ports + sound card ports at any time.
I can start my studio template project in ardour and that brings me up to 36 jack outputs, and thats just various buses.
Well, you would normally use alsamixer instead of amixer.
Thats a fair point haha. but it seems to me like if a master mixer before the physical output is the ideal, then alsamixer already provides this.