[LAU] ecasound + jack

I'm fiddling with some tools for my own needs and to see what may be useful for collab interaction. Ecasound, in theory, could be very useful because it's readily availble, gui/distro agnostic, and howto usage is easy to paste in email/im/wegpage etc which are good qualities for a general purpose tool. I've never had the patience to give it a fair go and frankly, every time I try, I end being frustrated (just like with Jack but that's ano...) Anyway, I found a snippet that had this recipe... 1. Start jack from qjackctl ( http://qjackctl.sourceforge.net/ ) 2. ecasound -G:jack,eca,recv -c -a:1 -i jack_generic,eca -o output.wav ecasound> engine-launch 3. Open qjackctl and connect the ports. If you don't want to do 3. every time, then use the patchbay feature of qjackctl and have it do it automatically. Pretty close to one thing I would like to do but I get this error no matter what -i (or -o) combo I try... ecasound: ERROR: [ECA-SESSION] : "Audio object 'jack_generic' does not match any of the known audio device types or file formats. and the same with jack_alsa and other similar options. Is it possible that my particular ecasound is compiled without jack support ? Would anyone have any comments about the usefulness of ecasound as a general purpose audio manipulation tool ? Is there another option that could be better ? --markc