On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 11:48 AM, Steven Kruyswijk <stevenkruyswijk@gmail.com> wrote:

Alright I've decided to give the RPi/Linux/Jack route another try... I have
to say my progress is pretty slow though... the Mac Mini route still looks
very enticing. Right now, I'm trying to understand this suggested line:

jackd -I alsa-playback:zalsa_in/-dhw:CODEC_1 -dalsa -dhw:PCH -r48000 -p1024
-n2

When I look up the man page for jackd at
https://manpages.debian.org/testing/jackd1/jackd.1.en.html, this is the
explanation for the -I parameter:

Not much point quoting a lot of text when you've just given the link. Anyway, I digress. The key line in the man page is:

client-name:client-path/init-string

so, if you told JACK

-I foo:bar/baz

That means: create a client called "foo", by loading the internal client from "bar" and give it "baz" as its initialization string.

So this:

which I find really hard to relate to /alsa-playback:zalsa_in/-dhw:CODEC_1/

means: create a client called "alsa-playback" by loading the "zalsa-in" internal client, and give it an initialization string of "-dhw:CODEC_1".

The initialization string for internal clients is specific to each client, but zalsa-in has most of its arguments in common with JACK itself. So "-dhw:CODEC_1" means "use the device identified as "hw:CODEC_1".

Can anyone please point me to a page where I can learn more about how to
make a setup where Pure Data runs automatically after boot, connecting to
more than one audio interface?

I suggest you remain focused on gettings things working on a command line before you try to set up a "Pd at boot system". You might prefer that all these tools just worked without you having to understand too much about them, but they don't. It will help you in the future to get a more solid grasp of what is going on and how things work and cooperate.