Everyone needs jack, they just dont know it yet ;)
Surely if Audacity is the only audio app running then it would be more
efficient to access the alsa drivers directly?
If this is your feeling
then the right thing to do is to fix jack to make it less arcane. Ideas
welcome.
It would be good if it could start and run as easily as other daemons - I know
there are attempts being made to address this, such as jackstart. I guess it
will be better when jack is fully integrated into distros, with the necessary
kernel patches for capabilities etc.
One of the main things that put me off using jack with audacity is that with
the standalone program I didn't think I had any latency problems. I tried
running jack and it told me I have xruns...
Can jack verbose output be directed to a console so that you could check for
xruns with ctrl-alt-f7 or whatever? I seem to remember trying this and it
made the xruns worse!
Cheers
Daniel