On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 3:56 PM, Ede Wolf <listac@nebelschwaden.de> wrote:

I may perspectively run into a shortage of audio inputs and stumbled across a blog, that reads like it is possbile to "merge" two soundcards into one virtual, that eventually looks as a single one to alsa. However, that blog does not mention jack.

Also, in an stone old ardour thread Paul Davis suggests to a similar problem: ", then you simply get 2 digifaces", but again, this may have been before the rise of jack.

And now I am wondering wether this is a possible or even reliable way to trick jack into being able to to finally handle more than one soundcard, if presented by alsa as being a single one.

this is a function of the ALSA driver for a given device, plus the capabilities of the device itself. We still don't know for sure whether ALSA can get all the cards started reliabily in < 1sample, but it seems as if it should.

a more device independent way of doing this, but one that implies sample rate conversion going on, is to use zita-a2j to allow JACK to use more than one device. With current JACK1, this is even builtin to JACK itself and can be done from the command line.