On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Fons Adriaensen <fons@linuxaudio.org> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 04, 2015 at 12:43:12PM -0800, Len Ovens wrote:

> I think the reference was to qjackctl and not jack itself. The GUI
> can only run one instance of jack anyway (and one instance of
> itself).

Qjackctl defeats any sort of logic and common sense, but that's
no reason to cripple Ardour as well.

This has absolutely nothing to do with Ardour or Qjackctl.

The "named server" option requires that an environment variable be set in the environment of every client that wants to use a server started with this option.

While this may be a cute hack for people who want to do things like running two jack servers on a single machine, it has been NOTHING but a source of utter confusion for almost all users, since there is no indication that its use requires an environment variable.

Running two servers on one machine might be interesting for 1% or less of JACK users, but catering it to it in any significant way is just another reason why JACK continues to sit around unused by many people who could otherwise have really benefitted from it.

Anyway, qjackctl's most recent version no longer exposes the option in the basic options tab, which will hopefully cut down on the number of users who mistakenly think that this option is some handy feature related to presets or something.

The whole new startup logic in Ardour4 is IMHO a big regression.
Probably meant to be 'user friendly' but the effect is the
opposite.

No, its related to the presence of multiple backends. Build Ardour with ONLY the JACK backend, and ensure that JACK is already running, and you'll basically never see the dialog.

But build it with more than one backend, and the user needs ways to choose the backend, at which point, things start to get much more complex than they otherwise would be.