First off, I
think jack-rack is awesome app and I have been
using it quite regularly.
Seconded. It made me unpack my acoustic guitar which I haven't
played for years. Great fun, except for my neighbours :) .
I totally agree. I think that one of the candidates to start the
real-life Linux Audio Revolution for non-computer-geek-musicians are the
acoustic guitar + realtime LADSPA effects and of course the outstanding
zynaddsubfx patches for the keyboard players. (For the electric guitar
disto, I have finally assumed that analog rules.)
But yes I think that before we should try to solve some problems of
usability for live-use... now there's too much mouse-work.
As a result, I've come up with a
small suggestion/wish-list for this wonderful app:
1) it would be awesome if jack-rack, once it gets bounced
by jackd (for whatever reason), would have an option to
restart with the same, already open settings file, while
recreating existing connections.
Seconded again. This would not only be useful for jack-rack
but for many other applications as well.
yes, again, I agree. I suggested that for the qjackctl.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1181768&gr…
there's a partial implementation of the idea with patchbay (the
automatic connection of some applications) but maybe with your feedback
we could explain to the developpers what we are missing. I'm not a
native english speaker and i've got some problems to be really precise...
I am simply saying this as
it has been quite stressful to have to close the app,
reopen it, open the settings file, and then re-hook
everything in jack right before the performance (and nearly
impossible during one) when the clock is ticking and
audience getting restless. :-)
The situation is getting worse if you use more than one app
and you have to restart JACK itself. Then you have to reload
a lot of files into all applications and to redo a lot of
MIDI and JACK connections. If each particular application
could (maybe optionally) remember
* the last loaded file
* the last used MIDI connections
* the last used JACK connections
this could simplify the usage a lot.
Because applications can even crash, the settings mentioned
above could be written to the configuration file immediately
when changing them ("crash saveness" as Ardour provides).
we're all waiting for the ardour 1.0 which is slowly becoming a reality
and will fix all this...
Furthermore, from a users POV I wonder if it would be
possible
to redesign the JACK-thread of an application so it doesn't
need to be restarted as soon the JACK connection gets lost.
Wouldn't it be possible to make an application automatically
reconnecting to JACK as soon as it got kicked, and as soon as
JACK gets stopped or restarted to display an alert box "It
seems that JACK has been stopped. Waiting for JACK to
reappear.".
It may sound like nitpicking, but for users, especially new
users, the points above could really be one little more step
to improve linux audio usage.
I think that this is not a problem of jack but a problem of the
applications which use it. Actually ardour already has a mechanism to
reconnect to jack when it loses its connection. Now it doesn't work
(beta29) ;( but it seems that in the future will do so.
I don't know... Any jack expert could help to see what should be done to
fix this?
regards,
MarC