How do I use JACK over a network?

Before we move onto answering the question “How do I use JACK over a network?”, we must first deal with one of the unfortunate ugly realities of the open source world: choice. There have been several efforts to provide JACK-over-a-network.

The most important thing to realize about each of these alternatives is that they are all mutually incompatible. You cannot run netJACK2 on one machine and netJACK1 on another, or any other combination. Both “ends” of the network link must be using the same software: netJACK1, netJACK2 or jack.trip. Each system has some qualititative differences from the others:

netJACK1, also known as “netone” is designed and implemented primarily by Torben Hohn, this is the most widely used JACK-over-a-network system. Exists for Linux, OS X and Windows. Can be run with and without data compression. netJACK2 Designed and implemented primarily by Romain Moret at GRAME. Exists for Linux, OS X and Windows. No data compression. jack.trip Designed and implemented by the Soundwire group at CCRMA at Stanford University. Exists for Linux, and OS X. No synchronization, variable data compression.

netJACK1

netJACK1 was originally designed to allow JACK to distribute audio across a high bandwidth local area network. Later, it was modified to allow it to use the CELT codec for data compression, thus allow use across a wide area network with less bandwidth (and more latency and possible data loss). It uses a master/slave design in which a single machine runs a JACK server that is connectved to sound card (the “master”) and any number of other machines function as slaves.

netJACK2

Like netJACK1, netJACK2 was primarily focused on allowing JACK to distribute audio across a high bandwidth local area network. However, it has the additional property of having a “discovery” system so that both of the ends of the connection can find each other more or less automatically. When discovered, each slave appears as a new in-server JACK client. It has no way to use data compression for use in wide area networks, and cannot tolerate packet loss. It uses the same master/slave design as netJACK1.

jack.trip

jack.trip was originally created for streaming relatively large numbers of channels across a high bandwidth wide area network. It has been used multiple times to stream 16-24 channels of uncompressed audio across Internet2 (a high bandwidth “version” of the internet generally only accessible to universities and research institutions). It doesn’t care too much about relatively high latency (say, 100msec) which makes it very useful for some purposes, and not for others. It doesn’t try to provide synchronization between the two ends of the link, and instead resamples to keep things reasonably aligned. Fundamentally, it just connects two independent JACK servers running on separate machines rather than using the master/slave design of netJACK1/2.

zita-j2n

TODO