Re: [Jack-Devel] The Situation(s) With JACK

Hey Paul, and everyone else.

> 1. there are at least 3 different implementations of JACK. This is not
> a problem in and of itself, but in the real world, it contributes the
> remaining problems in real ways.
>
> 3. there is widespread confusion about the relationship between Jack1
> and Jack2, with an overwhelming number of people believing that Jack2
> is the newer, better version of Jack1.

Naming Jackmp -> jack2 was a bad idea, if it wasn't intended to be a
successer to Jack1. I personally never found this to be a problem (as
i tend to read documentation) but i can see how people would be
confused.

> typical question arises "Can I use JACK to stream audio from A to B?"
> the answer is so complex that many people just give up (and probably
> rightly so). Contrast this to, for example, using the AUNetSend and
> AUNetReceive plugins on OS X. It just makes a mockery of netjack in
> terms of ease of use (though latency is terrible).

i intially had problems with netjack, as well. I've got it working,
but i could see how many users simply give up.

> 9. Despite the presence of JACK Session support in a number of notable
> applications, many developers apparently feel that it is unfinished or
> incomplete or in some other way not worth using "at present"
>
> 10. The existence of LADISH continues to produce confusion for users
> wondering how best to do some of the things that LADISH does, because
> there are now other ways of doing them.

I must admit, i fall into this category. I have not found Jack Session
all that useful. Being as all apps need to add support for it, i think
that has really slowed down adoption. Ladish has also slowed down Jack
Session adoption.

Personally, Jack Session can't really solve my session management
issues, as many apps that i use aren't native linux apps - so adding
Jack Session support will never happen :\  I've also found using
Jackdbus/Gladish is far simpler.  By this i am not saying Ladish is
the best implementation of Jack. However, it seems to address a lot of
issues, and there are starting to be a lot of useful tools to go with
it, that adds a lot of 'ease of use' - that you just don't get out of
Qjackctl, and the other common jack tools. I think that is why we have
seen Ladish be adopted so much. It does seem to provide the best GUI
tools, and ease of use for the end user.

> 11. Interaction with PulseAudio continues to be a nightmarish headache
> for a large number of new JACK users.

PA is a nightmare in general. At least once a month (if not more) in
various linux forums that i frequent, I see people who've installed a
distro and have no sound - and it's always issues with PA. Personally,
For Jack users i think it is better to just let Jack be your default
sound server. For the most part it works very well, with only a couple
corner cases, that probably still need to be worked out. - For me,
VMware doesn't seem to use the ALSA>Jack bridge, other than that it
works fine. (ie: youtbube/flash, 99% of other apps work with the
bridge, if they don't support jack directly).

> I do have a proposal for how this is going to stop, but before I put
> it forward, I would like to first see if there are any other ideas
> floating around on the mailing list that have not come up when I've
> discussed this situation on IRC. Once any discussion about this email
> settles down, I'll outline my proposal (whatever it ends up being at
> that point).

I'm very interested to hear what it is. Right now, i use Jack2 - in my
sound/synth/sampler module, where i use scripts to launch and connect
everything 'statically' (ON/OFF operation, headless system). In this
case, jack2 works ideally, no problems at all. But if i had to
dynamically switch sessions, it would not be ideal.

Now on my Desktop, i am using Ladish -> as it is easier to work with
for more complicated sessions (dynamically), and it has some added
redundency (for example, if an app crashes, i can just re-launch it
from within my session). Adding apps is simple, and i have the
commandline option from within GLadish - this is extremely useful!
integration with Festige is also nice. I have found that the
alternatives do not work as well, for certain things that Ladish does
very well. or if they do work as well, they don't provide gui tools,
or require extra setup or setting up various scripts. Which isn't a
huge pain, but indeed it is an annoyance, and certainly not something
a noob would be tackling..

Whatever your proposal entails. I hope that it will address some of
the common problems that currently Ladish (and various KxStudio/FalkTX
related apps) seem to solve for many end-users. I think it can be said
there are good lessons to be learned from each implementation of Jack
(i've used them all). Whatever the direction of JACK is to be, i hope
that it takes the best ideas / lessons from each implementation.

cheerz

1323440771.8098_0.ltw:2,a <CAOcfFMxiZRZXhPKxparuvMuizdepLPX6LJ3f-6QmfxGd72BLUw at mail dot gmail dot com>