Re: [Jack-Devel] Jack and pro-audio

On 12/26/2011 02:55 PM, Ralf Madorf wrote:

> - would it be pro-audio to run 50 applications for one audio production?

who knows?

earlier today, i ran a session with two instances of an ambisonic 
decoder, two instances of a reverberator, an analyser, a convolver, two 
external signal processors, a jack-enabled video viewer, a midi bridge, 
a daw, and two jack recording tools, in a jack session with over 1000 
connected ports to the master bus alone. all those tools were 
mission-critical.
i like to think it was a professional production. at least if 
"professional" == "making a substantial contribution to paying the rent".

morale: i don't know, you don't know.
what makes jack great is it makes no assumptions on what people might 
end up doing with it, it just provides clean plumbing, as best as we know.

i want a jack that scales to high heaven, can pipe stuff over the 
network if necessary, and doesn't get in the way. i want to use the 
greatest tools written by great programmers, despite the fact they can't 
agree on basic architectural issues, and whose stuff will never be "just 
plugins" for one another because they would be all in each other's hair 
all the time about the interface design. harnessing all this mutually 
exclusive creativity is a tremendously powerful thing.

jack connects all those diverse tools and programming paradigms - it 
creates a workflow (often kludgy, but still) from tools whose designs 
are diametrical and whose programmers have perfectly disjunct opinions. 
that's the biggest praise i have for any plumbing tool. it's inspired, 
and tremendously powerful. with a bow to dennis ritchie, i'd like to 
call it "unixy" :-D

i'm watching the future of jack with keen interest (not the least 
because my livelihood has come to depend on it). but i'm sort of relaxed 
about the schisms we seem to have, because the basic thing is there: the 
jack api is dead easy to implement for a client, and its restrictions 
are beneficial to code quality (because they clean up and simplify, 
rather than add complications).

only today, i had two very contrasting experiences, once of ardour3 and 
xjadeo on jack (which just did the job, for pretty much any content i 
threw at them) on the one hand and some cubase version including some 
obscure set of windows codecs on the other (which most patently didn't, 
until i had found a way - with free open-source tools - to massage the 
video content just so, until it finally worked).

morale 2: sometimes, integration is not all it's cracked up to be, and 
process boundaries can add stability and flexibility as well...

time for the finishing move of this sermon: the "see what we already 
have, it's great and there's no cause for panic because we can do stuff 
the other tag teams can't" piledriver: don't make assumptions, and don't 
throw the baby out with the bathwater.

here's to jack[0-9]* !


best,


jörn




-- 
Jörn Nettingsmeier
Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487

Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio)
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