Running JACK ith Windows.

Hello, I just downloaded Ardour so I can use it to connect to Musescore via JACK (as a host for VST plugins). In other contexts, I can just use portaudio. Anyways, I got JACK running with Musescore following the directions on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UgQLIcRRjc so THAT end is tied up nicely. It’s just not playing nice with Ardour.

When I START the JACK server from JACK control and then try to start Ardour, it just doesn’t start. It’s in my processes but no window. I think it’s possible that Ardour’s install installed a second version of JACK. If so, I can’t find it.
When try to start Ardour first, and choose JACK backend, it returns the “can’t reconnect to audio/midi” error, even when I give it the settings/parameters I that work for musescore.

If all else fails, I can just use a MIDI looper I guess. I thought it would be easier to get the two programs to talk back and forth, since they both use JACK. Thanks for any help.

So, I’ve figured out how to TRY to use JACK, at least. If I open Ardour and make it to the Audio/MIDI setup, I can open JACK Control and try it out. My current settings are: jackd -R -S -X winmme -d portaudio “ASIO::ASIO4ALLv2”

The messages window says that the driver is not running. That’s portaudio, but I thought JACK would start that up for me? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Using JACK with Ardour on Windows is not really supported, or at least not many people use JACK AFAIK so there may be a few issues.

In saying that, I just installed jack for windows (64bit version apparently) and Musescore 2.1 and tested it with Ardour 5.9.

I was able to get MIDI data from Ardour into Musescore and the other way around with the 32bit version of 5.9.

This is how I did it:

  1. Start Musescore and change to use the JACK backend in I/O preferences
  2. Start JACK via “Jack Control”
  3. Start Musescore.
  4. Start Ardour and change the backend to JACK(If it wasn’t already) and Click “Connect to JACK”. If the JACK backend was the last used backend it should connect automatically and this step is not necessary.
  5. Create a MIDI track and connect the Musescore ports either via Jack Control or from within Ardour. Actual connections will depend on which way you intend data to flow etc.

I did notice a two issues while trying this though:

  • The 32bit version of Ardour(5.9.0) will not disconnect from Jack and the application freezes.
  • The 64bit version of Ardour(5.9.0) will not connect to Jack and the application freezes.

It seemed to work OK, apart from having no idea how to use Musescore.

Thanks! I realized shortly after posting that " jackd -R -S -X winmme -d portaudio “ASIO::ASIO4ALLv2” " is missing a -d flag just before the ASIO thing. (it should be jackd -R -S -X winmme -d portaudio -d “ASIO::ASIO4ALLv2”). That’s why the driver wasn’t running.

It makes sense that the 32 bit version works, since Musescore hasn’t recieved a x64 build on Windows just yet. That might not work for me, since I was hoping to use a 64-bit-only plugin. (It’s a sampler that uses really high-quality samples, so there would be no point in making a 32 bit version that wouldn’t have enough RAM to actually do anything with). I might be able to figure out how to do this with Ardour, but I couldn’t get the plugin (PLAY by EastWest music) to work in ardour with portaudio anyways, haha, so I guess I’ll stick to using Carla for this. Ardour will work great for SFZ and VST synths, though.

If you’ve never used Musescore before, you might like it. It’s a very capable score-writer and it’s probably the best way to write music for traditional instruments like piano, etc. If you like to read and write music the traditional way, Musescore is a great open-source alternative to Sibelius.

Although Jack will assign default values, you might need to specify your preferred sample rate and buffer size too - e.g.

jackd -R -S -T -X winmme -d portaudio -r 44100 -p 512 -d “ASIO::ASIO4ALLv2”

Notice also the -T parameter. This launches Jack in “temporary” mode. In other words, when you close Ardour, Jack will unload from memory (so next time you launch it, you could run it at a different sample rate). If you don’t specify -T, Jack will get left in memory (so each time you launch Ardour, it’ll always be running with the original settings).