Any of you who have been building A3 on a daily basis like myself will be well aware what a fantastic DAW we have on our hands but I’m concerned and its JACK and its config that is making me worry. I’m worried that many people are going to give up on A3 all too soon or never even get to run it despite their best efforts because of the complexities involved in getting JACK running smoothly. I KNOW we can do better and we must!
First off, resolving my one and only JACK feature request (thats compared to the 100’s I’ve submitted to A3 over the last 6 months) would certainly go some way to improving the current situation:
http://trac.jackaudio.org/ticket/202
Secondly, we need a idiot-proof guide to getting JACK running and it needs to be where everyone can see it ie linked within/ part of the JACK FAQ as well as having prominent links to it on ardour.org. It needs to presume the reader has no knowledge of the labyrinth of technolgies that is Linux audio and it needs to cover both a failsafe config and how to work up from that to get an optimal config.
Before making this posting I did check the JACK FAQ and currently it has a non-existent link entitled ‘What are the best settings to use?’ as well as another section called ‘How can I get the best performance out of JACK?’ which has one sentence to it. The JACK wiki doesn’t fare any better - it has a section entitled ‘Configuring and running a JACK server’ but when you can on that you get took to a basically empty page telling you its WIP.
Paul, Torben, Carl, Seablade, oofus and all those involved in JACK and Ardour - lets get this fixed before the initial A3 release, hit the ground running and make the best impression possible by getting some good docs sorted for this. I’ll help however I can of course but I’m no expert in JACK configuration and optimisation.
Thanks
Dan