On 18/01/16 05:23, Steve Litt wrote:

>
> In all fairness, I've found few softwares as difficult to install and
> get right as Jack. In fact, of the five times I've tried to install it
> on various distros, I've succeeded zero times.

Jack is extremely flexible, and essential if you want what it does. It is
complex, it may seem overly so .. even arcane .. to someone not familiar with
audio production and the systems and work-flows it emulates. But those
complexities have a very real purpose and are essential in a Digital Audio
Workstation and several other use cases.

It is certainly not the way to go for simply playing sounds from files or the
web and hearing beeps and such from the DE and apps.

There are several audio and media production distributions with it all set up.

When Pulse was first introduced it (typically given its author) took over
control of the audio hardware, excluding anything else and grabbing it back if
anything else tried to connect directly ... and restarted itself if it was
stopped ... this way anything it could offer 'just worked' and anything it did
not offer became impossible. This completely messed up any system using Jack, or
anything else that did not go through Pulse to access the hardware, which 'just
failed'.

That may have been the period you tried to use Jack. Pulse had to be purged from
the system to use audio in any other way. Over time that was fixed (eventually
it added Jack as an alternative backend). Now it is normal to have Pulse as one
of the inputs to Jack if an audio workstation wishes to have basic desktop apps
just use their default Pulse methods, and installing Jack will generally set
this up by default.

Pulse was (at first) a monumental stuff-up which imposed the 'one true way' on
everyone ... but was eventually made more civilised (and less buggy).

The issue comes from the fact that alsa is easiest to use if only one app
connects to and controls a piece of hardware exclusively, this led to obvious
problems if that app was not some mixer that other audio apps could connect to.
Hence Jack, later Pulse (there have been many others).

>
> So I'd settle for Pulse (or ALSA or OSS) over Jack simply because I can
> actually get those installed.

If you don't need to route audio flexibly, and don't use more complex audio
hardware that Pulse cannot deal with, and don't want to fiddle with your system
to get the lowest latency you can, and don't use audio apps that are Jack based,
and don't want or need to use the other things Jack provides ... then you are
definitely in the majority as far as audio use goes, and there is little point
in installing it.


Simon