[ardour-dev] Two jack servers? (One internal to Ardour)

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   Just thinking aloud....

   I'm in the middle of some moderately large sessions, on the order
of 20-30 tracks + sends to submix buses and reverb all over the place,
and I find qjackctl's connections box to be unmanageable at this
point. I must have (easily) 100+ things going left to right. It shows
all the sends from tracks going to my reverb bus, it shows all the
tracks going to the submix buses and master faders. It shows much
stuff that it just seems unmanageable.

   I started wondering if it wouldn't be possible to have two separate
Jack servers? The first jack server would sync to the sound card and
Ardour would hook up stuff that actually goes outside of Ardour. I
think this is what most people would want to look at most of the time.

   The second Jack server would be for all the internal stuff -
tracks, sends, masters, etc. This one would be private to Ardour so
that the other remained cleaner and more user friendly.

   Is this even technically possible? (Although maybe not today...)
Even if it worked would it somehow have to increase latency? If so we
don't want it.

   An alternative idea would be some way of marking Ardour's internal
connections in such a way that tools like QJC do not display them.
>From my POV connections internal to Ardour should not be meddled with
in QJC, but I'm make so many connections in Ardour that QJC's
connections page is becoming a frustration instead of the tool it
usually is.

   Again, just thinking aloud about how to make the tools and
environment more friendly.

Thanks,
Mark