[Ardour-Dev] very significant merge in ardour git repository

[Fons Adriaensen]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 01:48:01PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

> Specifically, it removes the explicit use of JACK from the codebase -
> instead, JACK support is just another shared library that ardour can load
> if the user requests it. It is now technically possible to create different
> audio backends for Ardour that speak directly to the OS' underlying native
> audio API (e.g. ALSA or CoreAudio), though the work involved in this is not
> trivial. The work was done at the request of a commercial partner who plan
> to provide various backends.

So that means that you would connect a track input to e.g. 
'input 17' using Ardours's connection dialog, instead of
having a 'port' with a dedicated name (the track's name) ?

I'd very much like to have such a scheme even when using Jack.
In other words, instead of having dynamic port names, you'd
have a fixed set with fixed names, and you use these within
Ardour as if they were a hardware interface.

Seems backward, but it isn't. It's how things are on e.g. a
hardware mixer - it has a fixed set of interfaces (e.g. 16
analog ins, 16 analog outs and 64+64 on MADI), and you can 
connect any of those to any internal signal input or output.
Having the same logic in both the HW and SW of a mixed system
in fact makes things easier - you don't have to switch between
two ways of thinking about connections.

Another advantage is that the external wiring (which could be
Jack or HW) doesn't depend on session details anymore, just as
any HW wiring is likely to be fixed. The set of ports could 
have names configured by the user and corresponding to the
permanent external connections.

The disadvantage is that there are at any time probably lots
of Jack conncections which are not used but take resources.
>From my experience using such a scheme in the AMB/WFS mixer
used that the CdS/LABEL that doesn't seem to be a real problem.

Ciao,


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FA

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