[Ardour-Users] jackd help?

[Robin Gareus]

On 08/11/2012 03:21 AM, Matt Zagrabelny wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I am a relatively inexperienced jackd/ardour user - Debian Squeeze OS.
> 
> ii  ardour-i686                          1:2.8.11-3
>     digital audio workstation (graphical gtk2 interface) [i686]
> ii  jackd2                               1.9.6~dfsg.1-2
>     JACK Audio Connection Kit (server and example clients)
> 
> I used to have a functional ardour setup (on a mix of pre-Squeeze
> packages) for simple sound recordings and just bought a second hard
> disk to install Squeeze onto. I believe my success on the other hard
> drive must have been due to some amount of luck.
> 
> I have a tape deck hooked up to the laptop's mic input (with RCA to
> 1/8" audio jack cable.) A portable music player's record functionality
> tells me that a signal is coming out, but when I plug into the laptop,
> I don't see anything in the meter.
> 
> I am using qjackctl to spawn jackd and here is my .jackdrc (I grabbed
> this file off of the old hard disk.):
> /usr/bin/jackd -dalsa -dhw:0 -r48000 -p1024 -n2
> 
> Here is the output of /proc/asound/devices
>   2:        : timer
>   3:        : sequencer
>   4: [ 0- 1]: digital audio playback
>   5: [ 0- 0]: digital audio playback
>   6: [ 0- 0]: digital audio capture
>   7: [ 0- 0]: hardware dependent
>   8: [ 0]   : control
> 
> Any suggestions on how to debug jackd not seeing signal on the mic
> input on a laptop?
> 
> Thanks for the help!
> 
> -mz

Hi Matt,

Maybe it's as simple as the /Microphone muted in Mixer/.
"Open Volume Control -> Recording" from the desktop panel or run
"alsamixer" from the commandline + press <F4> Capture settings.

If that is OK, back off a step: Don't even start JACK and check if some
ALSA application (e.g. audacity of skype,..) can "hear" something on the
audio-input.

If it can, another cause of the problem could be pulseaudio interfering
with jackd. http://jackaudio.org/pulseaudio_and_jack

Most PPL concerned with pro-audio simply choose Option 1 and remove
pulseaudio completely -- on debian/squeeze that is usually done by
"sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio"

HTH,
robin