[Ardour-Users] Recording to Midi accompaniment

[David Kastrup]

Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> writes:

>>> The bad news is that Ardour really wants to work with Jack
>>
>
> Actually, the opposite. Ardour (and I) do not want you to use JACK.
>
>> That hasn't been true for a couple of major versions now, Ardour will
>> happily take exclusive control of your ALSA device.
>>
>>"Really wants to work with Jack" is not the same as "can only work with
>>Jack".  Letting Jack deal with the realtime problems of Audio is the
>>sane thing to do.
>
> Conjecture.  JACK with MIDI is a total PITA for most users. JACK for people
> from other platforms is just utterly conceptually confusing. When it does
> something that you need, it's amazing. When you don't need it, it doesn't
> give you anything that the ALSA backend doesn't (and the ALSA backend makes
> working with MIDI much simpler).

Jack manages to work with a Tascam US-122L (which has so few possible
settings in its usbstream plugin that specifying all command line
options for aplay/arecord is a real pain, and then it frequently drops
out.  Jackd?  No problem).  It works fine with Ffado (agreed that ALSA
Midi then gets ugly).  It allows to wire up a host of applications (try
integrating and recording something like Aeolus).  How are you even
going to record the Master off Ardour like I do in the video without
being able to route it as an output into Pulseaudio?

And Jackd does realtime scheduling.  It's been a long time since my last
xrun.  And that includes doing screen recording off an Ardour session on
the same computer that runs the audio session.

When a device is supported by Ffado, there still is quite the tendency
for that to be more stable than any available ALSA device.

So it has been my experience that foregoing Jackd is rarely going to
improve your audio experience.

-- 
David Kastrup