Somebody want to help me with JACK?


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quite simply I want to be able to record audio with low-latency so that its usable and to do this i know i need to get Jack working in order to do this, however it simply wont work with me and i cant get my head around it.

I am running with an onboard soundcard. i'll be using my mic port as my input.

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I think I remember having to try and use JACK monnnnths back, has it got anything to do with something called Alsa?

IIRC, I never got it to work :p

How can you record more than one track using an onboard sound card? They generally have one in, or are you using MIDI? If you decide to use Windows, use ASIO4ALL, you'll get nice latency with.

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IIRC there's an option in audacity to compensate latency.

We did some recording some months ago, using audacity with the integrated soundcard on a laptop. At first latency was between 1 and 2s but we could record fine after tweaking that a bit.

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I read something a while back about using Jack with Pulseadio, rather than ESD or Alsa. It was a bit over my head, but I think the gist of it was that it was more suitable for what you're trying to achieve.

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what i am trying to do is record a track, then record over that track. layering. thats where the latency issues are. i understand about compensating but the actual recording of it lags and jumps. its that bad. never had this with windows :/

the issue i have is i cant work jack. anyone who knows: id really appriciate help.

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There's a few things to start off by saying:

Onboard sound is not great for low latency work (on any OS). If you want to get into recording, a decent PCI interface is a great investment.

JACK and Audacity don't play too well together. The problem is Audacity likes to use ALSA, but ALSA in and of itself is not designed for low latency audio work. JACK is designed for low latency audio, but doesn't integrate too well with Audacity.

You don't mention what distribution you use, but a distro specially geared up for audio is a massive help. That means 64 Studio (Debian Etch Based), Planet CCRMA (repo for Fedora), JAD (openSuSE based) or Ubuntu Studio (I think you can guess ;) ).

However, your requirements aren't too great, so any distro should be able to give you a satisfactory result (specialist audio distros come into their own for multiple tracks of audio and realtime soft synths).

The way to control JACK (unless you're a command line masochist), is to use a tool called Qjackctl (it'll be in your distro's repos). It has a lot of options, but most aren't important. Clicking on the Setup button brings up the options. Set the samplerate (44,100 is probably what you're using). Set the periods/buffer to 3 (to compensate for you onboard sound). Set frames/period to something like 128, click OK and start JACK. Make sure nothing else is using the sound, (I often have to shut Firefox if I've been using Youtube or Myspace as it hogs ALSA).

Once JACK is running and happy, you can start an audio app and hopefully start recording without problems. As I said, Audacity isn't great for recording with JACK, perhaps consider using Jokosher or Traverso, both of which are fairly simple to use and similar in concept to Garageband for Mac OS X. These are designed with JACK usage in mind.

On Pulse Audio, the technology promises to make audio usage a lot easier in future for Linux, but at the moment it's a little too buggy for mainstream use IMHO. Considering the number of Pulse issue with Fedora 8, I can only hope it's more stable for Ubuntu Hardy when Ubuntu plan to integrate into the distro.

Hopefully that helps you out some. :D

Edited by xithium
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