[CM] juce, linux and alsa

Dave Phillips dlphillips at woh.rr.com
Sat Jan 31 10:14:58 PST 2009


Heinrich Taube wrote:
> it seems like one of the juce wizards has written a class for  
> connecting to jack rather than alsa. its on page two of this (long)  
> discussion about audio problems on linux, which actually seem quite  
> centered on problems with alsa!
>
> http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juceforum/viewtopic.php?t=1338
>
>   i dont really know what the right solution is to get the audio  
> problems sorted out on linux.
>   

Interesting discussion. The players include the developer of the 
excellent JOST plugin host (kraken, aka Lucio Asnaghi), the developer of 
Snd-ls and a JUCE-ified Mammut (kjetil, aka Kjetil Matheussen), and of 
course the lead JUCE dev (jules).

Yes, the real focus of their lament is ALSA. Frankly, I agree with 
Kjetil: Use JACK for serious audio, use OSS (or ALSA's OSS emulation) 
for everything else. The number of audio "solutions" for Linux has 
become a problem itself, and application developers might be best 
advised to simply support OSS and JACK. IMO, you could skip OSS entirely 
too, but that's a little more radical. However, choosing JACK also gives 
you access to JackMIDI (better timing than the ALSA sequencer) and 
jackdmp (multiprocessor JACK daemon, aka JACK2). For my purposes there's 
little or no need for OSS support.

I suggest going with JACK all the way. It's the best high-performance 
audio server available for Linux (and now OSX and reportedly Windows), 
it includes integral MIDI support, and its continued development is 
pretty likely.

Now if only the JavaSound devs were listening ...

Best,

dp



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