[PlanetCCRMA] about Fedora updates

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 22:39 -0800, Niels Mayer wrote:

> For example, there should be a well supported option for "prosumer"
> and "pro" audio/video use of Linux using Jack and netjack as a
> replacement for pulseaudio. These would need to be supported across
> the board by other apps in fedora/gnome/kde s.t. users wouldn't need
> to manually set gstreamer properties in gconf, or do other gyrations I
> described earlier
> in: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.planetccrma.general/9485 . One suggestion for using Jack as a replacement to pulseaudio was made here: http://pdavila.homelinux.org:8080/blog/?p=369 ...

This comes up every once in a while in the jack* lists (and/or lac). So
far no one (AFAIK) has gone beyond saying that it is the way it should
be and that that would solve all problems. When somebody actually starts
working the way down that path he/she will realize that it is not that
simple (this is not to say that it should not be done or could not be
done). 

Currently Jack2 (fc12+) plays nice with Pulseaudio and can get the sound
card on startup and release it when exiting. And the Pulseaudio
connection to Jack did work on limited tests I did. 

So you can start Jack, load the appropriate Pulseaudio plugin and
redirect all PA streams to play through Jack. I experimented with that
briefly when writing the perl script I used for Jack/PA interaction in
fc11 when the PA vs. Jack interaction was still buggy. It was possible
to start Jack and get an application that was playing on PA to keep
playing transparently through Jack. 

So, the building blocks are already there, I think. 

Still, there are many reasons why it is not possible or desirable to
make Jack a "system service" that starts when the computer boots. It is
not designed to do that (security is one of the main problems). 

> Such an option would also make Fedora even more "the distro to have"
> for doing prosumer and pro music and video on Linux, especially with
> Fedora's strong support for infrastructure like qjackctl and patchage,
> audio tools like rosegarden or ardour, and video tools including
> qjadeo , kino, kdenlive etc. 

-- Fernando