KXStudio Applications for Jack

I'm curious about the applications collection of KXStudio, but I'm still struggling with my new laptop and it's creepy ACPI support. The stupid dsdt is really messed up and totally buggy. That's also the reason why the last parts of the Aspire tutorial are still missing >.<

But well, I've found some really neat tools for Jack today. They look like they could replace the laditray stuff.

There are no ebuilds for them yet, but if somebody wants to have a look and test them, here's the link: KXStudio:Applications

Some feedback would be great though. Let me know if it's worth to test them. ^^

Jack and Pulseaudio

I've recently found a question on the Gentoo forums about Jack and Pulse in one environment which is very well possible.
Both, Jack and Pulse, need to be build with the dbus useflag which let them communicate which each other.
As soon as you start Jack it will take over the device from Pulse and give it back to it if you close Jack again.

Jack and the LADI overlay

The LADI overlay provides a great set of tools for jack and lash. It is managing your settings in studios and let you save and load different jack settings. The important tools from the overlay are ladish and laditools.

The laditools are containing several utilities. Here's the list quoted from the blog of the ladi creator MarcO'Chapeau:

The laditools python module (no interest for the end users)
laditray : a system tray icon that allows you to start, stop and monitor JACK, as well as start some JACK related apps (log viewer, connections...)
wmladi : a controller as a Window Maker dockapp. Uses the same menu as laditray
ladilog : a JACK, LASH and a2jmidid log viewer
ladiconf : a GUI to setup JACK's configuration
g15ladi : a JACK monitor for g15 keyboards

You can add the ladi-overlay to layman:

layman -o http://www.marcochapeau.org/files/downloads/overlays.xml -f -a ladi


Build the laditools:

emerge laditools -avq


There's also a rewrite of lash in the overlay called ladish. It is replacing the lashlibs but it turns out that you run into some file collision if you install ladish and a tool is pulling into lash.

Here's a small workaround to install both package to allow tools like ardour to use lash:

a) Add the useflag lash to your /etc/make.conf
b) Build lash with the oneshot emerge option:

emerge lash -1avq

c) Delete the lash libs from /usr/lib64:

rm /usr/lib64/liblash.so.1.1.1
rm /usr/lib64/pkgconfig/lash-1.0.pc
rm /usr/lib64/liblash.so
rm /usr/lib64/liblash.so.1

d) Build ladish:

emerge ladish -avq


If you want to add laditray to your autostart add this line to ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh:

laditray &

But be warned it will start Jack automatically and will take control over your devices until you stop the studio. It's better to start laditray from menu if you use Pulseaudio for listening to music and systemsounds and Jack only as realtime soundserver for music composition.


Some interessting Links:
Home of LADI
Overlay