Re: [LAU] Ardour/Jack on Debian 5.0

On Sun, May 03, 2009 at 07:40:30PM -0500, Brent Busby wrote:
> I'm still on Debian "etch" here, getting ready to upgrade to lenny,
> and I have noticed many here talking about audio work on lenny.
>
> However, apparently Ardour is no longer in the distro, [...]

ardour is not in Lenny.
ardour is in Squeeze (testing) at the moment, version 2.7.1.
ardour is also in Sid (unstable), version 2.8-1.

> and Jack is a version which is considered buggy upstream according to
> the recommendations on the Ardour download page online.

jackd is in Lenny (stable) based on 0.109.2 with many distribution level
patches, some of which change the source code. I've reviewed the patch.
My guess is that you should consider this 0.109.2-5 as different to
0.109.2.

jackd is in Squeeze (testing) at 0.116.1

The ardour recommendation you refer to is probably the building section,
at http://www.ardour.org/building where it says "JACK 0.109 or later,
preferably 0.116 or later to avoid a buggy version of JACK (libjack)".

Unfortunately this doesn't say exactly which bug was fixed, so it is
impractical to find whether the bug was fixed in a backport, e.g.
the Debian Lenny jackd 0.109.2-5.

But a version of 0.109.2 does meet the primary constraint of "JACK 0.109
or later".

Also, the ardour build on Debian may have been adjusted already to
compensate for this problem. There are about 6000 lines in the diff for
the Sid version.

> (And presumably every Jack-enabled audio app in Debian is compiled
> against this buggy version...yuck.)

Yes, but if the API doesn't change unduly, every Jack-enabled
audio app in Lenny should work fine with a later version of Jack, all
you have to do is install the later version and you shouldn't need to
recompile the other apps.

ardour in Sid states a dependency on jackd later than 0.103.0. If you
know it can only work with an even later version of jackd, then please
file a bug.

> What's the most common/recommended way for Debian users to keep their
> DAW working these days on lenny? I can't switch the machine over to
> Ubuntu right now because I need to upgrade in place with no reinstalls.
> It was encouraging to see some of you talking about audio work on lenny,
> so I assume there is some way around this?

I'd normally cherry-pick from the testing packages if it was important.

But in the situation you cite, it is entirely possible that the killer
bugs for jackd may have been fixed by backporting fixes to jackd or
ardour, and so you can't rely on the version numbers to prove there is a
problem.

If you wish to build Ardour rather than install from Debian, then yes,
you should follow the building instructions closely.

-- 
James Cameron    mailto:quozl@email-addr-hidden     http://quozl.netrek.org/
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