Re: [LAU] Jack, Ardour, and the Gentoo Pro-Audio Overlay

On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:53:38 -0500 (CDT)
Brent Busby <brent@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> Before going further...I have read the FAQ.
>
> Over the past couple of months, I have been settling into a very nice
> new AMD quad core machine with Gentoo/amd64. Generally, I've been
> extremely pleased with Gentoo, and I plan on staying on this OS.
>
>
> One question I have which is not entirely Gentoo-specific regards
> DBUS-aware Jack versus regular Jack (and other various Jacks):
>
> Since my system has been compiled to have absolutely no
> PulseAudio whatsoever, do I need DBus support for Jack at all? From
> what I've gathered from threads here, the only thing DBus support is
> used for in Jack is as part of some mechanisms of trying to tell
> PulseAudio when to pull out of the way (via DBus). There are USE
> flags of 'classic' and 'dbus' available for the live ebuild of Jack
> in the Pro-Audio overlay...although if 'classic' means no DBus, I'd
> presume you'd get that by just turning the 'dbus' knob off, so I'm
> not sure what 'classic' does. It's not described.
>
> Is there any disadvantage to Jack-DBus? What about Jack-Midi? I've
> always dealt with my MIDI hardware using regular Alsa Midi, and I've
> seen messages suggesting Jack-Midi support is not necessary.

I won't be able to answer all your questions but some of the things
currently important to know:
1) Jack compiled with dbus support allows you to control jack with dbus
control apps like laditools. You should then use dbus control
applications only since others wont work reliably.
2) The dbus PA <-> Jack thing is a hack that's there because there's no
better mechanism yet.

All this will hopefully change in future and was discussed in some
length on the LAD list some time ago. Until that changes I personally
recommend to compile jack without dbus unless you want to use laditools.

> Also, I'm new to the whole live ebuilds thing. I see that the
> overlay offers Ardour, Jack, and many other things in the form of
> direct CVS snapshots. It seems that these are prefered, however, it
> looks like they often require unmasked versions of dependency
> programs. Should I be afraid of that? For example, the live ebuild
> for Ardour seems to be trying to pull in a version of aubio that is
> masked for amd64, though I didn't see a bug in the bug database
> explaining why. Should I simply unmask any package that is demanded
> of a program in the overlay on the basis that overlay programs are
> basically bleeding edge anyway?

I can't help you with that specifically since I never used gentoo but
as a general guideline: stay away from it if you don't know what you're
doing. A CVS (or any version control system for that matter) checkout
might be totally broken and there's no guarantee that it will even
compile.

HTH,
Philipp
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Received on Fri Jul 17 04:15:02 2009