Jack in Ubuntu Studio

[Marc R.J. Brevoort]

On Thu, 4 Feb 2010, Eric Hedekar wrote:

> The problem is a bureaucratic one at this stage,
> because Jack is in the Universe repositories of Ubuntu,
> applications in the Main repositories (Pulse Audio for
> example) can't be built against it so Pulse Audio isn't
> compiled with Jack support in the repositories.

I'd like to make you aware that there's a third possibility.

"Can't be built against it" is relative- it is technically
possible (although not common practice) to work around this.

HD24tools for example has JACK support built-in (for Linux
as well as MacOSX/Windows), but doesn't require JACK to be
available; it is a soft dependency. This is vital for
platforms whose users don't usually have JACK available.

Without JACK available, HD24tools will try portaudio.
With Jack and portaudio both unavailable, there simply
will be no sound.

This is accomplished by letting the application manually
load libraries in runtime, rather than statically linking
them in, or letting the compiler generate code to load the
dynamic libraries on program startup.

I suppose it would be possible to tweak Pulse Audio to
have the same capabilities, but it's really up to 
the author(s) of Pulse Audio to make such a decision.
I'll gladly provide the JACK wrapper code that allows
this.

In any case, I thought I'd make you aware of this
possibility. As it allows JACK support to be built-in
without it being a hard dependency, it could solve the
problem posed by the original poster.

Best,
Marc