JACK integration

[ChristieGrinham]

Add JACK integration for cross-program transport and audio/midi routing.
This would ease audio editing and help with composing music for video.

[Jason Gerard DeRose (jderose)]

Hi, we meet again! Thanks for filing this, and thanks so much for offering Novacut your expertise as a composer!

JACK integration wasn't on my radar at first, but your use case for music composition makes total sense and now I see how important this is.

I'd love your input on how exactly the workflow should work for this. I assume you want something more than just playing back the current edit with JACK to allow live work on the score? For example, is it useful to see annotations/notes from say the directory or writer? What kind of annotations do you want to be able to add yourself?

Another interesting workflow problem is I'm guessing as you work on a score, the editor/director might makes some tweaks to the edit, requiring tweaks to the score. So bits of the score need to be "pinned" to the correct scene in the edit. And that way the software knows when a scene has been changed, when the score might need a tweak to fit the new timing, pace, or mood. Am I on track here? Please enlighten me!

And some food for thought in terms of what could be possible as far as workflow: longterm we what Novacut to handle everything from collaborative screen writing, to driving production-day workflows and logistics, to the entire post-production workflow, to publishing. Now, we don't intend to have a single overloaded hyper-application... that would turn into a nightmare. But the point is that all this information is stored in the same, unified database, and then for various tasks we build very focused workflows that draw on whatever information that makes sense. So if it makes sense to see the script as you compose the score, you can (as an example... I don't know if that would actually make sense).

Anyway, thanks again and please feel free to dump any ideas into this bug report as they come to mind!

[ChristieGrinham (christiegrinham)]

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

I think to begin with having support for the JACK transport would be most important as this would allow us to press the Play button in novacut and all other programs connected via jack would start playing at the same time. So say I am doing the rough score in Musescore, if I press play in Novacut, my score in Musescore would start playing at the same time, and vice-versa, if I press play in Musescore, the project in Novacut starts playing. The same feature could be used with Ardour, possibly for sound effects or in-depth editing of audio tracks (as Ardour has great support for many real-time audio plugins and will soon have full Midi capabilities). These programs already support the JACK transport so you would just have to add the support in Novacut.

I think annotations/notes would definitely be useful. The director could make a new annotation track with notes for the music, so at this point the music is dark and mysterious, this point it's light-hearted and quaint and then here this none. And then the composer would be able to look at this and easily be able to connect that with what is going on screen. Maybe we could have some kind off diff feature? so the composer can see which notes have changed since they last looked at the project.
And maybe you could use the notation track to say which piece of music plays when and if you click on the annotation it brings up that file in the appropriate program.

At the moment the only video player with JACK transport support is Xjadeo, but it is extremely outdated, doesn't always work and has a terrible UI, so to have something else that can fill this role would be perfect and to have it so tightly integrated in the workflow is a great idea.

Finally having audio input/output via JACK would come in handy so people can record sounds straight in from other software like Renoise, Hydrogen, Qsynth. And with Midi support you would be able to use external midi controllers/surfaces to play/pause and adjust levels for each track.