Ardour doesn't work out of the box

[Gonzhauser]

Binary package hint: ardour

After installing ardour I opened a new project.
Good thing: Record works.
Bad news: Playback doesn't work and a cryptic error message appears saying that my hard drive isn't fast enough.

Solution: I had to manually start jackd before starting ardour.

I think this should work out of the box. The first things a user sees is that it doesn't work and then he remove ardour and then he decides to remove linux. :(
Please make it work out of the box.

Similarly, when jackd is started mplayer doesn't play anymore.
I have to kill jackd before I can use mplayer.

I hoped that the audio mess stopped when having pulseaudio in hardy but a combination of ardour/jackd/mplayer/alsa is still _not_ working. :(((((

[C.Kontros (coryisatm)]

This is actually how things work at the moment since different apps use different sound servers.

Intrepid might make this better. Best for now to use JACK Control to control JACK and only use apps that use the same server together.

If you want different JACK/Ardour behaviour, best to go to their bug tracker. http://tracker.ardour.org

[ttoine (ttoine)]

Please have a look at what I said about that kind of problem on this bug report :
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ardour/+bug/214256/comments/13

[Gonzhauser (gonzhauser)]

Ok, i read you comment but I still think that on simple hardware it is possible to work out of the box.
As far as I know pulseaudio was created to clean up this mess.
I am not an expert but I think you can always add a default route for the audio data and
I don't know/care whether it is

pulseaudio -> jack -> alsa

or

jack -> pulseaudio -> alsa

.

Is it so hard to have ardour and mplayer/totem/whatever running simultaneously or one after another without manually reconfiguring stuff or starting/stopping jackd?
I also don't care whether jackd is running always or automatically started when ardour needs it.
It just has to work.
That would be _really_ nice.

[ttoine (ttoine)]

Actually, we still have the problem and it will be hard to solve for a "every one" default config. Depending of mother board chipset, and mother sound chipset, the configuration of jackd could be different.

Second problem, every software, sound server, sink or what else generate sound can use and access with a lot of different solution to the sound card. The more you add software intermediate like pulse, gstreamer, jack, etc... the more it is difficult to access to alsa with a good latency. Second problem, wich software should have the priority ? And third problem, for firewire sound cards, only jackd can run them at the moment using freebob/ffado project.

So, for me, it is better to let the integrated sound chipset for Gnome/Gstreamer/Pulse/etc... applications. And to have a second sound card for audio applications, used only with jackd. It allow that the audio work is not disturbed by system sounds, etc... Everybody who make a bit of music with his/her computer do that, just because it solves the problem. And don't tell me about prices, etc..., it is now very affordable and easy to find a second pci/usb/firewire/pcmcia sound card. And one who need quality sound will always use another sound card, at least to have good a/d converters, even if he/she don't need a lot of i/o.

So, for me the problem is not only the softwares on Ubuntu Linux, but more the way people want to make music with. If you don't need a good sound card on Windows or MacosX, you don't need one for Linux. If you want to make music, whatever the system, you need a second sound card.

Toine

[Gonzhauser (gonzhauser)]

I have a notebook and use it to record music. I'm totally happy with it and I know professional composers who are _perfectly_ happy with it. Of course you can't do orchester work with 12 zillion tracks but for recording some tracks it is perfectly usable.

When I install Cubase on Windows, it works (well, most of the time).
Never heard of any problems with Logic on Macs.
Friends of mine use Protools on a Macbook without special hardware for composing.

I can only repeat myself: Is it so hard to detect that there is only one soundcard and connect to pulseaudio to hear at least _something_?

I think it is important to provide a "just works" solution for simple configurations, the user with two soundcards or special hardware is probably more aware of the fact that he has to configure his workstation.

[C.Kontros (coryisatm)]

"Is it so hard to detect that there is only one soundcard and connect to pulseaudio to hear at least _something_?"

Yes.

In the end, this is not a place for discussion. If you would like to discuss this issue please take it to the ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list.