A quick spin vox-pop

[Ian Malone]

A week or so ago I thought I'd canvas some opinion on what people
might want from the spin. So I asked at the Rob Chapman guitar forums,
Rob is probably best known for gear demos and lessons on youtube, and
for starting a guitar company that makes collaboratively designed
guitars. So these are people who are used to community participation,
but not necessarily free software (though I probably skewed that a bit
by using their geeks forum).

Anyway, discussion seems to have finished, so here's the thread:
http://www.robchapman.tv/forum/threads/fedora-jam-music-creation-collecti...
Not a whole lot of new ideas. There are a few people already using
Linux for audio production and they are generally happy with what they
already use, not very surprising as they probably wouldn't be using it
if they weren't. However things that came up:
1. Hardware support. Not much we can do from a spin/music-list point
of view to improve driver support, but worth having advice and links
to the Alsa matrix visible somewhere. There is a lot of supported
gear, but there are people like digitalscream who've got hardware
which is unlikely to work.

2. Integration. Touched on, things need to work without too much
setup. This is even more important since it seems the spin will be the
starting point for people new to linux audio. It's not the primary
goal of the music list effort (that's really the packaging that
Brendan and others are doing), but it does serve as a showcase for
that work.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk

[Bernardo Barros]

On 10/28/2012 01:59 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
>  1. Hardware support. Not much we can do from a spin/music-list point
>  of view to improve driver support, but worth having advice and links
>  to the Alsa matrix visible somewhere. There is a lot of supported
>  gear, but there are people like digitalscream who've got hardware
>  which is unlikely to work. 
Maybe this could be mentioned on a README.html file on the Desktop. That
file would have all relevant information, including hardware related issues.

[Bernardo Barros]

One suggestion about the spin

Since it's KDE, there is no need to use pulseaudio. One elegant
alternative would be to exclude pulseaudio and include alsa-jack-plugin
providing a system wide alsa configuration (/etc/asound.conf) like this:

pcm.rawjack {
    type jack
    playback_ports {
        0 system:playback_1
        1 system:playback_2
    }
    capture_ports {
        0 system:capture_1
        1 system:capture_2
    }
}

pcm.jack {
    type plug
    slave { pcm "rawjack" }
    hint {
        description "JACK Audio Connection Kit"
    }
}

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave { pcm "rawjack" }
}

[Ian Malone]

On 30 October 2012 18:58, Bernardo Barros <bernardobarros(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  One suggestion about the spin
>
>  Since it's KDE, there is no need to use pulseaudio. One elegant
>  alternative would be to exclude pulseaudio and include alsa-jack-plugin
>  providing a system wide alsa configuration (/etc/asound.conf) like this:
>
>  pcm.rawjack {
>      type jack
>      playback_ports {
>          0 system:playback_1
>          1 system:playback_2
>      }
>      capture_ports {
>          0 system:capture_1
>          1 system:capture_2
>      }
>  }
>
>  pcm.jack {
>      type plug
>      slave { pcm "rawjack" }
>      hint {
>          description "JACK Audio Connection Kit"
>      }
>  }
>
>  pcm.!default {
>      type plug
>      slave { pcm "rawjack" }
>  }
>  
I'd advise against removing pulse if we can help it:
1. In the past (pre-pulse) I used to try various dmix (alsa) solutions
to get multi-application sound working. It's actually quite difficult
to get it working right, especially once things get into different
sample rates. Maybe this is better using jack as suggested, but lots
of the people working on this wont be using this as their desktop
which means fewer eyes on the setup we're asking others to use. Moving
us neatly on to:
2. The spin isn't the sole purpose of audio creation/music list, it's
(I think) "Creating high quality packages of music / audio
applications, tools and libraries." Fedora's default sound platform is
Pulse. If we can't get that integrated well with Jack and a
professional audio environment then we'll be making things more
difficult for users who want to use this stuff. The first advice to
them will always be 'rip out pulse'. And on that note:
3. Pulse is actually one of the best things to happen to linux audio
in the last decade. (Others are Jack and the steady improvement of
drivers in ALSA.) I remember manually setting devices in every
application, having to go around pkill-ing things to try and find what
was holding the soundcard and, as above, playing with odd partial
solutions. It was very painful in the early days, there are still
problems with its integration (mixers is my favourite) and it now
takes the flack as the application that's holding the sound device
when non-aware programs try to use it.

Of course if it really is impossible to overcome we might have to
consider it to make the spin plug-and-play. Hopefully Jørn's control
application will go some way to doing that though.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk

[Bernardo Barros]

My suggestion was made imagining that user that runs jack all the time
just after login and do a lot of pro audio work. From my experience
this setup works better. To be frank I've never been able to run
pulseaudio and jack at the same time in a smooth way, but people say
it's possible.

Cheers!

[Brendan Jones]

On 10/30/2012 07:58 PM, Bernardo Barros wrote:
>  One suggestion about the spin
>
>  Since it's KDE, there is no need to use pulseaudio. One elegant
>  alternative would be to exclude pulseaudio and include alsa-jack-plugin
>  providing a system wide alsa configuration (/etc/asound.conf) like this:
>
>  pcm.rawjack {
>       type jack
>       playback_ports {
>           0 system:playback_1
>           1 system:playback_2
>       }
>       capture_ports {
>           0 system:capture_1
>           1 system:capture_2
>       }
>  }
>
>  pcm.jack {
>       type plug
>       slave { pcm "rawjack" }
>       hint {
>           description "JACK Audio Connection Kit"
>       }
>  }
>
>  pcm.!default {
>       type plug
>       slave { pcm "rawjack" }
>  }
>  
I would caution against removing pulse from the Spin. There's no need as 
long as we have and easy way to turn it off - either by using Jorns app 
or providing concise easy to access documentation on the wiki (there may 
be some overlap with the musicians guide here). Arch have been doing 
this really well for some time [1][2][3] and we could provide something 
similar.

Pulse achieves what it set out to really well I think but its domain is 
really not pro audio. Its a complicated beast and often where's the 
blame for bugs in ALSA and the kernel. An updated Common Pulseaduio 
troubleshooting wiki would be really useful here.

The pulse commit lists for some time now and they seem to be really 
active and very receptive to answering questions. We should start 
forwarding more bugs upstream. I'm watching the bugs as they come in and 
hopefully will have more time to act on them once F18 is released.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pro_Audio
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/JACK_Audio_Connection_Kit

[Bernardo Barros]

I don't know what I'm missing, but with my setup all applications that are
not native jack clients (e.g. flashplugin etc) connect to jack
automatically with the alsa-jack plugin. What feature pulseaudio is
supposed to provide here?  It supposed to mix different clients in realtime
or something fancy? In that case it does not make sense since it's not
aware of the native jack clients.




On 30 October 2012 23:37, Brendan Jones <brendan.jones.it(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  On 10/30/2012 07:58 PM, Bernardo Barros wrote:
>
> > One suggestion about the spin
> >
> > Since it's KDE, there is no need to use pulseaudio. One elegant
> > alternative would be to exclude pulseaudio and include alsa-jack-plugin
> > providing a system wide alsa configuration (/etc/asound.conf) like this:
> >
> > pcm.rawjack {
> >      type jack
> >      playback_ports {
> >          0 system:playback_1
> >          1 system:playback_2
> >      }
> >      capture_ports {
> >          0 system:capture_1
> >          1 system:capture_2
> >      }
> > }
> >
> > pcm.jack {
> >      type plug
> >      slave { pcm "rawjack" }
> >      hint {
> >          description "JACK Audio Connection Kit"
> >      }
> > }
> >
> > pcm.!default {
> >      type plug
> >      slave { pcm "rawjack" }
> > }
> >
> >
>  I would caution against removing pulse from the Spin. There's no need as
>  long as we have and easy way to turn it off - either by using Jorns app or
>  providing concise easy to access documentation on the wiki (there may be
>  some overlap with the musicians guide here). Arch have been doing this
>  really well for some time [1][2][3] and we could provide something similar.
>
>  Pulse achieves what it set out to really well I think but its domain is
>  really not pro audio. Its a complicated beast and often where's the blame
>  for bugs in ALSA and the kernel. An updated Common Pulseaduio
>  troubleshooting wiki would be really useful here.
>
>  The pulse commit lists for some time now and they seem to be really active
>  and very receptive to answering questions. We should start forwarding more
>  bugs upstream. I'm watching the bugs as they come in and hopefully will
>  have more time to act on them once F18 is released.
>
>
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/**index.php/Pro_Audio<https://wiki.archlinu...
>
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/**index.php/PulseAudio/Examples<https://wik...
>
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/**index.php/JACK_Audio_**Connection_Kit<htt...
>
>  ______________________________**_________________
>  music mailing list
>  music(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>
> https://admin.fedoraproject.**org/mailman/listinfo/music<https://admin...
>

A quick spin vox-pop / Fedora Wiki

[Brendan Jones]

On 11/01/2012 04:30 AM, Bernardo Barros wrote:
>  I don't know what I'm missing, but with my setup all
> applications that
>  are not native jack clients (e.g. flashplugin etc) connect to jack
>  automatically with the alsa-jack plugin. What feature pulseaudio is
>  supposed to provide here?  It supposed to mix different clients in
>  realtime or something fancy? In that case it does not make sense since
>  it's not aware of the native jack clients.
>  
Serious audio users are going to configure there system just so in any 
case. We have to be cognizant of the novice user - pulse does provide a 
very good way of hot-plugging sound devices for normal desktop use. The 
jack-pulse bridge simply provides another sink/source.

Gnome pulls in pulse by default, and some apps will try to connect to 
pulse if it is installed regardless of whether it is running which is 
problematic. I don't expect all users of the spin to stick with the 
default desktop we've chosen, so rather than try and remove pulseaudio 
from the equation all together we should aim for peaceful coexistent 
instead.

Instructions on how to setup the alsa-jack bridge is something which 
would be a great addition to the wiki. I have created a starting page 
for Jack here [1]. This has been taken from the Musicians guide[2] and 
is not meant to replace it, but just provide a more organic way of 
documenting what the community knows about setup and configuration.

Looking for volunteers to add the rest of the configuration side from 
the guide to the wiki and expand on the already existing pulseaudio 
troubleshooting pages we have. If you don't have an account, create one 
and choose to join the music-creation SIG and I'll sponsor you

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JACK_Audio_Connection_Kit
[2] 
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Musicians_Guide/sect-M...


[3] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/user/new

A quick spin vox-pop / Fedora Wiki

[Ian Malone]

On 1 November 2012 05:21, Brendan Jones <brendan.jones.it(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  On 11/01/2012 04:30 AM, Bernardo Barros wrote:
> >
> > I don't know what I'm missing, but with my setup all applications that
> > are not native jack clients (e.g. flashplugin etc) connect to jack
> > automatically with the alsa-jack plugin. What feature pulseaudio is
> > supposed to provide here?  It supposed to mix different clients in
> > realtime or something fancy? In that case it does not make sense since
> > it's not aware of the native jack clients.
> >
>
>  Serious audio users are going to configure there system just so in any case.
>  We have to be cognizant of the novice user - pulse does provide a very good
>  way of hot-plugging sound devices for normal desktop use. The jack-pulse
>  bridge simply provides another sink/source.
>  
I think so too, supporting Pulse ON TOP OF JACK means the normal
desktop environment looks the same while what you're really running is
Jack. It also provides a way of insulating your Jack setup from
desktop applications, just disconnect the pulse sources and sinks.

>  Instructions on how to setup the alsa-jack bridge is something which
> would
>  be a great addition to the wiki. I have created a starting page for Jack
>  here [1]. This has been taken from the Musicians guide[2] and is not meant
>  to replace it, but just provide a more organic way of documenting what the
>  community knows about setup and configuration.
>  
For what it's worth I'm going to try and track down whatever bug is
crashing Jack in the KDE Live CD install. It's not a Jam-specific
problem and probably not even Pulse related. F18 KDE Phonon actually
tries to integrate quite tightly with pulse too (almost more so than
F16/17 gnome I think).

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk