Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix

Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by majewsky on Sunday February 07, 2021 @04:20PM (#26058287)

> The audio stack on Unix is easily in my top three pet peeves of the desktop environment. It feels like a huge case of too many cooks in the kitchen.

This is also my opinion, which is why I was surprised by the conclusion of the article. Money quote:

> The audio stack is fragmented on all operating systems because the problem is a large one. [...] The stack of commercial operating systems are not actually better or simpler. [...] Linux is the platform of choice for audio and acoustic research and was chosen by the CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics).

I guess my gripe is this disconnect between "desktop audio" and "pro audio". I have my PulseAudio set up the way I want it, and that's what I need 99% of the time, but I would like to use Ardour when I want to record a podcast, but whenever I read the Arch wiki about how to have PulseAudio and JACK coexist, it looks like a huge mess that I don't want to deal with. Here's hoping PipeWire really shapes up to be my savior one day.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by jcelerier on Sunday February 07, 2021 @05:35PM (#26058880)

> whenever I read the Arch wiki about how to have PulseAudio and JACK coexist,

https://github.com/brummer10/pajackconnect

start jack, start pulseaudio, run pajackconnect, done

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by cycloptic on Sunday February 07, 2021 @05:33PM (#26058868)

The simplest way to do this now is to install pulseaudio-module-jack, that works pretty seamlessly in my experience.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by oilbagz on Monday February 08, 2021 @04:04AM (#26062245)

Without this one simple module, PulseAudio would have been entirely eradicated from my life long ago. Now its just hanging around in the background while JACK does all the work.

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