Ardour 3.5 question.

[dednikko]

Hey developers,

What does this mean to the average Linux Audio User? Will we be gaining anything here?

Ardour is now (theoretically) no longer dependent on JACK. The functionality provided by JACK has been abstracted to allow 3rd parties to provide implementations that directly use various platform native audio and MIDI APIs

http://ardour.org/whatsnew.html

[ssj71]

I personally doubt that ardour will remove JACK functionality, but they're heading toward having JACK functionality with any backend. I'm curious if there will be any community backlash against that statement though. It seems we are generally pretty proud of JACK and don't respond well to it getting anything but praise. Anyway there will always be alternatives (such as non) if Ardour goes some strange direction. Still its doubtful it would remove this functionality, its just no longer dependant on it. Really it improved JACK integration by allowing full control within A3 if you read the details.

[bazsound]

Of course, Ardour can still be run with JACK, and this option is not going away. We hope to see these other "backends" emerge over the next few months. For now, users should not experience any functional changes when using Ardour.

I dont think this is going to effect jack at all. Jack is an incredible and highly configurable back end. Theres so much development gone into jack to get to where it is today and what it can do that i doubt anything that comes out could catch up to where jack is.

I think its just more to make it easier to develop for osx and windows since mixbus is a commercial project that uses ardour.

currently though i think ardour wont run without jack as there are no other backends yet that support the functionality of jack. as i understand it ardour cant replace what jack does, it still needs a backend that does all the behind the hood stuff.

[varpa]

You seriously think Ardour would remove Jack and support only Alsa? The primary author of both Jack and Ardour is the same person. Jack was developed first because Paul Davis saw the need for a better audio server before he could begin work on the DAW he wanted to write. In fact, Ardour 3.5 has improved Jack support - more control such as the ability to dynamically switch the sample rate, for example. What could be gained by removing Jack support? Jack is one of the greatest strengths of Linux audio.