Do I need JACK?

Support & discussion regarding DAWs and MIDI sequencers.

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yama
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Do I need JACK?

Post by yama »

Hi, I'm new to this, got a MIDI controller recently, I come from the world of just playing on an acoustic piano mostly classical music.

I run arch in my desktop so I started looking into audio and JACK comes up a lot, but I can't figure out exactly why. I tried setting it up following arch wiki guide and the final steps weren't working, but I just wanted to get some sound out of the keyboard the day I bought it and learned that using LMMS with alsa works.

One of my main interest is using the keyboard as a way to play around with soundfonts (for example I love the sound of harpsichords so I just play it without recording) and I've been doing this with LMMS, but I'm assuming there's easier quicker ways to do this, since LMMS is more geared towards making music, not just playing an instrument.

I'm also interested in composing, for which I use Musescore for classical style, and learning more of LMMS for more electronic stuff.

So how does JACK vs ALSA benefit me in regards to these things?
varpa
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Re: Do I need JACK?

Post by varpa »

Alsa is the hardware or driver layer and Jack works on top of that. With Alsa only one program can do audio, with Jack, any number can use audio, and you can pipe audio between applications. Suggested reading: http://libremusicproduction.com/article ... arted-jack
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