Ardour: Alsa vs jack

[English Guy]

Recently I have read a couple of things that suggest that Ardour is a lot more stable with just Alsa than Jack.

I only need Jack when syncing Hydrogen to develop a drum part and even this is redundant as soon as that is exported from Hydrogen as an audio file.

I have a large (for me and my modest machine) project to mix and I was wondering whether it was worth exporting the stems from the Jack based project and importing them into a new version that used Alsa.

Has anyone any knowledge or even better experience of which is better please?

[stanlea]

I guess it may depends on your hardware, jack is not supposed to be more faulty than alsa. This said, try also the Ardour forums.

[gimmeapill]

I wouldn't talk about stability, in the sense that I didn't find it to crash more or less.
But I have just tried the Alsa back end with 5.8 (out of curiosity) and was very surprised to get less xruns with Alsa (same latency settings as Jack).
Now to be certain, I should probably have measured the latency, but I didn't go that far.
As stanlea suggested: You should probably also raise the question on the Ardour forums to get a more informed answer.

[English Guy]

Sorry I realised I put midi where it should have read jack in the title. I have changed it in my original post.

[funkmuscle]

just loaded a heavy session with alsa and the xruns were spitting out like bullets from a machine gun.
switched back to Jack and no xruns.

[English Guy]

just loaded a heavy session with alsa and the xruns were spitting out like bullets from a machine gun.
switched back to Jack and no xruns.

Thank you. That is the kind of info I was looking for.

[rghvdberg]

You can switch back ends in the Ardour session.
No need to have separate sessions.

[funkmuscle]

You can switch back ends in the Ardour session.
No need to have separate sessions.

if that was for me, I think I did what you're saying right? Explained below.

Code: Select all

I wanted to test the difference between Alsa backend and Jack's so I just switched between both using the same session. That session was xrun free with Jack and spat out xruns like bullets with Alsa.

[rghvdberg]

Oops sorry, missed that. It was late

[English Guy]

I always work with alsa, unless i have to connect several program's when i use jack.
But even when with jack i only do that to build the song correctly (like hydrogen) and in the end i export the other tracks as wav or flac in ardour to mix and master, so with alsa again.

May I ask why?

[English Guy]

Yes you may offcouse. Can ask me everything and mostly i will answer. That's what forums are for . The rare answer i don't like to give i will not give.

Thank you