Suddenly JACK is unable to use any soundcard

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unfa
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Suddenly JACK is unable to use any soundcard

Post by unfa »

Hi!

A couple of days ago I booted my laptop and wanted to play some music - I realised I can't get any sound out of it.

A few days later I know this: ALSA works and can use my soundcards, aplay -l seems to detect them correctly, but when run JACK (using ALSA driver!) all three different audio interfaces I tested with (each has 2 ins/2 outs) are detected as 32 in/32 out monsters. And they are unable to capture or play anything.

The audio interfaces I tested are:

Onboard Intel HDA (laptop, stereo)
USB Behringer UMC202HD
USB Line6 POD Studio UX2

I don't remember updating anything right before the problem stroke, but I'm reverting my Linux Mint 18 KDE5 system partition from rdiff-backup to a state 7 days in the past to see if it fixes the problem.

I am running AV Linux 2016.3 live (isotester) rigth now. I was sure it will work - but no. I have run Ardour 5.3 with JACK and I have 32 channels of nothing. I tried running Ardour with ALSA directly, without JACK - and voila! It works again! So I suspect that the problem comes form JACK itself. No idea how or why, becasue it really just stopped working overnight - and now a completely unrelated Live distro is having the same issue. I did not expect that. That sounds like hardware problems - but I tested 3 different interfaces! If they were all USB, I could have believed that it's a USB bus problem, but the onboard Intel HDA is using a PCI interace. Also - they work when used with ALSA directly, without JACK in the middle.

If I can't find a solution I'll run an older KX Studio 14.04 LiveDVD that I have on my disk to see if it also suffers from this issue.

Please let me know if I can provide any more information about this.

PS: This is a Linux Mint thread I searched for help first. This one is a successor:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic. ... 9&t=235949

EDIT:

I reverted my system form backup, will test it now. This is a list of jack-related packages on the AV Linux LiveCD. Maybe the installed JACK version matters?

Code: Select all

# dpkg -l | grep ii | grep jack
ii  jack-capture                            0.9.71-1                                 amd64        program for recording soundfiles with jack
ii  jackass                                 1:20140520-1kxstudio1                    amd64        JACK-MIDI support for VST hosts
ii  jackd                                   5                                        all          JACK Audio Connection Kit (default server package)
ii  jackd1                                  2:0.124.2~20151211-2~xenial1             amd64        JACK Audio Connection Kit (server and example clients)
ii  jackd1-firewire                         2:0.124.2~20151211-2~xenial1             amd64        JACK Audio Connection Kit (FFADO backend)
ii  jackutils-script                        0.0.1avlinux6-1                          all          Simple Start and Stop Scripts to Utilize With QJackctl and Launch a2jmidid and aloop-daemon - Custom AV Linux Package
ii  libjack-dev                             2:0.124.2~20151211-2~xenial1             amd64        JACK Audio Connection Kit (development files)
ii  libjack0:amd64                          2:0.124.2~20151211-2~xenial1             amd64        JACK Audio Connection Kit (libraries)
ii  libjack0:i386                           2:0.124.2~20151211-2~xenial1             i386         JACK Audio Connection Kit (libraries)
ii  qjackctl                                2:0.4.1-1kxstudio2                       amd64        User interface for controlling the JACK sound server
ii  screencapjack-script                    0.1.2avlinux8-1                          all          A very basic screen capture script using ffmpeg and jack-capture, the script is installed to /usr/local/bin and can edited with a text editor. Custom AV Linux Package 
EDIT2:

Reverting my system seems to have fixed the issue, but that's not a fix - it's just a poor workaround.

This is the list of JACK-related packages on my Linux Mint 18 KDE5 64-bit system, in a state that works:

Code: Select all

$ dpkg -l | grep ii | grep jack
ii  jack-capture                                    0.9.71-1build1                              amd64        program for recording soundfiles with jack
ii  jackass                                         1:20140520-1kxstudio1                       amd64        JACK-MIDI support for VST hosts
ii  jackd                                           5                                           all          JACK Audio Connection Kit (default server package)
ii  jackd2                                          2:1.9.11~20160620-5~xenial1                 amd64        JACK Audio Connection Kit (server and example clients)
ii  libjack-jackd2-0:amd64                          2:1.9.11~20160620-5~xenial1                 amd64        JACK Audio Connection Kit (libraries)
ii  libjack-jackd2-0:i386                           2:1.9.11~20160620-5~xenial1                 i386         JACK Audio Connection Kit (libraries)
ii  pulseaudio-module-jack                          1:8.0-0ubuntu3.1                            amd64        jackd modules for PulseAudio sound server
ii  vlc-plugin-jack                                 2.2.2-5                                     amd64        Jack audio plugins for VLC
The major difference I see is that AV Linux has jackd1 while Linux Mint has jackd2 installed. I'll chroot into the newest snapchot of my system that wasn't working to see if that changed.

EDIT3:

So this is the list of packages from the Linux Mint that had this problem:

Code: Select all

# dpkg -l | grep ii | grep jack
ii  jack-capture                                    0.9.71-1build1                              amd64        program for recording soundfiles with jack
ii  jackass                                         1:20140520-1kxstudio1                       amd64        JACK-MIDI support for VST hosts
ii  jackd                                           5                                           all          JACK Audio Connection Kit (default server package)
ii  jackd2                                          2:1.9.11~20160620-5~xenial1                 amd64        JACK Audio Connection Kit (server and example clients)
ii  libjack-jackd2-0:amd64                          2:1.9.11~20160620-5~xenial1                 amd64        JACK Audio Connection Kit (libraries)
ii  libjack-jackd2-0:i386                           2:1.9.11~20160620-5~xenial1                 i386         JACK Audio Connection Kit (libraries)
ii  pulseaudio-module-jack                          1:8.0-0ubuntu3.1                            amd64        jackd modules for PulseAudio sound server
ii  qjackctl                                        2:0.4.1-1kxstudio2                          amd64        User interface for controlling the JACK sound server
ii  vlc-plugin-jack                                 2.2.2-5                                     amd64        Jack audio plugins for VLC
I don't see any difference, so looks like installed jackd version (1 or 2) has no effect on the issue.
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