I fell back to running Jack and Alsa with the default Alsa-Jack bridge, PulseAudio turned off, and controlling all through Cadence/Catia.
Now that I have configured gstreamer properly to use Alsa (couldn't get it to use Jack directly), all of the applications that I have tried work in some fashion without PulseAudio.
The applications that really understand Jack give me visible connectors on the Catia canvas, and I can make persistent connections to them. The applications that only know Alsa, or that have a less satisfying use of Jack, give me individual visible connectors in Catia, but starting/restarting an output makes the connectors disappear/reappear with connections set back to defaults.
I would like to get systematically more informative names on the connectors in Catia (some just say alsa-jack with a meaningless number), and I would like more persistent Catia-customized connections. But I am starting to suspect that much or all of the improvement needs to be done in the individual applications, rather than in a general purpose controller.
I didn't have much use for the single catch-all connection of all Alsa applications, even though it was persistent. Perhaps there is a clever way of achieving it all at the Cadence/Catia level, but I can see that some applications sometimes should drop connections and make brand new ones, so it may be best for the individual applications to decide on and implement persistent connection to Jack.
alsa_in/alsa_out seem to do just what I need in providing input and output connectors that I can manipulate in Catia. Eventually, I will probably script an automatic alsa_in/alsa_out connection for each USB device, and eventually I expect that Catia and/or other KXStudio controls will incorporate such a thing, and probably nice sets of defaults and fallbacks for connecting particular applications.
To organize the different .asoundrc configurations, I made a bunch of different ones with suffixes, and made a symbolic link named ".asoundrc" to the one I want to use at the moment:
Code: Select all
odonnell@Psammead:~$ ls -l .asound*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 odonnell odonnell 23 May 6 17:54 .asoundrc -> .asoundrc.kxstudio.dpkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 odonnell odonnell 1689 May 5 23:24 .asoundrc.aloop.exp
-rw-r--r-- 1 odonnell odonnell 287 May 4 12:00 .asoundrc.kxstudio.dpkg
-rw-r--r-- 1 odonnell odonnell 40 May 27 2011 .asoundrc.user.old
If configuration switches get to be a regular part of control through Cadence (the switch between custom and default Alsa-Jack configuration already does this on Jack restart), I would even put the individual files under a .asound directory, and look for an even less user-dependent method of switching, probably involving a change to the Alsa program that reads ~/.asoundrc.
)
). It's easy to do "rm *.old", so I think it's better to err on the conservative side. I also favor using established code from dpkg if at all possible, for uniformity.