On Sat, 14 Jun 2014, Kaj Ailomaa wrote:
Make sure to look through what has already been planned, primareily at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuStudio/UbuntuStudioControls. Either Len or me can update that page with new content.
Looking through the wiki we have system check and jack control. It seems some things are duplicated. I am thinking the system check might run at boot time and leave a file laying around with it's analysis. Then there would be a settings application (in the settings menu... although it may make sense to use it to replace pavucontol in the sound indicator). This settings application could be the same as the jack control application, but opened with --settings or it could be a separate application. In either case, it would seem that there needs to be interapplication communication. A settings app would need to tell jackcontrol that settings have changed: please use them. SIGHUP would be enough for this. Or something that sees another instance of jack control is already running and pass that instance a message that says open the settings window and raise it. Perhaps another common SIG*. Dbus communication is another possibility.
What I am saying is that the jack control user interface needs to be really lean. Click the icon and only one more click to do what needs doing from a short list... The systray icon for qjackctl for example is too long in my opinion. It would be nice if the latency slider could be set up like the volume slider in the audio indicator is now.
Jack start/stop: If settings has jack running at session start up... this should probably be greyed out or at least greyed out except in advanced. There could be an Unstick Jack button that kills jack and restarts. One of the problems we deal with many times on our support chanel is some application starts jackd before jackdbus is running. Having jack run all the time would fix this. If jack defaults to high latency startup, there is no resource problem with using jack as the default pulse device. I understand this goes beyond just the contols application and gets into system setup. Another possibility would be to add a killall -9 jackd to the start button. BTW running "jack_control start" can be done at any time even if jackdbus is already running with no problems/hickups.
I have been running jackdbus as my sound server for over a month now with complete reliability. Pulse feeds jack (when I want it to) and latency is adjusted on the fly. Pulse has all alsa cards turned off. I really think this is the way to go. It would be nice if we could have a front end for jack that looked to applications like pulse but was smaller... but when I look at what people expect pulse to do (surround sound for example) I don't know how much smaller it could be made. Perhaps have a user config for pulse that loads fewer modules.
Just as an aside, we should come up with a name for this jack control so we don't get it mixed up with jack_control. If we feel it has wider application than just UbuntuStudio the name should indicate that.
I have some family stuff I want to do but will continue some of my thoughts later.
-- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
