Daniel Nouri's Blog

Yesterday I found an excellent tutorial for setting up Jack on Ubuntu. I read on the Jack homepage that it also runs on Mac OS X. So this might even be interesting for the I have to have a Mac because... umm, well... because types among us.

What is Jack for? It's a low-latency audio server. And it's for connecting audio and midi signals between programs. With Jack, you can have a virtual midi keyboard drive a sequencer and have the sequencer drive a synthesizer and a drum machine, for example. Actually, that's exactly the setup that this tutorial describes.

I figure I should only start up Jack when I make music. Because I listen to music with amaroK, which cannot output to Jack. I can imagine lots of my other everyday applications don't output to Jack. But that doesn't hurt. qjackctl is a tool for starting up Jack and configuring it. It comes with a status icon in the tray bar of which the background color turns red if you had a buffer overflow or underflow, which is useful for finding out which JACK settings work for you: The more performant your system and your soundcard, the less latency you can have. Latency is the time between playing a note and hearing it.

The last time I set up Jack was on a Debian box. The memories I have from the Jack installation on that box are that it took me quite a while to figure out things. Hence, I was hesitating but now I finally installed Jack on this Ubuntu box, and it was a snap.

After reading the beforementioned tutorial, seq24 finally starts to make sense to me. I tried seq24 before, but frankly, I didn't know what to do with it. Its user interface scared me away.

seq24 is a sequencer, as you might have guessed. It has a live mode that is very similar to what Ableton Live has: While your (MIDI) loops are playing (which drive other synthesizer or drum machine software -- you get the idea) you can switch between them by mouseclick. You can have the switch happen in such a way that the previously selected loop continues playing until it comes to the end after which your new loop starts. This mode of play is very nice for experimenting and finding out which of your loops sound good together.

All I need now is get into a creative mood... (waiting)

Update: The old Ubuntu Studio wiki was merged with the Community Ubuntu Documentation for Sound.