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Thread: Using Two Sound Cards

  1. #11
    Join Date
    Apr 2008
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    Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

    Re: Using Two Sound Cards

    There are directions for using pulse-jack and a lot of other stuff here

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=843012

    The pulse-jack info is near the bottom of the OP in the Ubuntu Studio section.

    If jack is running and using the HDSP then it is unavailable to pulseaudio and so will not show up. It should show up if jack is closed and some other app has not already grabbed it while pulse was sleeping

    If you are happy with your setup I can not really recomend you changing it and pulse in Jaunty is not really working as it should so I have not fooled around too much with the pulse-jack stuff there but others have and it seems to work well for them.

    But, if you want to add a little functionality like applications playing through pulse being available to connect through jack then the pulse-jack modules are pretty easy to get working as you will see in the link above. What it does is creat a jack-sink and jack-source in pulseaudio and create pulse input and output clients in jack. The jack and pulse devs have been talking with each other lately so hopefully we can get some more from this in future versions. There are a few things you need to be careful with but they are explained.

    Sometimes I use the pulse-jack sink to add effects to streams playing in Amarok, or record you tube with ardour, or play along, things like that and to get record-my-desktop working. It can all be done on the fly without having to restart jack or any of the apps to change devices so it is very handy in that regard. The alsa/pulse apps stay in pulseaudio and the jack apps stay with jack and the pulse-jack sink lets you connect them without losing anything from either one.

    Pulseaudio is going through some big changes lately. Pulse0.9.15 has a much better volume control with a lot of added functionality and they expect to add even more with future versions along with playing better with jack. They have not jumped to version 1.0 so I suspect the devs feel pulseaudio is still somewhat incomplete.

    But, things are looking up soundwise, FFADO is working better, Jack2.0 is very close. When jack gets back into the /main repo a lot of these issues will go away.

    A little history so maybe you can understand why all of a sudden so many distros moved to pulseaudio and why everything has become so confusing. The alsa drivers have been moved into the kernel. Due to kernel security concerns this move brought about a big change in the way the alsa drivers should be communicated with. It is no longer acceptable for applications to be able to directly manipulate the drivers since they are in user space and the drivers are now in the kernel. Since the ALSA sound server (not the drivers) architecture (esound, demix, et al) was such a mess and so many changes were needed to conform to this new paradigm, it was easier to just abandon it and institute a new sound server that would sit between the drivers and the applications and prevent user applications from intruding on the kernel space. Pulseaudio, unready as it was, was about the only thing that fit the bill and so was adopted by ubuntu and fedora and suse and mandriva etc.

    Meanwhile, KDE, as they are wont to do, started developing their own new sound server, Phonon, which has replaced aRTS in KDE4 and is very similar to pulseaudio but is still very much a work in progress.

    And OSS has jumped back in the game but nobody is taking that too seriously since their previous abandonment of the Open Source community generated a lot of resentment and mistrust. (The devs took OSS private and started charging for it.)

    Meanwhile jack stands apart from all of this and continues on its dedicated but limited mission. To provide a low latency controller for professional quality sound production. Jack will never be a sound server but the jack devs are working to get jack better integrated into the sound server scheme without compromising the mission.

    Soo, the linux sound scheme is in what can be charitably called a brief period of flux. Hopefully it will all settle out in another year or 2 and these new sound servers will have their act together. Meanwhile you can still fall back to the old ALSA server stuff but I think much of the server side API will become deprecated over the next few years due to security concerns.

    That was probably way more than anyone needs to know.
    PMs will be ignored.

  2. #12
    Join Date
    May 2007
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    Distro
    Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

    Re: Using Two Sound Cards

    Thanks for the help on the pulse-jack modules. (BTW, I've often referred to your 10,000 page audio guide thread for a while now; the info is helpful and appreciated.) Looks like using the pulse-jack modules requires updating to jack2 AND updating pulseaudio, and neither of those updates are yet packaged for Ubuntu.

    I'm torn between my currently functional setup and my curiosity, particularly by jack2's ability to better use a multicore cpu. Does that translate to even lower latency? The jackdmp paper (http://lac.zkm.de/2005/proceedings.shtml#letz_et_al) indicates that the jackdmp model actually adds one buffer more latency (Page 3, section 3.4.2), which if I understand correctly, unfortunately means slightly higher latency.

  3. #13
    Join Date
    Jul 2009
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    Brodnax VA.
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    27
    Distro
    Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

    Re: Using Two Sound Cards

    As long as you are not running Karmic, just use synaptic to find "asoundconf-gtk" and that will install a teeny tiny little application that puts up a simple little graphical box that allows you to switch audio sources. Karmic broke mine as it has no /usr/bin/asoundcon file any more. BUT when it was working with Hardy and Intrepid, it presented either my main sound card or my USB headset. SWEET!! Worked like a charm. If I wanted to change volume or turn on the headset boom mike, then 'alsamixer' would do the job. Magic! Best little handy application in the whole distro. I kept it's icon parked in my bar for quick switching. Now, I cannot use it with Jaunty That sux. X[ Ric

  4. #14
    Join Date
    Apr 2008
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    4,377
    Distro
    Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

    Re: Using Two Sound Cards

    Quote Originally Posted by malrost View Post
    Thanks for the help on the pulse-jack modules. (BTW, I've often referred to your 10,000 page audio guide thread for a while now; the info is helpful and appreciated.) Looks like using the pulse-jack modules requires updating to jack2 AND updating pulseaudio, and neither of those updates are yet packaged for Ubuntu.

    I'm torn between my currently functional setup and my curiosity, particularly by jack2's ability to better use a multicore cpu. Does that translate to even lower latency? The jackdmp paper (http://lac.zkm.de/2005/proceedings.shtml#letz_et_al) indicates that the jackdmp model actually adds one buffer more latency (Page 3, section 3.4.2), which if I understand correctly, unfortunately means slightly higher latency.
    If you really are still using 7.10 as your sig suggests then you should just wait for the next release, karmic koala in October. jack2 will be in there and ardour3 etc, etc, along with the 2.6.30 kernel which, from what I understand has incorporated the rt patch so will be rt capable OOB.

    One more buffer vs multicore, I am not sure that latency will actually increase in any significant manner since before that jack was using a slice of one cpu and can now use slices from multiple cpus. Unless this buffer for multi cpus is quite large, which I doubt, there will be no increased latency.
    PMs will be ignored.

  5. #15
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
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    Vancouver, Canada
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    1,856
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    Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn

    Re: Using Two Sound Cards

    Quote Originally Posted by markbuntu View Post
    If you really are still using 7.10 as your sig suggests then you should just wait for the next release, karmic koala in October. jack2 will be in there and ardour3 etc, etc, along with the 2.6.30 kernel which, from what I understand has incorporated the rt patch so will be rt capable OOB.
    I just stumbled on this thread, I know it's old, but I have to scratch my head. Karmic won't have any of those features.

    We're past feature freeze so here is the official package versions for Karmic:
    Jackd is 0.116.1
    Ardour is 2.8.2 (Ardour3 hasn't even been released yet)
    Kernel is 2.6.31 (there is a SEPARATE 2.6.31-rt because the Realtime patch is still a patch and is not incorporated in the mainline kernel yet)

    It'd be nice to have jack2 packaged soon, and people are working toward that; but promising it for any version until it is packaged is just silly.
    What makes a great open source contributor is not primarily the brilliance of their ideas or importance of their bug, but rather their willingness to see it through to success.

  6. #16
    Join Date
    Sep 2012
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    1

    Lightbulb Re: Using Two Sound Cards

    Hi,

    I recently made a tool called 'p2jaudio' (screenshots: http://code.google.com/p/p2jaudio/wi...shotsAndVideos).
    I think this tool does the opposite of what you are trying to do.
    If Skype audio is sent via PulseAudio JACK Sink, and if I manage to create the opposite of 'p2jaudio' (something like 'j2paudio'), you could connect 'PulseAudio JACK Sink' with the resulting 'Headset' input jack, and connect audio from non-'PulseAudio JACK Sink' ports to a resulting 'Speakers' input jack.

    But optimal would be that you could configure in Pavucontrol the following: the audio coming from 'Skype' to go only through the headsets and the audio coming from all the other applications to go through the speakers.
    But I don't know this is possible.

  7. #17
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
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    58,282

    Re: Using Two Sound Cards

    Old thread closed.

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