Sorry, I only sent that last reply to Grant, the reply-to-anybody-but-sender options are a little counter-intuitive in Gmail.

On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 11:10 PM, Carl Canuck <carl.canuck.official@gmail.com

wrote:

Hi Grant,

I have in fact spent a little time with Jack and even conjured up a working prototype using Jack audio with ALSA MIDI (that will never see the light of day). However, you're ignoring the fact that:

1. Some people don't like having 20 separate audio applications running

and having to save all of their states individually 2. If you believe that any existing Jack session manager is a stable, reliable application that adequately solves problem #1, then it's obvious that you've not spent much time with Jack session managers 3. Jack is something like 15 years old now, and they still haven't even managed to solve #1 and #2 yet, among other long-standing issues? 4. With points #1, #2 and #3 all being common knowledge, why should I put my faith in Jack competently wrapping ALSA for me instead of taking matters into my own hands and going straight to ALSA? 5. If you visit Windows/Mac audio forums, there are legions of people who will tell you they tried Linux once, found Jack to be buggy and terrible in general, never intend to try Linux again. In fact, you can register a user name on any non-Linux music forum, and ask "i'm thinking of trying Linux for audio, thoughts?", and people will say exactly the things I described to you, not because they have any unfounded bias against Linux or Jack, but because that was truly their experience. 6. Jack's configuration settings and error logging are atrocious, it is far too often excessively difficult to understand why Jack won't start and how to fix it. 7. Is it really so unreasonable to ask for a basic example of a common use-case for ALSA without being told that I should just abandon the quest for that knowledge and put my faith in the Jack developers? Should deciphering the intended use of any API be an exercise left to the would-be developer?

If you like Jack, then by all means use it, but it's not ideal for my use-case, and I won't be spending any more time evaluating it until the Jack developers address these long-standing issues.

Carl

http://users.suse.com/~mana/alsa090_howto.html

Also, I have in fact seen the link you provided Grant, but that once again is only bits and pieces of the use-case. I'd like to know that I'm using ALSA as it's creators intended, rather than stringing together bits and pieces and hoping that I'm doing it right.

Regards, Carl