Just some notes to myself for later.

I want a little better sounding audio on screencasts so I dusted off the firewire soundcard I got a few years ago for recording bass tracks.

This model FireBox 24-bit/96kHz from PreSonus worked great for me on audio production stuff several years ago, but at the time I could give jackd and friends a realtime kernel to have their way with.

Now, I don’t really have the spare hardware to dedicate to a RT audio setup…
gotta run several ubuntu server VMs for work and can’t really hand the whole shebang over to jack every time I wanna record something.

Here’s my attempt to do it without realtime priorities… I’ll track my progress here.

The quick and the dirty…

Starting from a Natty desktop.

install jack

# apt-get install jackd

when the installer asks to do realtime by default, I said no.

Note that I installed ffado-mixer-qt4 ffado-tools ffado-dbus-server earlier trying to get this to work with pulse, without jack… but gave up. I don’t know if these packages effect the current setup, but they’re still installed

start the jack daemon…

$ jackd -r -dfirewire

Connect to jackd

$ qjackctl 

(in the foreground so I could watch messages)

Install something like Ardour

# apt-get install ardour

and wire stuff together with the qjackctl patchpanel, start jackd and go.

I used to use a better jack patch panel in the past… have to find it.

resources

http://wiki.jon.geek.nz/index.php/Presonus_Firebox
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=835477
http://rgrwkmn.hubpages.com/hub/Recording-in-Linux-aka-Free-and-Open-Source-Digital-Audio-Workstation