[Jack Winter]

Originally Posted by Nystagmus

The thing about PulseAudio that I have no control over whatsoever, is the fact that MANY Linux Distros use PulseAudio installed by default. I don't think this is by accident. I'm not crazy about it and would prefer a pro audio alternative, but it seems to be appealing to those who decide what gets put into a distro. So until the pro audio stuff gets designed to be more user friendly, people will still be installing PulseAudio by default and as a percentage of them try out pro audio hobbies, the same issues will be cropping up time after time, unless incremental improvements to everything involved in the audio chain overwhelms and overcomes the glitches.

So overall, I do agree with you, but I feel that it's not a simple solution to just "install WineASIO and run JACK". I had a lot of difficulty with that and I'm not entirely a total newbie beginner anymore. Also, I didn't want to install the entire KXstudio repository, and even the KXstudio author admits some problems with the repo/install disc on his recent forums.

So yeah, it's a very thorny issue in about 8-10 different ways.

But I don't really disagree with you. And I'm thankful for your help.
All I can say is what I've experienced.

Sure, if you don't need lowlatency then the easiest way would most certainly be to use what your distro has configured for you. If that is a patched wine on top of pulseaudio then just go with that. Trying to fight the distro is normally not an easy thing at all.

That said, if a distro ships pa and jack, then it also ought to have configured it properly which would mean that the one can start jack without a problem, and pa would release the soundcard for jack's use, and then redirect pa's output to the jack server. If so, all you'd have to do get wineasio installed (and possibly wine-rt) and it all ought to just work, ymmw as always

Some more details on why things are like they are (regarding wineasio and wine-rt). To build wineasio you need the asio.h header file from Steinberg's SDK. This file unfortunately is explicitly prohibited from being distributed by anyone but Steinberg, so it can't be included in the wineasio source code. This means that most distros won't make a binary available and you'd have to build it yourself, or find a repo that makes a binary available for your distro.

Wine-rt adds the functionality of mapping windows priority levels to that of linux, thus making it less likely to experience audio underruns. The wine project doesn't want to add that patch as they are afraid that it might let malicious or badly written apps crash wine or the hosting computer. So again the responsability ends up with the end user, unless the linux distro takes care of it.