How to get JACK audio working in Ubuntu distro's and others

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Writing this how to here for easy reference.

So first off we're assuming here that you're using jack2.

In order to get jack2d to even start you need to manually select ALL audio interfaces. If you're using a Ubuntu distribution the version of JACK you have is actually somewhat dated depending on your definition of the word. Although it's actually QjackCtl we're interacting with. Anyway this is where the problems start from an end user stand point.

The problem is there's an Interface option which when you first open the setup page would indicate that all you have to do to get JACK working is select your audio device and hit start. So you do that and the first thing you get is a JACK was not able to start and it references pulse-audio still running as being the problem when actually it isn't.

Screenshot from 2016-03-08 18:38:44.png730x508 44.7 KB

You actually need to manually select both the Input Device and Output Device in order for JACK to use a given interface. Once you've done that and only one you've done that will JACK start and work as expected.

Now Arch users if you've landed here you might be scratching your head. Because your set up page is quite different. With the latest version of jack the bulk of the options that Ubuntu users are bamboozled with are now hidden under an advanced tab AND simply selecting an Interface will get you out of the gate. It's no longer necessary to manually select the Input and Output devices.

So bottom line is. Unless we as users press the midstream devs to keep their forks up to date we can end up in a really bad situation. We've been seeing this a lot recently and whilst JACK isn't mission critical in comparison to HeartBleed and the Bash and C++ flaws it's still not good.

And just to show how behind Ubuntu is at this point.

Mint 17.3 : Ubuntu 14.04

Antergos Linux : Arch

I know there's a major mind set difference between the Arch and Ubuntu especially considering we're looking at an LTS Ubuntu here but.... In my opinion (TLDR you probably don't agree) just because it's an LTS release doesn't mean applications running on it should be frozen. Kernel, drivers, core utilities sure go ahead. But this is an application installed post release it should be kept up to date! Especially in the context of end distributions like Linux Mint. Just bleh.

Anyway I hate out of date software so discovering Antergos/Arch was a very refreshing experience as Cinnamon was way more up to date than the version that was rolled with the latest Mint release which is only like 2 months old at this point sooo yeah..... ??? Nuff said I think.

Original Post Below:

Has anyone gotten JACK working in Linux Mint 17.3?

Hi everyone. I'm using Linux Mint 17.3 and I've started dabbling with ZynAddSubFx and a Midi Composer. I've been bouncing between Windows 10 and Mint trying to get a combo of software that would work for me. On both Windows and Linux I can get Zyn to read input from a midi keyboard, however on Linux Zyn wants to use JACK for audio output exclusively even though it offers alsa and others as an option. I can also feed Midi output form the composer into Zyn on Linux but.... can't get the two to talk on Windows.

All the videos I'm seeing on YouTube and on other forums seem to make it sound like I can just install it and run. I've got qjackctl and all it's doing is lobbing errors at my head and I'm super confused. Some are saying I have to stop pulseaudio before jack can run but..... pulseaudio is a dependency of Cinnamon as it turns out which means that it just relaunches itself instantly. When I uninstalled pulseaudio from Ubuntu Studio to test the theory in a VM it removed cinnamon :( but it still didn't work. This is Ubuntu Studio the one distro that's preconfigured for this sort of thing.

I really am at a loss. I've not tried to mess around with audio stuff in Linux before this but I've been using Linux as my daily driver for 3 years now and dabbling for 8 years so I figured it couldn't be that hard. Wrong. :/

Anyway was really hoping someone in the community has had experience doing this and could help out.

Side note: I really don't want to change distros (more to the point DE) just so I can do this but.... I am currently downloading Arch to install in another VM to test that out as seeing as Arch has way better package documentation than any other distro. So I'll post back if I have any success there. :|

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I've had trouble installing jack on even ubuntu 15.10. I install Kxstudio and have it reconfigure application settings. Works every time for me and it can see my midi i/o (although I never use them)

I'm not sure it will work for mint, but it is ubuntu based and so long as you can use the repos and install kxstudio-desktop who knows.

a quick google gave me a little guide https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=178572

So someone got it working.

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Thanks for the recommendation. I'll give it a look. Although KDE :/ but :P once it's packages are installed I can just run it in whatevs :) I've got Antergos installing in a VM currently (it's an Arch derivative, kinda like the look of it so far, and hey it doesn't have the Arch pain :P )

I'll try getting Jack running in it and then have a look at Kxstudio. Not expecting any luck with Jack but.... we'll see. :P

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So install Antergos. Go through the requisite teething pains with Pacman. Get a GUI for the thing installed. Yay. Actually nice to look at which coming from Debian is a breath of fresh air. Anyway. Install Jack Audio Connection Manager hit start Jack and..... the thing freaking works first go. Horray! Right. Now I've got to learn Arch properly so I can actually use it for Music production. Don't think I'll be using it as a daily driver just yet but.... I like the experience so far. Hasn't been totally awful. :)

My only gripe and it's actually a pretty big one. I enabled AUR in the install process but.... attempting to install most AUR packages from packman yields an error: package not found but not for all packages. if an Arch user wouldn't mind explaining to me what's happening there I'd appreciate it cause right now I'm down right confused. :/

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I am actually surprised when I get something right on the first try.

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For packages from the AUR you have to use 'yaourt' instead of 'pacman'. the syntax is the same. There are alternatives to 'yaourt' as well.

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NB: If you want to get JACK and PulseAudio to play (relatively) nice with each other, you need to install JACK2, which is the next generation of JACK, rather than JACK1, which is the most common package folks end up with when they install "jack". Differences between the two versions can be found here.

For JACK2 on Linux Mint, you'd want to install jackd2 and pulseaudio-module-jack.

For Arch Linux-based distros, you'd want jack2 and pulseaudio-jack.

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Thank. Yeah in Mint I was installing Jack2 but... I've discovered something. It's a noticeably older version of Jack2. With the one in Arch when I installed it to my USB drive I discovered that I had to explicitly select the input and output devices in order for it to launch. Which isn't as clear in the version I'm running on Mint. So I can probably get it working in Mint now armed with that knowledge.

Also with Antergos it came with Jack1 installed which led to confusion naturally but a quick switch to 2 fixed things almost instantly. So :)

Thanks everyone. I'll post a wiki format guide in this thread for people to find later. :)

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I struggled for ages to get JACK and pulseaudio to play nice together. used to remove pulse, until skype changes forced having to use it

Best option for having both pulseaudio and jack is use 2 different sound sources and disable the JACK audio device in pulseaudio config so there is no conflict

If there is only one sound device, arch based distros work well with 'jack2-dbus' package. Arch Wiki - PulseAudio through JACK

The 'new new way' from there wasn't working for me on Manjaro, problems with dbus meant I needed the standard jack2 package without dbus for JACK.

I used a modified version of 'new way' shown on arch wiki, has worked well for firends on other distros

I Added a QJackCtl option 'execute script on startup' (not full bash script as wiki suggests) just typed in single command 'pacmd suspend true'. Temporarily suspending Pulseaudio was enough to get JACK started properly.

I initially added 'pacmd suspend false' to the script to run after jack start, but Pulse seems capable of de-suspending without this anyway

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Have you taken a look at ubuntu studio ?

http://ubuntustudio.org/

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Yes. Jack didn't work out of the box. Still requires the in depth configuration that I still haven't written up. Let me do that now.

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I usedt Ubuntu Studio for about 6 months. Had no issues with jack, but Pulseaudio wasn't quite as good. Switched to Manjaro over a year ago - with v6 Pulseaudio been fine ever since

If you do get Jack running ok without x-runs, keep a backup copy of the config file .'jackdrc' in home folder.

text should be something like : jackstart -dalsa -dhw:Maya44 -r48000 -p512 -n2