Yay, jack works!

In the interest of writing things down, in case if I have future problems . . .. Ok, so Ardour, which is a very nice piece of software, requires a library called Jack. when I heard this, several months ago, my first thought was get to get jack from fink, but the version wasn't new enough, so I removed it. Then I tried various other versions, none of which worked properly.

So, I modified . . . . something to get a working version. It was a few versions sort of stuck together like frankenjack (and it died right before Halloween . . . spooky!)

Yeah, so unable to remember what I did, I turned to IRC for help. IRC is very cool, I don't know I didn't use it before this last summer. You can find all sorts of people doing sort of the same thing as you and then help each other solve problems. It's awesome! IRC.Freenode.net has some really cool channels, including #supercollider and #ardour. (It also has #jack, but that is really inactive.) Anyway, I went for help in #jack and learned about something called a paste site. It's bad form to paste a lot of crap into a channel and if you do so and then say you think you might be a hacker, people will laugh at you for being a silly n00b. Um, not that I totally did that and am all embarassed right this second. um.

anyway

Somebody there told me to blow away every jack-related file and install JackOSX. which I did, or tried to do, and it still blew up. Sie suggested I do a system-wide find command looking for wrong versions of jackd. That turned up nothing, but when I broadened my search, I found that I had removed fink's version of jack, but not fink's version of jack-shlibs. So when I tried to run jack, it was pointing at the wrong libraries.

On the one hand, that was kind of a dumb oversight, but on the other hand I'm kind of amazed that I was able to work around this before. I wish I could remember what I did.

Because being a hacker isn't about knowing about paste sites (that's just nettiquite). Being a hacker means being able to get impossible things to work. It's a terrible thing to do, because you can never figure it out later, especially if somebody else did it. Anyway, I'm kind of amazed at myself six months ago.

And, if you're thinking of running Ardour, which is a nice piece of software, you won't have problems unless you try to do something impossible. (But if you want to run it on one machine and display it on another via X-windows, you still have to modify some of the contents, alas)

The route from my computer to my speakers on my mixing board is still working, which makes me think I'm all wrong about that too, but there's some intermittent drop out, so I'm going to be confident in my previous assessment of the problem.