Anyone experienced with JACK audio? I need help.

Hey,

If there’s anyone experienced with JACK audio, and possibly bitwig too, then I’d appreciate your advice/help.

I bought bigwig to go alongside renoise/logic (9 in my case, I’m yet to upgrade), for audio manipulation, and other reasons (no DAW does it all, but renoise is amazing for what it does/to me mainly beats/rhythms, and logic I like for a lot of reasons).

On the bitwig site and prior to launch, the bitwig company said that there wouldn’t be rewire, but, there would be JACK, which does what you need.

I just downloaded JACK and can’t figure out how to route bitwig and renoise/logic together.

I could get audio coming from bitwig to logic, but, the tempo didn’t match up, loop didn’t match up, when I pressed play in logic it does nothing in bitwig, and it seemed to come out of all of the audio channels I’d setup in logic.

There are literally only a small few videos on youtube on how to work with jack, and I haven’t been able to find a video on how to setup jack with bitwig at all.

I want to set things up so I can send bitwig/logic/renoise into bitwig/logic/renoise, with the slave/master varying depending on the project. I want the play positions to match up, the tempo to match up, cycle/loop to match up. Basically, I just want to do what takes seconds with rewire. I want to do what rewire does.

Is this possible?

If so, then how do I do this? (if someone provides an example of logic/renoise/ableton/(and DAW) into bitwig and bitwig into logic/renoise/ableton/(and DAW), then, that should be enough for me to work out the rest). Can someone provide information/tutorial/guidance please?

Once I’ve set it up, do I have to do it every time I want to use bitwig in my setup? Or can I save some settings so I can just load connections up quickly?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers guys

which operating system are you using for this? I found tutorials on youtube for both windows and os x.

OS X 10.8.5

I can’t find anything that uses bitwig and another DAW (on OSX anyway).

Is what I want to do possible? To your knowledge?

I’ve only used jack on linux, where what you want is possible.

looking at www.jackosx.com it shouldn’t be too hard to set up on os x, and should work with any coreaudio application:

However, I couldn’t find any info whether jack transport, which is used to sync start/stop/etc with applications is supported on os x.

Does jack on OSX use jackCtl? the gui interface for jack? if it does there is an option in the settings for enabling “Jack Transport” that should sync up everything as long as both audio applications have been set to use jack as there audio driver…try looking for it…but it just might not be possible on on OSX as the audio applications , im guessing, are designed to use core audio and jack might be a bit of a hack…you could also try using midi to sync the applications up rather than using jack…set renoise or logic as the midi master…and one as slave…that i know is possible with logic as OSX’s core audio allows you to use fake internal midi cables to route information from one program t another…

No “jackCtl” comes up that I can see.

@slippycurb, do you mean qjackctl? I found a few links: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/wiki/Ardour_Installation_Mac_OS_X (bottom of the page) and https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/openmixer/manual/using_netjack/netjack-under-osx (at Download and install qjackctl)

also found this tutorial for jackpilot: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ardour/ch013_starting-jackosx/

qjackctl, yep thats what i meant sorry

qjackctl is not necessary in order to use jack transport successfuly. the only thing that is needed is that each app, that wants to use jack-transport is configured to do so. renoise has a single button for that. also, there is a difference from rewire in that there is no master or slave. each application connected to jack audio server can start or stop jack transport and this way it can start and stop all other apps that are listening (and controlling) jack transport. connections you make in jack pilot are audio and midi but not transport. as long as application is connected to jack server it can also control the transport. but this has to be configured in an application and depends on it, if transport is supported/enabled.

hope that helps.

ps: essentially, jack server is a demon that runs in a background, so one could start it in a command line. there are different apps (guis, or commandline tools) that can control how jack-aware apps are connected between eachother through jack

pps: i never used jack on os x though, above is all from the experience on linux, where it’s easy to use jack-transport between renoise, ardour and xjadeo (video player) for example

JackTransport is easy to set up on linux, as long as applications support it. Whether this applies for os x is another thing.

My guess is that jacktransport isn’t supported on os x, unless there is some Coreaudio feature similar to it that can be directly utilized by jackosx. Of course you could find this out by kindly asking on jackosx irc channel or mailing list (or whatever they have)

Routing audio through different applications should work on os x though.

it seems like jack-transport is supported by at least Ardour on osX. so it seems jackosx supports it, the questions is whether other apps to (apart from Ardour).