JACK Audio Connection Kit - Definition and Overview

The JACK Audio Connection Kit or JACK is a soundserver or daemon that provides low latency connections between so-called jackified applications. It is created by Paul Davis and others and licensed under the GPL. JACK is free audio software. It can use ALSA, PortAudio and (still experimental) OSS as its back-end. As of 2003 it runs on Linux and Mac OS X.

Audio flow chart for Linux systems:

 application 1
 application 2   <->  JACK  <-> ALSA  <-> Sound card
 application ...

Applications

Some software that works with JACK:

• qjackctl [1] (http://qjackctl.sf.net/) is a Qt based tool to control JACK.
• Ardour, a hard disk recorder
• SuperCollider, a realtime audio programming language
• CheeseTracker
• XMMS, using xmms-jack (http://xmms-jack.sf.net/)
• Freqtweak [2] (http://freqtweak.sf.net/) is a program that allows for individually tweaking the frequency bands.
• Demeter (http://inanna.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~swh/Projects/Demeter/) can show distortion in JACK systems and AD/DA converters
• JACK Rack (http://pkl.net/~node/software/)
• JACK Timemachine (http://plugin.org.uk/timemachine/) is a simple program to record sounds that would otherwise have been lost
• LADCCA [3] (http://pkl.net/~node/ladcca.html) is the Linux Audio Developer's Configuration and Connection API, a session management system for audio applications
• Meterbridge (http://plugin.org.uk/meterbridge/)
• MusE [4] (http://lmuse.sourceforge.net/), a Qt-based MIDI/audio sequencer
• PyJack (http://www.a2hd.com/software/) Python module to provide an interface to the JACK server
• Pure data - a graphical programming language for multimedia
• libjackasyn (http://gige.xdv.org/soft/libjackasyn) is a library that converts programs written for the OSS system into JACK-aware applications.
• ZynAddSubFX - a opensource software synthesizer

See also

LADSPA

External links

• http://jackit.sf.net/
• http://jackit.sourceforge.net/docs/design/