deeply confused with ALSA and JACK

[daverezi]

good tidings all, I am not new to music production however, i am new to music production on linux.
Currently, all that I want in the world is to be able to record the sound coming from my bass guitar. I have tried a cavalcade of options to try and read this point, but they all seem to have the common problem:
My VOLT 1 audio interface uses ALSA, which seems doggedly insistent with not communicating with JACK or any of the DAW, of which I have tried several. Am I missing something? Is there a trick to it which I have yet to learn? Please help.
All my love,
Daverezi

[folderol]

Get the excellent QjackCtl program (available with all distros). This will enable you to link the Jack server to ALSAs interface.

[beate]

Many of the recording tools, especially audacity, its forks, and ardour work happily with Alsa alone. And for simple tasks that is entirely sufficient.

Of course You need to determine the Alsa device to be used using arecord -l, and possibly audacity or something alike (tenacity, maybe) is the easier tool for the beginning. As long as You deal with projects where only on or maybe 2 channels are to be recorded simltanously, You'll be happy with a simple Audacity/Alsa setup. Jack comes into play as soon as the tasks become more complicated (which starts at syncronously piping the output of, say, Hydrogen, into the tool) or if more than 2 tracks need to be recorded at once (Audacity provides meters only for the 1st two tracks, and its horizontal scrolling can lead to dropouts - my experience while recording 4 channels with it)

Regarding Jack and Qjackctl. Qjackctl constructs a command line to start jackd. This commandline uses the parameter -D, possibly meaning duplex. This parameter is valid only for firewire backends. In connection with Alsa as the unterlying sound architecture it leads to an error, at least with very recent implementations of jack.

So it might be easier to start jackd from the command line, or sometimes even the only possibility. Simpler than it sounds. My 4 channel interface, for example, is started with

/usr/bin/jackd -dalsa -dhw:ZEDi10 -sALSA -r48000 -p256 -n3&
For Your Volt device You just use the name apply -l or arecord -l tell You in the -dhw:xxxx argument.

[daverezi]

dear beat,
thank you so much! with tasks like these on linux i never know where to start or how to start it, so it seems i tried to do a poweruser method hwere something more straightforward would have sufficed. it works! huzzah!
best,
daverezi

[beate]

congratulations

[LadyRose]

dear beat,
thank you so much! with tasks like these on linux i never know where to start or how to start it, so it seems i tried to do a poweruser method hwere something more straightforward would have sufficed. it works! huzzah!
best,
daverezi

This is very good to know about it.