grammoboy2
commented
4 years ago FYI: Short discussion with the author of Jack Transport on IRC:
is Ableton Link a better alternative for Jack Transport when dealing with loops?
link is utterly different from jack transport, and they are barely comparable more than that. link's concept of "sync" is totally different it's not about absolute position as much as relative musical position (though absolute position is a thing too) anyway, the simple answer is "jack transport has no concept of loops, so ..."
there's already an implementation for JACK so in theory they just have to support JACK transport the problems are deeper than that though JACK Transport has 1 rather sophisticated concept that Link does not have that concept may not be useful for any app that keeps all of its data in memory but is essential for those that do not looping apps probably keep it all in memory
jack transport has the concept of a "slow start" client i.e. a DAW that needs to reload 64 tracks into memory to reflect the new position the actual transport mechanism won't start till all clients are ready (within limits) this makes it much easier to write such a client like a DAW
So for a DAW it needs that rather sophisticated feature, cause it needs to write from disk to memory, whereas a looping app might have it all in memory already, so it could live without that rather sophisticated feature. Do I understand it correct?
right
Your statement that in theory they just have to support JACK transport sounds rather... promising.
not sure what the status of rui's Link support code is at this time https://github.com/rncbc/jack_link
harryhaaren
Feature request / thinking...
https://github.com/Ableton/link
For looping applications on Linux it might be more flexible then Jack Transport. Also looping with Jack Transport is not possible. I was thinking about this when I experimented with Luppp together with Non-Daw. Syncing with non-sequencer comes to mind, but also the possibility of applying automation to the output of Luppp (via non-mixer, non-timeline or a other tool). All these tools use Jack Tranport which is nice, cause the applications are synced, but it's also limited in some way. They've to join together from the start. Applications can't join in at a later point. When I was thinking about this, I found out that Ableton Link might do, what I had in mind. I'm not done thinking, but I post it here already. ;)
Bit related to: https://github.com/openAVproductions/openAV-Luppp/issues/302
More info: LAC2018 talk https://media.ccc.de/v/lac2018-42-ableton_link_a_technology_to_synchronize_music_software JACK link https://github.com/rncbc/jack_link Carla has Ableton Link support https://git.open-music-kontrollers.ch/lv2/link.lv2