This plugin aims to bring first class support for the JACK Audio Connection Kit to VCV Rack.
- There are four input and four output ports.
- Output ports are marked with an off-color accent.
- Each port may be named individually, and the name supplied in Rack will appear in your JACK patch bay.
- Each name must be unique across an entire Rack instance.
- If four ports are not enough, simply add more to a patch. Each module will create four input and output ports. All modules cooperate to ensure that audio is sent and received through JACK in lockstep (you can consult the power meter to see that only one of the JACK Audio modules will stall Rack.)
We do not currently calculate the delay from the time audio might enter Rack and leave it again. This means we don’t tell JACK how much time we expect to take, and so it cannot perform any delay compensation.
If you try to play an input stream in to Rack, and simultaneously to a monitor, you will hear a short delay effect as the two signals are not correctly synchronized. There may also be issues trying to synchronize audio between separate running instances of Rack.
These issues should only give you trouble for relatively advanced JACK
patches. They have no effect on the default use case of a single Rack
instance generating sound on its own and sending them to Ardour or
non mixer for recording or out-of-Rack effects processing.
On some systems JACK will take control of the audio device (on Linux, it takes over your ALSA sound card.) Trying to have both JACK and Rack connect to ALSA will result in performance issues or possibly crashes.
It is advisable that you delete any Audio modules from Core or any
Audio 16 modules from rcm when working with JACK. It is possible
to leave them in a patch unused, but trying to delete them while a
JACK server is running (even if you don’t have SkJACK installed!) **can
and will result in sadness of the crashing variety.**
JACK modules do not have this problem in reverse. If SkJACK is installed and JACK is not, or a JACK server is not running, the modules will silently do nothing.
The module graphics template was designed by github user @infamedavid (David Rodriguez), and are available via CC-BY.
The 3270 terminal font is used under the BSD-3 license.
This plugin is made available under BSD-3.
A copy of the JACK client headers are included under src/jack, which
are made available to us under the LGPL license.
We have included them because it primarily simplifies compiling the plugin on Windows (MinGW2) targets.