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Google Hangouts and Jack Audio
This is probably a rare occurrence, but documenting hacks and projects is what this blog is for, so here goes.
I have two sound cards. One of them is for GNOME and Pulse, and one of them is for JACK and my professional audio work. One just goes to some cheap 2.1 PC speakers with a bad volume pot that I haven't gotten around to fixing, the other goes to some Sennheiser headphones and has my DO56 via a 12AX7 preamp.
I was listening to the Atheist Nomads live Google Hangout today, and I was wondering if I were doing the same thing, if I could pipe my usual JACK production tools into it. Pretty straight forward, really: create a loopback soundcard and then run the alsa utilities to carry audio into and out of it. I seem to use Loopback audio cards a lot.
For some reason the google talkplugin saw the Loopback, but wasn't speaking to it in ways that made sense to me. I asked Dustin over at the podcast how he got JACK to work with the hangout, and he said he didn't use JACK, just pulse. Which got me thinking.
I jumped out of GNOME and into Window Maker, launched Chromium, and instead of a small list of hardware devices as in Pulse, I got an ALSA list of devices, and suddenly everything was working fine.
I don't want to have to jump out of GNOME just to do a hangout with the good tools. So I looked into having an application ignore Pulse. Tried a bunch of ways suggested by documentation and web pages, but none of them worked.
Finally, I remembered that Pulse paid attention to some environment variables for the purposes of remote sound. I tried a cheap hack, and lo, it worked:
$ PULSE_SERVER='0.0.0.0' chromium
Assuming chromium wasn't already running, I was in business. Connecting to Pulse fails, it falls back to ALSA, and my JACK tools work. Good to go.
I get the reason for Pulse Audio. I'm transitioning back from Mac OS and CoreAudio was a really nice thing to have. Also, I'm not a member of that very strange tribe that hates Lennart Poettering beyond space and time. That said, Pulse makes some choices that feel kind of less than well engineered to me.
Gun Control is Temporary
Things to understand:
- I am a gun owner. I own many guns. I support the second amendment.
- I'm also politically liberal, and to some extent that includes gun control.
My conceptualization of firearms and the second amendment are complex and evolving. Liberals dislike when I talk about the government explicitly honoring the rights clearly enshrined in the Constitution1) when their focus is on keeping children un-murdered. Conservatives, for the most part, won't talk to me about gun control because they just assume I hate guns with my communist ways.
So by all means, consider me a moderate or never talk to me about guns ever again, because you're clearly an extremist.
Version Control?
Even thought I've been out of the coding game for a while now, I again find myself needing to keep track of changes to a number of coding projects I have. I used to use CVS, but that was yonks2) ago and it seems there are a lot better tools around.
What I need:
- Globally accessible
- While I mainly plan it for my use only, it's possibly as things grow I might need to bring other coders on.
- Some projects will be destined for open source, others will need to remain private (e.g. code for clients, internal crap)
- Simple to set up and maintain
- Simple to use, especially across multiple platforms. Should be easy, most operating systems I use are POSIX compliant.
I'll be researching, but if anyone has any comments, I'd like to hear them.
I guess I'm asking, Git or SVN?
I used SVN briefly, but it seems to require a lot of apache tomfoolery that makes it hard to use in the environments I use them in.
MultiHead Background in GNOME
I made a cheap script to handle it for me. Needs GNOME33) and ImageMagick.
start.txt · Last modified: 2012/12/14 00:10 by sam