Jack Audio

Jack Audio
Homepage	https://jackaudio.org/
Documentation	https://jackaudio.org/api/
Repository	https://github.com/jackaudio/jack2

Jack Audio is a realtime audio server that Autopilot uses to play sounds. Jack operates a daemon (jackd) in the background, and Autopilot interacts to it through Jack-CLIENT.

Installation

Jack has a few longstanding issues working on the Raspberry Pi, the most pressing of which seems to be the use of DBus in the standard binary distributed by the raspberry pi apt repos which is unavailable in eg. a headless context (where an X library is not running).

Installation can be done with apt, but it is recommended that you compile it from source. Both options are available as autopilot scripts (jackd_source and jackd_apt)

From Source

Clone and build the library, enabling support for ALSA and building with 6 processes. Then install the library and refresh symbolic links

git clone git://github.com/jackaudio/jack2 --depth 1
cd jack2
./waf configure --alsa=yes --libdir=/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/
./waf build -j6
sudo ./waf install"
sudo ldconfig

This will install jack audio to /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/bin/

From Apt

If installing from apt, use

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y jackd2 

If installed with apt and you receive an exception that includes the following:

Failed to connect to session bus for device reservation: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11

Then prevent jackd from reserving the audio device, which may cause skipping/buffer under-runs if another process attempts to access the audio device. (You may want to add this to your .bash_profile if you don't want to declare it every time)

export JACK_NO_AUDIO_RESERVATION=1

Configuration

After jack is installed, I recommend enabling the @audio group access to launching jackd at realtime priority and increasing the amount of memory that it is able to lock

sudo sh -c "echo @audio - memlock 256000 >> /etc/security/limits.conf"
sudo sh -c "echo @audio - rtprio 75 >> /etc/security/limits.conf"

Audio https://docs.auto-pi-lot.com/en/latest/autopilot.stim.sound.jackclient.html