capturing streaming audio into Jack/Ardour ?

[PeteC]

Hi

is there any way to capture audio from applications when not running Jack - i.e. audio streams ?

I want to be able to put together creative loops from various sound sources on the net and then capture them into Ardour.

I know about pulseaudio routing into Jack - but I dont think AV Linux 4.0 has paulse audio installed.

I tried to configure Audacity input from my Delta 66 but couldnt get it to work out. - no option to capture the streaming audio.

Rgds
Pete

[trulan]

Here's the first thing that comes to my mind:
http://alsa.opensrc.org/Jack_and_Loopback_device_as_Alsa-to-Jack_bridge

Not exactly a simply fix, and tends to be a bit cpu-heavy if you set it up to run high quality.  It's one of those hacks that looks like it should be so useful, and it works well enough, but I haven't really found a use for it personally.  But, there it is, for whatever it's worth.

[PeteC]

many thanks Trulan

bit over my experience level with Linux at moment - but i will study it.

I thought there might be an existing application which might do it for me.

Rgds
Pete

[GMaq]

Hi,

Well unless I'm missing something since AV Linux has JACK Flash support in Iceweasel you should be able to capture streams from flash video/audio directly into Ardour. I'm not sure for other web content. If you could set the audio in the totem-mozilla plugin to jack instead of ALSA then it might work as well but I haven't tried it personally.

[trulan]

I believe GMaq is right, if you start Jack first, then use Iceweasel, you should be able to capture sound directly into Ardour.  Also, VLC Media player has Jack support and can do a lot with streaming content I believe, though I've never tried it.

The alsa-loopback setup I linked above is a very comprehensive solution - once it is all set up, anything at all that outputs sound gets routed into the Jack system and you can connect it to anything else.   Also, it's not quite as hard to set up as the guide indicates, if you're using a fairly recent Liquorix kernel (not sure about the default AVLinux one) the aloop module is already there, so there's no need to re-compile ALSA (which is the hard part anyway.)  But yeah setting that up is a bit advanced I realize.  It's the first thing I thought of, and I know it would work.  For an exciting exercise, at one point I was using Skype with a firewire soundcard - AFAIK nothing else can do that other than the PulseAudio-Jack bridge, which I had working under Ubuntu at one point but found to be very unstable.

This is one situation though where Pulse Audio might be better suited for the task.  Pulse Audio is not well suited to (nor intended for) production-type stuff, so AVLinux avoids it.  You may find that dual-booting something like Ubuntu (for capturing the streams) and AVLinux (for working with them) would be an option that would better serve your needs.  But, in the interest of keeping things simple, try Iceweasel and/or VLC first.  The only thing that makes this tricky is the Jack connections for both of them are only there when sound is playing - as soon as you click 'stop' they disappear, and all your connections are lost.  That makes using them for capture via something like Ardour a lot harder than it should have to be.

Good luck!