Anyone know of a good alternative to Cubase? I have tried MUSE and Ardour, and Soungarden, they all seem good but are all dependent on JACK - which is driving me insane as I cant get it working and seems like I will have to get a degree in linux binary code before I can get it to work, anyone know of one that you download and it just works no problem without this JACK thing?

PS - JACK irritates me a lot - it is stopping me creating music
Bad Bad JACK.

i only know rosegarden and muse.
you could try to compile those prog.'s yourself with the alsa driver option instead of JACK.

but what's the prob with JACK ?
it works ok here, and i like it....
( let's get it working eh.... )

egag

Well the trouble I seem to have with JACK is that I cant get it working with the programs, the only sujestion Ive had before about this is to allow JACK and the program that needs it to run as root, but I am a little unsure about the security of this, you know of another way to get it going?

well...i use a 2.6.xx kernel with a module
that gives users the "realtime" capabilities.

you can get it here :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/realtime-lsm/

but i guess you also need to recompile your kernel
to make the normal " capabilities " modular.

for a 2.4.xx kernel there are several howtos, but IIRC , you need to patch the kernel sources.
( use google " howto realtime 2.4 " or so to find it )

but it depends on the kernel you use, and if you compiled your kernel before,
it's not to difficult.

btw. do you also use a gui for JACK. ?
qjackctl looks nice...

egag

Unfortunatly this is where I start to get very confused, I am very much a point and click kind of linux user and am not sure how to do all that stuff, just really looking for an easy way to get a program running that can do the job, you know if there is any way to get this programs without jack?

you could try " muse -h " to see if there's an " alsa " option.
same goes for all programs.

in that case you can add the option in your menu of kde or gnome.

another option is to find a kernel-package suited for your distro.
i guess someone has put such on the web.
search for smth like " suse realtime kernel" on google.

... or you can run as root..... ( better not )

egag

my opinion is to just use sudo to start jack and the other things
i can't imagine what security concerns there could be ??
i can see why you don't want multimedia with all it's buffers and whatnot in root
but running it as root is alot more secure than altering your kernel to give all users access to memlock and rt clock (my opinion anyway)
i run it as sudo and jack is very well behaved and i like using it and my linux box as a recording and music production machine.

jack is alot more powerfull and usefull than winblows point and click

heh, i forgot to tell you this -- if you really don't want to use jack try
ecasound
http://eca.cx/index.php
download and install ecasound and tkeca (requires tcl/tk)
even though ecasound is a very confusing command line recording utility
tkeca gives you access to it in a graphical way that is fairly easy to use and you don't have to use jack as the output device if you don't want to -- you can use alsa