Notes from a year of working with Jack Audio Connection Kit

Tags: programming debugging jack audio
Categories: programming

Last year I became the lead engineer on a new project. After joining the project I spent a lot of time helping users and engineers debug JACK audio behavior (although JACK typically wasn't the cause of the observed issue). While I had used Core Audio in the past I wasn't as familiar with JACK at the time, so I thought I would write down a few of the things I have learned to check first when somebody tells me they are having an issue with JACK. These are specific to running JACK on Linux, in my case Ubuntu.

flowchart LR A[Does JACK server start?] --> B{No} B --> C[What is your clock source, and is it valid?] C --> D{Does your device provide JACK a clock?} D --> E{"Does your device have an internal clock,\n or does it rely on an external clock\n (for instance a PCI MADI card setup)?"} C --> F{Are all of your cables connected?} F --> G{Are they in the right direction?} F --> H{Are they all showing healthy conditions on\n their LED or other connection health indicator?} B --> I[Does ALSA recognize your sound card/interface\n as a capture and/or playback device?] I --> J{No} J --> K{"How is the device connected (USB, PCI, etc),\n and do you need any additional drivers?"} J --> L{"Using the correct tools (lsusb, etc)\n does the kernel recognize the device is present?\n If not you're debugging hardware."} I --> M{Yes} M --> N{Does ALSA recognize that the device supports\n the sample rate you want to run the JACK server at?} M --> O{Do you need to customize any channel or other\n settings with alsa mixer to have the correct IO setup?} M --> P{Can you use alsa utilities to send or\n receive signal to the device?} P --> Q["If your clock source is valid, and ALSA\n recognizes the devices and can route signal in/out of the device\n (depending on playback and capture capabilities and requirements)\n then we probably have a JACK settings issue.\n If you don't verify the clock and ALSA\n settings first though you may be looking in the wrong spot for the issue."] C --> R{Clock is valid and ALSA can use the device} R --> S{Are you starting JACK in daemon mode or dbus?} S --> T{If daemon mode:} T --> U{Is there anything blocking the daemon from starting?\n For instance another jack server that is already\n running via pulseaudio or another process?} R --> V{Are you passing the right hardware identifier\n to JACK to select the correct playback/capture device\n that the process will use with the server?} R --> W{Are you starting the server with a sample rate,\n frame size and period supported by the device?} W --> X{Use ALSA tools or qjackctl to review device settings\n and configuration options.} R --> Y{What does JACK tell you if you start the process\n with the `--verbose` flag?}

That's a lot to check, and I employ various ALSA cli utilities along with JACK tools like qjackctl to help collect information as I iterate through the items above until I get to a state where the JACK server will start. Once I get the JACK server started if errors are reported it tends to fall into a couple categories (I'm sure there are more, this is just based on my experience so far):

  1. JACK client issues
  2. This is a pretty broad space since really a jack client can represent just about any application/algorithm that you want to wrap as a jack client and have audio or midi in/out port support. A few things I've seen:
    1. The application runs at a fixed rate that isn't compatible with the rate the server is running at.
      1. You will either need to update the client, run the server at a different rate, or do sample rate conversion.
    2. The application parses JACK server output information and doesn't behave correctly when the server runs in verbose mode.
      1. There is probably a better way to get the information the client needs without parsing jack server output.
    3. The MIDI messages that the application receives are not parsed correctly.
      1. Use MIDI utilities to check the message format/structure and either fix the sending or receiving application code.
    4. Resource errors - these tend to be addressable with standard tools (writing tests, profiling the application, static analysis, etc).
      1. Memory errors.
      2. Callback code doesn't execute within the allotted time.
      3. Improper port management.
      4. Logic bugs.
  3. Unstable clock
  4. This one is a little tricky. If the jack server starts, but loses the clock source you can check a few things.
    1. Is the device still connected correctly, and if it's external did it lose power?
    2. Check syslogs and dbus. Did the hardware disconnect and reconnect?
    3. If the device clock is external does the device have any logs that you should review?
    4. If none of the points above expose any useful information then you will probably need to do deeper monitoring, and possibly troubleshooting at the driver/device level.
      • Does the error happens on a set time interval
      • Can you replicate it on a second machine
      • What debug information is available at the driver level

Working with and building JACK applications has been a really interesting experience. Making sure everything aligns as expected from hardware through software has taught me a lot. Maybe some of this will help somebody else if they are debugging JACK workflows for the first time.