Jack, while incredibly powerful has been a huge hurdle for pro audio on Linux. I'm looking forward to Pipewire being the default audio interface. Hopefully it drives a revival of the Linux sound engineering community and new software projects. Specifically the lack of a user friendly loop/sample-based recording tool like Ableton Live is glaring.
Starting Jack and then patching stuff together was never an issue to me. It's not any more complicated than your imagined use-case for it, aka "patch program A into progam B"
ALSA is horridly complex and it's complexity is related to Linuxy stuff, not to anything resembling the work your actual audio converters are doing nor the task of getting data in and out of them!
A new layer added on top of ALSA will not fix this.
Nothing will fix this until some AUDIO people, who are NOT Posix Linuxy People write a realtime audio subsystem to REPLACE ALSA.
This will not occur anytime soon, for several reasons.
Both the Bela.io system and Elk's "brand new audio OS from the ground up" (LOL) utilize Linux but bypass ALSA to achieve their low-latency rock-solid audio pipeline. (the CTAG interface that Heinrich Langer designed appears to be the first example I can find of this approach)
They use Xenomai realtime kernel extensions to Linux to essentially run the audio driver as a real-time thread and the buffers your program writes to/reads from, are the actual buffers that DMA is moving the audio data in and out of to the ADC and DAC.
End of the day, audio isn't a posix API, and should never be considered as such. Want an abstraction? fine, wrap a callback as an audio server lol...
I had a Tascam USB audio interface that always sounded THIN on Linux and I wondered why, until I saw that the ALSA channel mapping had automagically applied a surround sound map to my 8 channels of output, which implied two lovely high-pass filters running at 75hz because the system was quite sure that's what everyone does with 8 channels of output... this despite the fact that ALSA saw 4 different stereo "devices" as my hardware interface presented itself...
IF ONLY this were merely a universally understood /etc/alsa.conf or something file... oh no no no! Linux People have SAVED us from audio configuration! Go look in /opt/didntknowthisfolderexisted/.confy/map.conf or maybe somewhere else... Add x-windows and the lack of any GUI application corresponding 1-to-1 with the "handy obscure utility" it purports to configure and control, and you have a match made in heaven!
Linux is an awesome server OS. It's a crap audio OS, and this is due to extreme cleverness and a total lack of paying attention to how any other audio API's in the world work except OSS... OSS isn't even an audio API FFS! it's like a printer API... you might as well use CUPS to run your sound LOL
Good news to see work being done on the Linux-audio 'bottleneck'. I miss the ease-of-use and options available on other platforms (I left behind).
Does this mean we'll finally see Zoom screen sharing with Wayland? Hope the Zoom team gets this resolved soon.
Note this is developed by a Red Hat engineer, so this is an an open source IBM contribution to Linux.
I tried getting it running and working two weeks ago and sometime today as well. I had some real problems getting it working. The compilation ran without a hitch, but getting jack, alsa or pulseaudio to work wasn't really possible. Wanted zo open bug reports and read the wiki on github but they moved it to the freedesktop gitlab, but didn't update the links. Also the pages are mostly out of date or without any relevant information, but plans.
Can't wait to get a seamless setup for it, but I guess 0.3 is still too early for early adopters...