Unability to leave the jack ports unconnected

[jpcima]

When the jack stream is instanciated, the ports of the program are connected with those of the audio system. Depending on the kind of application, the developer may or may not desire this.

This is desirable, for instance, in a media player. In a musical application, it am pretty sure it goes against standard practice of Linux audio. It is common to let the user connect the program as he wishes, and let patchbay management persist the connections outside the program.

It appears there currently is no way to disable connection, beside commenting two jack_connect calls in jack.c and recompiling.

I believe it would be useful, while preserving default behavior, to introduce a flag to inihibit the automatic connection of ports on the Jack backend.

In the past a few people and I have requested a similar feature in the rtaudio library, which seems unfortunately to have fallen into deaf ears. I would appreciate a similar option in libsoundio which I believe is a better sound library overall.

[andrewrk]

Can you help me understand, what would be the utility in starting a SoundIoOutStream and not connecting to the JACK ports? What would you expect to happen? If you didn't want to connect to a JACK port, why would you call soundio_outstream_start?

[jpcima]

I use the Qjackctl software to manage a jack audio environement, which includes the connection manager. A similar software is Patchage.
Take a typical linux softsynth, like Zynaddsubfx. Start the software, and you obtain a pair of output ports, unconnected. You can connect by using the audio connection tab of Qjackctl. Then, you may save this connection, also in Qjackctl, so it comes back automatically next time.

To make the connection automatic messes with this workflow, and the software patchbay cannot be used normally. The unconvenience is not big on the normal computer with a stereo soundcard, but it becomes in a studio configuration when you have several audio ports and routing necessary.
I hope this clarifies, if not please ask.

[andrewrk]

OK I understand now. There are 2 components here, the ports that libsoundio outputs audio to, and the fact that we can connect these ports to ports that will make the sound come out of system speakers.

It makes complete sense that you would want to only provide sound on these ports and not necessarily connect them to the system outputs.

[andrewrk]

Hopefully I can tackle this, and some other issues this weekend. We're due for a release soon.

[jpcima]

OK I can propose a push request soon since it's a trivial bit of development.
Like a boolean flag to add to the stream structure that takes effect in the open function, do you think the idea is good API wise?