Setting Up JACK Audio Connections - alastairtech/rivendell GitHub Wiki

Rivendell supports the JACK Audio Connection Kit, which is a professional sound server daemon that provides real-time, low-latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications that use its API. The Debian installation doesn't currently 100% work out of the box with JACK. With some adjustments to the Rivendell service, you can use JACK just fine with the following instructions.

Warning This is not to be considered a long term fix for getting JACK to work with Rivendell. There are various reasons you wouldn't want to run the Rivendell Systemd Service as a non-root user. This workaround doesn't break the core functionality of Rivendell, but a better solution needs to be found. So far we have reports of dropboxes breaking when making this change. Also, pay attention to your sample-rate and bit-depth settings in Rivendell and JACK. This can often cause problems with audio playback.

First, make sure you've enabled JACK in the Rivendell Admin Panel for the host.

Open up a terminal window and run the following command to edit the Rivendell Systemd Service file.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/rivendell.service

Add the line User=pi at the bottom of the [Service] section. Ctrl+O to save and Ctrl+X to exit.

Next, you'll need to refresh Systemd so it can see the changes with the following command.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Now you can start the JACK audio server using qjackctl. If you don't have the utility install you can do so by running the following command.

sudo apt install qjackctl

To make sure Rivendell connects to the JACK server we need to restart the service using the following command.

sudo systemctl restart rivendell

You should be able to see rivendell inputs and outputs in qjackctl's connections window now.