[PlanetCCRMA] Jackd, Too many Active Servers;

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 04:52, Mirco Scaramucci wrote:
> Hello everybody.
> I am a first timer on this list therefore I don't know much about 
> PlanetCCRMA issues.
> But I HAVE BEEN experiencing problems starting the jackserver most of 
> the times I decided to download the PlanetCCRMA packages.
> My aim is to be able to play MidiFiles coming from different sources 
> such as vanbasco's website and be able to mute certain tracks, change 
> tempo and key.
> Unfortunately I have been really badly conditioned by the vanbasco 
> player and the Cakewalk/Sonar/qbasis world while using windows.
> I have followed all instructions I could find on the PlanetCCRMA website 
> on how to start/tune and all that but even when I managed to get the 
> jack server to start with no problems, I could not get any playback. 
> (rosegarden, muse and all that)

There are many reasons why this would not work. Most probably you are
not sending the midi commands to any synthesizer at all. Muse and
Rosegarden are not going to generate sound by themselves (unless you use
them as audio recorders, of course). They will send midi commands and
those have to be routed to a synthesizer, either a soft synth like
timidity++ or zynaddsubfx, or the hardware synth built into a soundcard,
in which case it has to be supported by ALSA and you have to load a
soundfont in it (otherwise it has no samples to play). 

> I am using fedora core 3 with Kernel .2.6.11-1.14-FC3smp on a pentium 4 
> 2.6Ghz 678Mb, and my sound card is a philips Dynamic edge 4.1 which uses 
> the C-Media CMI8738 driver.

That is the original Fedora kernel, it will not allow you to use Jack
with realtime privileges as a non-root user.

> I do not posses any external midi/audio interfaces at the moment.
> All I am trying to achieve is PLAYBACK/EDITING of midi/karaoke files  in 
> order to suite my performances as a singer.
> Everytime I have been trying to start the jack server, either through 
> the QJACKCTL  interface or the jackd command at console level, I have 
> not been able to connect server or the output of my console commands 
> were as follows:
> 
> [mirco@localhost ~]$ jackd -d alsa -d hw:0
> jackd 0.99.36
> Copyright 2001-2003 Paul Davis and others.
> jackd comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
> This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
> under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details
> 
> JACK compiled with System V SHM support.
> too many servers already active
> [mirco@localhost ~]$

Looks like you already have servers running. See if there are any
leftover processes by typing:

  ps axuw|grep jack

That will show processes in the computer that include the name "jack" in
their name. If jack is stopped there should be none. 

> Extra output was genberated by QJACKCTL that stated: PATCHBAY DEACTIVATED.
> 
> CAN ANYONE SHED SOME LIGHT ON THIS PLEASE?

That last one means the ALSA sequencer module is not loaded. Load it
manually (as root) by saying "/sbin/modprobe alsa-seq" - or enable a
workaround:
  /sbin/chkconfig alsasound on
That will load it automatically on reboot. 
(but only if you have installed the Planet CCRMA kernel and additional
ALSA driver packages. 

-- Fernando