jack-select 1.0

Homepage

jack-select is available from the source code repository on Github:

https://github.com/SpotlightKid/jack-select

There you can report issues and suggest new features or contribute via pull requests. Releases can be downloaded from the Python Package Index (PyPI). jack-select is also available as an Arch Linux package from the Arch User Repository (AUR).

Overview

This application displays an icon in the system tray (also known as notification area) of your desktop, which shows the status of the JACK audio server and when you click on it, a menu pops up, which lets you quickly select from the JACK configuration presets you created with QjackCtl. When you select a preset, its JACK engine and driver configuration settings are loaded via DBus into JACK and then the server is restarted. This allows you to switch between different audio setups with just two mouse clicks.

When you hover with the mouse pointer over the systray icon and JACK is running, a tooltip will show you the name of the active preset (if known), the most important parameters of the current setup and some server statistics.

Lastly, there are menu entries to stop the JACK server and to quit the application.

To create or edit presets, just use the QjackCtl configuration dialog and make sure you close it with “Ok” so the changes are saved. jack-select will pick up the changes automatically.

DBus Interface

jack-select also has a DBus interface, which means you can use any generic DBus client to tell jack-select to open its menu, activate a preset by name or to terminate itself. You can also run the jack-select command while another instance is already running, to access some of the DBus service methods.

When jack-select starts up, it first checks whether there is already an existing application providing the jack-select DBus service. If yes, when called with no command argument arguments, it tells the running jack-select instance to open its menu. If a preset name is given as the first command line argument, it tells the running jack-select instance to activate this preset. An invalid preset name is silently ignored.

For details about the DBus interface, please use DBus introspection facilities to examine the de.chrisarndt.JackSelectService service on the session bus.

Installation

To install jack-select on your system for everybody, check and install the requirements below and then get jack-select by either downloading a release archive from the Python Package Index (PyPI) and unpack it or clone the source code repository from Github:

$ git clone https://github.com/SpotlightKid/jack-select

Then change into the directory created by unpacking the release archive or cloning the repository and run make install:

$ cd jack-select
$ [sudo] make PREFIX=/usr install

This will install the jack-select program, the jackselect Python package, the jack-select.1 man page and the jack-select.desktop file and the jack-select.png icon to provide a desktop start menu entry. It will also install the required Python dependencies if they haven’t been installed yet. Installing PyGObject probably won’t work this way, so make sure it is installed some other way beforehand, e.g. via your distributions package management.

If you want to install jack-select only for the current user, replace the last command above with:

$ make install-user

This will not install the man page.

You can start jack-select from your desktop’s XDG-compatible start menu or add it to your autostart folder (e.g. ~/.config/autostart) to have it started along your with your desktop.

Requirements

This application works with the DBus-version of JACK only. It written in Python 3 using the PyGObject bindings for GTK 3. Python 2 is not supported.

In addition to PyGObject, the following third-party Python libraries are required:

• pyxdg

• dbus-python

These may be available from the package repository of your distribution as python-gobject, python-xdg and python-dbus respectively.

If you want to install jack-select from a Git repository clone, you’ll also need the Python docutils to build the man page from the ReST source. If you want to create the ReST version of the README from the Markdown source, you’ll also need pandoc (only neccessary when you want to create a source distribution archive).