JackSupport seems to be a very often requested feature. However, some user might not know that BEAST already has some support for Jack. How?

If you compile and install PortAudio Version 19 (a portable audio driver), you can build Jack support into PortAudio. Then, you can download and install BEASTs PortAudio driver. Finally, when you start BEAST (with the PortAudio driver), you only need to do something like:

$ beast --bse-driver-list

Available PCM drivers:
  oss oss=DEVICE,MODE
    Open Sound System PCM driver:
      DEVICE - PCM device file name
      MODE   - may contain "rw", "ro" or "wo" for
               read-only, read-write or write-only access;
               adding "hs" forces hard sync on underruns.
    Devices:
   >        /dev/dsp (read-write)
  portaudio portaudio=DEVICE,MODE
    PortAudio PCM driver, using PortAudio V19-devel.
      DEVICE - the PortAudio device to use, 'default' selects default device
      MODE   - rw = read/write, ro = readonly, wo = writeonly
    Devices (OSS):
   >        oss:0     /dev/dsp (default)
    Devices (ALSA):
   >        alsa:0    VIA 823x rev60: VIA 823x rev60 (hw:0,0)
   >        alsa:1    VIA 823x rev60: VIA 823x rev60 (hw:0,1)
    Devices (JACK Audio Connection Kit):
   >        jack:0    alsa_pcm
$ beast --bse-pcm-driver portaudio=jack:0

So beast is started, using the the portaudio jack driver for audio output.

At least in theory, this is the way to get Jack support with recent BEAST versions.

- In practice, when I tried it today, it crashed. So maybe either PortAudio or Jack changed in some way. I'll try to debug it when I have time. But maybe it also works for you as it is. -- stw

I take a look on the download section, but it is only a portaudio driver for the 0.6.4 and .6 version. So I cannot even try it with beast-0.7.1. I have portaudio in my system, but very few package are compiled with it. I am on gentoo and have a -portaudio in my USE flags. It implies at when portaudio is a conditional dependency of an application, it will not be compiled with the application. I do that because most packages was just failing to compile with portaudio support, or was crashing.

I think at it will be both easier and better to have native jack support in beast. It is the best way to run jack anyway. And arts is not an option for me, even with jack as output, it have just too much overrun. Jack is supported now both on mac-OSx and linux, and it is a beginning af a windows port, so it will be definitly the way to go on the long run. Jack support implies at beast must be realtime safe, but as multimedia is becoming an indispensable and growing feature of every computer and every OS, who doesn't want it? --- DM

Actually the reason the PortAudio driver is no longer available is that it never really worked reliably, and we want to have native JACK support anyway. While this means that even the upcoming beast 0.7.2 will not have a JACK driver, it also means that when we have a JACK driver, we will be able to support it properly. -- stw