Recently I've been working with the transport synchronization capabilities of the JACK audio server. This article is a report on those capabilities as tested with a variety of Linux audio applications under the JAD and 64 Studio distributions.

PulseAudio is a cross-platform, open source sound server that supports advanced software mixing capabilities and network transparency. PulseAudio is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the Esound daemon and uses a pluggable Esound module for backwards compatibility.

Audacity is a sound editing program that puts the freedom to create into the hands of the user. It is a vital tool for audiophiles everywhere who love to record, mix and edit their own music or sound files, and for the average joe who just wants to do a little audio editing.

At last we reach the final installment of this series, the question & answer stage in which we'll consider some of the common problems encountered with audio and MIDI on Linux, along with some common and perhaps not-so-common solutions to those problems. We've looked at some indispensable items for your Linux system troubleshooting toolkit, now let's see how they are applied.

In my last installment of this series I introduced a variety of GUI-based tools that can help you discover more about your system to help identify potentially troublesome components. This week we'll look at some of the command-line utilities that do similar work.

Ubuntu Studio bills itself as the "multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu," an official Ubuntu project "aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast as well as professional." It is certainly flashy on the outside -- even if it is mostly the same Ubuntu Linux distro under the hood.

This is a user-friendly tutorial by Nate Figlar for the Jack sound server, an essential tool for free software multimedia production. It's been written with the 64 Studio distro in mind, but is generic enough to be relevant to any desktop distro with sound applications.