JackTrip Documentation

About JackTrip

JackTrip: A System for High-Quality Audio Network Performance over the Internet.

JackTrip is a Linux and Mac OS X-based system used for multi-machine network performance over the Internet. It supports any number of channels (as many as the computer/network can handle) of bidirectional, high quality, uncompressed audio signal steaming.

You can use it between any combination of Linux and Mac OS X (i.e., one end using Linux can connect to the other using Mac OS X).

It is currently being developed and actively tested at CCRMA by the SoundWIRE group.

Installation

Download the latest release: Download

Please read the documentation inside the packet to install.

Mac OS X Requirements

You'll need: Jack OS X. The documentation explains how to install it and set it up, and it's highly recommended.

Jack OS X comes with JackPilot to do the audio routing. An alternative is qjackctl, which I find easier to use. You can find the binary here: qjackctl mac binary

If you use Leopard, you won't need to configure the UDP ports manually.

Linux Requirements

Please read the documentation inside the packet to compile and install in linux.
The older version of JackTrip is documented here. Please follow those instructions to configure the firewall under

Using JackTrip

Type jacktrip in a terminal window to display a help list with all the options. JackTrip uses Jack as its audio server. You have to make sure that the settings in Jack are the same in the local and remote machine.

There are two parameters that you want to tweak: Frames/Period and Sample Rate. The Lower the Frames/Period, the lower the latency. The higher the Sampling Rate, the higher the bandwidth requirements. You have to make sure these settings match in both machines.

You also may want to look at the internal buffering -q, --queue parameter in JackTrip. If your connection is very unstable, with a lot of jitter, you should increase this number at the expense of a higher latency.

The audio bit resolution parameter, -b, --bitres, can be use to decrease (or increase) the bandwidth requirements, at the expense of a lower audio quality.

A basic connection will have one of the nodes as a server:

jacktrip -s

And the other as a client

jacktrip -c [SERVER-IP-NUMBER]

You'll see a JackTrip client in Jack. Everything you connect into the send ports will be transmitted to your peer. You'll receive what your peer sends you on the receive ports.