Hydrogen on Mac with JACK

Problems getting SL up and running on a Mac? Post here.

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Digital Larry
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Mar 26, 2019 11:54 am

Hydrogen on Mac with JACK

Post by Digital Larry »

This is not so much a question about SL. I spent a week setting up SL, Hydrogen, and Ardour in pursuit of an optimized looping setup. I tried both Ubuntu Studio 19 and macOS 10.12 on an old Macbook Pro. As you may know, macOS Hydrogen has the JACK feature turned off. So I got the Hydrogen code and compiled it and JACK came back to Mac. But it was not a good thing which is my guess as to why it was missing.

I'm pretty used to JACK sync with SL on Linux and use that in "cycle" mode for the most part and find it works great. It seemed like Hydrogen on Mac must be putting out way too many clock messages, as recordings etc. would not start immediately, but expecting them to start at the cycle boundary didn't work either. They were always early. Who knows, maybe it is some power of two problem but at the moment I m more interested in trying to make music than to debug this (which would require an incredible learning curve that I don't have time for).

After dealing with some stability problems on my Linux box (overheating gfx card due to seized fan), I am back on that and ran my combo for 8 hours overnight and it's still locked together as when I started. So I am not motivated to switch to MIDI sync and then deal with "drift compensation" etc.
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