Questions[jack](ubuntu)

I have a bit of a specific question:

Being a musician, I use Ubuntu for software monitoring and I would like to control my output master volume with my mouse wheel.

For this purpose, I currently use EasyStroke with the commands amixer -D pulse sset Master 5%+ (Mouse wheel up) and amixer -D pulse sset Master 5%- (Mouse wheel down), which works fine.

The problem is that I use some programs that have a direct JACK output, such as Reaper, my DAW, and also some media players.

As long as the software uses the PulseAudio JACK Sink output, I can control the output volume via mouse wheel, but when the software does not use PulseAudio, it is directly connected to JACK and always at max volume.

If you refer to the screenshot: I am able to manipulate the master volume of the red-marked output (PulseAudio JACK Sink), but I actually need to access the one marked green to control all sound (system out).

Unfortunately, I can not control my ALSA master volume via amixer -q sset Master X, because ALSA does not offer any controls for my only USB sound card.

Is there any way to control the JACK Output volume via terminal that I could replace my mouse button commands with?

Or alternatively, is there a way to add a PulseAudio input module to the right side of the JACK connections to connect Reaper and all other JACK software and route them through the PulseAudio JACK Sink? (PulseAudio JACK Source is only used for microphones and won't play back the input.)

All the sound works perfect with all the applications on my system. But from the moment I launch Ardour, no more sound comes out from other application than Ardour. The easy way to get it back is to restart the laptop.

This is probably related to Jack ... but it's not clear...

Does anyone know what's going on behind the scene? How to fix it?

I don't know if this is the right place to ask about this, but I'll give it a try. I'm a linux user for a while now and I try to avoid opening Windows as much as possible. But for some things, I just have to. One of those things is recording. I play the guitar and I write music so I often need to record what I'm playing. Just in case it matters I'm planning to use ardour audacity rosegarden hydrogen and most of those nice programs that are widely known (linux known hehe). I need external usb sound card suggestions so I can do my thing on linux as well. Not too expensive please.

I want to use PulseAudio on top of jack, so I've turned pulse off and now want to start jack using qjackctl. However, this results in the following error log:

22:14:15.933 Patch Panel disabled
22:14:15.940 Reset statistics.
22:14:15.953 Changed ASLA connection.
22:14:15.970 D-BUS: Service available (org.jackaudio.service aka jackdbus).
Cannot connect to server socket err = File or directory not found
Cannot connect to server socket
jack server is not running or cannot be started
22:14:15.980 Updated visualization of ASLA connections
22:14:18.147 D-BUS: Unable to start JACK server
Cannot connect to server socket err = File or directory not found
Cannot connect to server socket
jack server is not running or cannot be started
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: Starting jack server...
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: JACK server starting in realtime mode with priority 10
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: [1m[31mERROR: Cannot lock down 82246176 byte memory area (Cannot allocate memory)[0m
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: control device hw:0
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: control device hw:0
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: [1m[31mERROR: Failed to acquire device name : Audio0 error : Cannot allocate memory[0m
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: [1m[31mERROR: Audio device hw:0 cannot be acquired...[0m
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: [1m[31mERROR: Cannot initialize driver[0m
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: [1m[31mERROR: JackServer::Open() failed with -1[0m
Fri Jul 20 22:14:18 2012: [1m[31mERROR: Failed to open server[0m
Fri Jul 20 22:14:19 2012: Saving settings to "/home/jan/.config/jack/conf.xml" ...
22:14:24.418 Cannot connect to JACK server as client - connection failed. See message dialog for details.
Cannot connect to server socket err = File or directory not found
Cannot connect to server socket
jack server is not running or cannot be started

(Several messages were in German, I did my best translating them)

The pulseaudio process is defenitely not running.

I use Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit with an NVIDIA audio card.

I want to run pulseaudio from startup to deal with system sounds etc and be able to run jack from qjackctl for use with audio applications (LMMS, ardour, rosegarden etc) I'm having issues when i start up, the sound applet does not allow me to control the volume. When I click sound preferences it says "waiting for sound system to respond" yet the sound still plays in rhythmbox etc.