A systray application to quickly change the JACK configuration from QjackCtl presets via DBus.
jack-select is available from the source code repository on Github:
https://github.com/SpotlightKid/jack-select
There you can report issues and suggest new features or contribute via pull requests. Releases can be downloaded from the Python Package Index (PyPI). jack-select is also available as an Arch Linux package from the Arch User Repository (AUR).
This application displays an icon in the system tray (also known as notification area) of your desktop, which shows the status of the JACK audio server and when you click on it, a menu pops up, which lets you quickly select from the JACK configuration presets you created with QjackCtl. When you select a preset, its JACK engine and driver configuration settings are loaded via DBus into JACK and then the server is restarted. This allows you to switch between different audio setups with just two mouse clicks.
Menu entries for presets, which refer to ALSA devices currently not available (e.g. those provided by USB interfaces, which are currently un-plugged), will be deactivated. The application will detect changes in the sound device configuration via udev and update the menu accordingly (this behaviour can be disabled via a command line option).
When you hover with the mouse pointer over the systray icon and JACK is running, a tooltip will show you the name of the active preset (if known), the most important parameters of the current setup and some server statistics.
The entries in the "ALSA-MIDI Bridge" sub-menu allow to configure and start and stop the a2jmidi service.
Lastly, there are menu entries to stop the JACK server and to quit the application.
To create or edit presets, just use the QjackCtl configuration dialog and make sure you close it with "Ok" so the changes are saved. jack-select will pick up the changes automatically.
jack-select also has a DBus interface, which means you can use any generic
DBus client to tell jack-select to open its menu, activate a preset by name
or to terminate itself. You can also run the jack-select command while
another instance is already running, to access some of the DBus service
methods.
When jack-select starts up, it first checks whether there is already an existing application providing the jack-select DBus service. If yes, when called with no command argument arguments, it tells the running jack-select instance to open its menu.
If a preset name is passed as the first positional command-line argument the preset is activated immediately at application startup. If another instance of jack-select is already running, jack-select will tell the existing instance to activate the preset. An invalid preset name is silently ignored.
For details about the DBus interface, please use DBus introspection facilities
to examine the de.chrisarndt.JackSelectService service on the session bus.
To install jack-select on your system for everybody, check and install the requirements below and then get jack-select by either downloading a release archive from the Python Package Index (PyPI) and unpack it or clone the source code repository from Github:
$ git clone https://github.com/SpotlightKid/jack-select
Then change into the directory created by unpacking the release archive or
cloning the repository and run make install:
$ cd jack-select
$ [sudo] make PREFIX=/usr install
This will install the jack-select executable, the jackselect Python
package, the jack-select.1 man page and the jack-select.desktop file and
the jack-select.png icon to provide a desktop start menu entry. It will also
install the required Python dependencies if they haven't been installed yet.
If you want to install jack-select only for the current user, replace the last command above with:
$ make install-user
This will not install the man page.
You can start jack-select from your desktop's XDG-compatible start menu or
add or link the jack-select.desktop file into your autostart folder (e.g.
~/.config/autostart) to have it started along your with your desktop.
Note:
If you do not have installed PyGObject and/or dbus-python via your
distribution's package system yet, running the install command given above will
try to install them via Python setuptools from the Python Package Index (PyPI).
This will most likely require a compiler and some development packages to be
installed, since not all indirect dependencies are available on PyPI as binary
wheels for Linux. If this fails, try installing the packages build-essential,
python-dev and libcairo2-dev (assuming your Linux distribution is a
debian/Ubuntu variant) and try again.
If dbus-python is installed via your distribution's package system, you may
get the following error when running jack-select:
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: The 'dbus-python' distribution was not found and is required by jack-select
This means that dbus-python was not installed in a setuptools-compatible way.
Unfortunately this seems to be the case on most major Linux distributions.
As a workaround, you can install a working version of dbus-python from PyPI
only for your current user:
pip install --user dbus-python
This application works with the DBus-version of JACK only. It is written in Python 3 using the PyGObject bindings for GTK 3. Python 2 is not supported.
In addition to PyGObject, the following third-party Python libraries are required:
These may be available from the package repository of your distribution as
python-gobject, python-xdg, python-dbus and python-pyudev respectively.
They come with their own dependencies, which are not listed here.
If you want to install jack-select from a Git repository clone, you'll also need the Python docutils to build the man page from the ReST source.
jack-select is licensed under the MIT License.
Please see the file LICENSE for more information.
jack-select was written by Christopher Arndt 2016 - 2022.
jack-select incorporates the pyudev_gobject library written by Sebastian
Wiesner and released under the LGPL 2.1. See the header of the
jackselect/pyudev_gobject.py file for license details.