Hi, I’m very excited by the possibilities of Elk Aloha… but in the meantime I’m crunning a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian Buster, using a Focusrite Solo USB audio interface, and running Jamulus with Jack to jam over the internet. The ‘internal/inherent’ latency from the Pi set up is around 25ms. Add this to the internet latency and even on the ‘nearest’ cloud server I get latencies of 45ms+.
I was wondering if anyone had installed Elk Audio OS on a Pi 4, installed Jack and compiled the Jamulus client and dependencies on it, and seen lower internal latency?
Does Elk Audio OS work with USB audio interfaces and Jack Audio Connection Kit/QjackCtl?
Are there any things to watch out for?
What flavour of Linux is Elk Audio OS based on - is it Debian related like Raspbian?
Hope that makes some sense.
Thanks in advance for you time.
Hi @Paul-E,
(answering questions in a different order):
No, Elk is a custom Linux distribution built with Yocto / Openembedded.
This give us the maximum flexibility in terms of customization, boot time optimization, robust update system etc. but you can’t just apt install Debian packages.
The Elk images built for Raspberry Pi do not support JACK / ALSA. They are using our low-latency Xenmoai audio subsystem (based on RASPA / SUSHI) and while this give you way better latency & CPU performance than a standard Linux distro, you can’t run traditional ALSA & JACK applications.
One alternative is to wrap an application as one of the plugins formats supported by SUSHI (VST2, VST3, LV2). The other will be replace the JACK (or ALSA) API with RASPA in a standalone application.
None of them are trivial for an application as Jamulus but not impossible either.
We are working on a similar solution to Jamulus, Aloha, which is currently available only as part of a closed-beta program. Feel free to use the contact form if you want to participate in that.