ac3jack 0.1.2 review
Downloadac3jack is a tool for creating an AC-3 (Dolby Digital) multichannel stream from its JACK input ports
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ac3jack is a tool for creating an AC-3 (Dolby Digital) multichannel stream from its JACK input ports. Using this tool, an AC-3 stream (up to 5.1 channels) is created in real time and either written to a file or streamed to standard output.
When streamed to stdout and piped through the ALSA tool ac3dec -C, the AC-3 stream can be passed out the SPDIF port on your audio interface for connection to a multichannel surround receiver. In this way, you can achieve full 5.1 surround mixing and monitoring of your JACK applications with a single digital cable, and no need for hardware supporting discrete outputs and inputs.
AC-3 is a compressed audio format, so quality will suffer a little, but it is the price you pay for easy surround sound. After all, if it is good enough for DVD and film soundtracks, it must be OK. The AC-3 encoder used here comes from the FFMPEG project, and I have not done any quality comparisons with commercial encoders.
Requirements:
JACK -- version >= 0.80.0
providing real-time low-latency audio interconnection and delivery. If you haven't used JACK before please study the Linux Audio User Guide and make sure to read the section on JACK.
FFMPEG -- version >= 0.4.6
Note that you'll need to make sure the header files are installed, some packages do not install the headers for some reason. A make install from the source code will do this.
What's New in This Release:
fixed compilation bug (the code should be pure C now, honest
ac3jack 0.1.2 keywords