x42/ltc-tools

Recommended setup on MacOS?

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I'm trying to setup ltc-tools under MacOS (High Sierra). While the ltc-tools installs fine (both building from source and via brew) it seems that the dependency towards jack is causing issues. On OSX there is jack1 and jack2 and both appears a bit abandoned to me. Jack1 does not seem to work on El Capitan and above and, while jack2 installs, it seems to not be compatible with ltc-tools or the libjack it uses as the call to jackdump fails.

I'm wondering if there is anyone using ltc-tools on recent MacOS versions and, if so, what combinations of software is known to be working, if any?

I'll answer myself (if someone else stumbles upon the same problem).

After some struggles I made things work and I concluded what does NOT work with Jack on Mac these days. What is a problem is that Jack is not much maintained any longer on MacOS. There is the old binary that can be downloaded from https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com/releases/download/1.9.11/JackOSX.0.92_b3.zip and this is the one I made it work with.

So first install the above binary. Then clone https://github.com/x42/libltc, configure, build and install it. After that clone https://github.com/x42/ltc-tools and build/install that. This will give you a set of binaries. The problem though is that you can no longer set Jack as the default input/output on MacOS. This function is broken. So what you need to do is to manually start the jack server and tell it what device it should use as input device.

To start things up, first figure out what audio devices you have on your system with the command "jackdmp -d coreaudio -l". Then start jackdmp with jackdmp -d coreaudio -C 'some device that you pick from the list'. Now you should have jack connected to a device. Then, for instance if you want to use jltcdump to dump the time codes you start that. Then after that you can do the command "jack_lsp -c" to check what jack input/outputs you have and then connect those you need with "jack_connect ".