This New Years Eve I ran a special broadcast for a group of friends over the net - and had a ton of fun doing it. What was really exciting to me was working with patch bays in JACKD2 and learning more about audio routing. 

This is some next level stuff - having a virtual patch panel available to you for audio production in a low-latency audio environment which traditionally is really tricky. If you've ever tried to patch 2 sound cards together and do anything you know that you get random pops and hisses and sometimes full dropped audio frames which cause audio artifacting of the n'th degree because the clocks on the boards are impossible to keep in sync.

Leveraging the dbus interface of JACKD2 you can pipe audio from one soundcard (say your internal soundcard) to an external (connected via USB or Firewire commonly) and achieve some really complex stuff.

The following Patchage screenshot may not look like much - but leveraging Internet DJ Console, and Mixxx directly interfacing with JACK - then piping Skype / Google Hangouts into a VOIP line in on IDJC I was able to take live callers for new years resolutions and shout outs on the radio.

This added a new dimension of interactivity to my shows that were unavailable to me before. Yet another reason I love the FOSS mentality - we have so many avenues of exploration and education available to us that I feel like we take it for granted most times.

I'm going to do a technical write up on this in the near future and cover the basis of how I'm leveraging these tools to setup my own broadcast for shows and other projects leveraging the Juju charms I've already talked about.

Happy New Year everyone! Heres' to 2015 being the best year yet!