ac3jack

Description

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 stream, so quality will suffer somewhat, 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.

Application availability

This application is available from the following Mandriva media:

2008.0 x86_64 contrib-release - View package information

cooker i586 contrib-release - View package information

cooker x86_64 contrib-release - View package information

2008.0 i586 contrib-release - View package information