About

JACK Rack is a rack-style plugin host for the JACK low latency audio API. The rack can be filled with LADSPA effects plugins and can be controlled over MIDI using the ALSA sequencer.

News

• 2025-07-12: JACK Rack 1.5.0 is out, bringing compatibility with C23-era compilers, jack-session support, and other improvements contributed by several JACK Rack users.
• 2010-03-26: Torben Hohn has joined the maintainers, and we've moved from CVS to Git.
• 2007-11-26: JACK Rack 1.4.7 is out.
• 2007-07-27: JACK Rack 1.4.6 is out, with a bunch of new features and bugfixes.
• 2006-12-30: JACK Rack 1.4.5 is out, featuring various enhancements.
• 2006-11-10: JACK Rack has another new maintainer, Adam Sampson.
• 2005-07-08: There is a new mailing list for release announcements.
• 2005-06-25: Some notes on development status and the next two releases can be found in this post.

Download

Dependencies

JACK Rack requires the following packages:

• zlib
• libxml2
• JACK
• LADSPA 1.1
• GTK+ 2
• alsa-lib (optional for MIDI support)
• LASH (optional for LASH session support)
• LRDF (optional for plugin descriptions)

To connect it to other audio programs you'll need a JACK patchbay, such as jack_connect (command line, comes with JACK) or qjackctl (graphical). If you don't have any LADSPA plugins, get some from here. Great guitar effects for LADSPA can be found in the CAPS package.

Stable

The current stable release of JACK Rack is 1.5.0. Downloads, including older releases, can be found in our SourceForge project.

Releases from 1.5.0 onwards are signed by Adam's GPG public key, with fingerprint 35DF 723E CD9C 2BFE 8965 1482 5C3E F7FC 77BF D43C.

Releases from 1.4.5 to 1.4.7 were signed with Adam's older GPG key, with fingerprint E7F0 8517 F80F 7F34 BD56 5F9F EAFA 83BC B94D 2E95.

To verify that the file you've downloaded is intact, download the corresponding signature file and do:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys '35DF 723E CD9C 2BFE 8965 1482 5C3E F7FC 77BF D43C'
gpg --verify jack-rack-1.5.0.tar.gz.asc

Git

If you'd like to try out the latest development version of JACK Rack, or work on it yourself, please see the Sourceforge Git page for JACK Rack to browse the code and clone your own copy.

Donations

Please consider donating money to the project if you are not able to donate code.
All people involved work in their spare time for it and have not received any funding for it so far.

Contact

You can subscribe or write to the development mailing list, jack-rack-devel, from here. There is also a low-volume list, jack-rack-announce, where releases will be announced.

You can also contact the maintainer directly at <ats@offog.org>.