I’d use it for live-jamming with several computers & apps. Namely Ableton Live on one computer with Reason and on another PC FL Studio (and maybe some other weird stuff). Rewire just can’t do the network thingie and this is where the strengths of netjack are (in addition of Jack’s possibilities to route audio in ALL ways, not just from slave to master).
We could then use a common mixing app which lets everyone get his own headphone mix out + a main mix.

I first thought of network-enabling a virtual rewire-slave + a virtual receiving rewire host on the other side (FX Teleport 2 promised to gain that possibility, but the project died). Or extending Wormhole 2 for a standalone version which can host a plugin (as FL can be run as VSTi and at the moment we are doing excactly that with FX Teleport, but there are several buggy things with that one). But why reinventing the wheel?

So the Rewire-Minihost-Jack-Bridge would really be a wonderful solution as long as those commercial apps out there don’t support Jack natively (and I don’t expect one copmpany to jump out and say: “Let’s put in effort and pay a programmer to support that partially well working Jack thing even when it will be a bit complicated to setup for computer-unskilled musicians and even if there are no other apps out there supporting it”).

I’m with Dan on this: if people are using ReWire-capable applications, I see little point in adding JACK into that setup. It gets more complex for them, and they don’t really gain anything as a result.

Propellerhead Software will issue licenses to companies in the audio or music industry interested in creating commercial ReWire applications.

There are no costs involved. Propellerhead Software will administer the authorization, copyrights, logos and trademarks. The company will also provide the licensee with technical support, free of charge.

Due to the legal aspects of the agreement you need to have a proper, registered company in order to qualify as a ReWire developer. We do not allow private persons, schools or companies in other types of businesses to become licensors.

Not a big market for that kind of product. The only advantage I can think of for doing something like this is to merge all your audio outputs into one input and still have everything be in sync.

It would be really useful for song sketches. You would never have to stop making music to change some setting. Just keep hitting record.

This is mirroring the setup of having a hardware looper and a lot of gear actually. Instead of having an echoplex, you have Abelton Live with a foot controller. Instead of a bunch of instruments on stage, you have a laptop and a midi controller running a bunch of different software. And instead of a mixer merging everything into one stereo signal to be sent to your looper, you have jackdmp running everything into a single stereo or mono input.

And of course, if you have a drum machine that you’re looping with, the Echoplex will work with MIDI clock to get the right tempo.

Now, if you look at it that way, there’s many more loopers out there. But there’s no way to do it all within software. Not that I’ve found yet.

What would almost be ideal would be a Jack/ReWire hybrid. A Jack style host that supports ReWire and takes the ReWire audio input but will also take the input of any app running JackRouter just as it does now. Then, in this little host app, you have your patchbay where you can use programs that are running jackrouter and programs using rewire all together. Send the outputs wherever you want, and any tempo/transport messages will just be passed through the host to all the slaves.

Since ReWire is a known protocol and has been adopted by many different software programs. Why not leverage its ubiquitousness into something more flexible?

Did I sell you Mr. Nigrin?

If we would build a Rewire to Jack bridge just for MIDI, then the only apps that could take advantage of it are ReWire’d apps in the first place, so why not just use ReWire altogether for both audio and MIDI… No need for Jack at all in those setups.