Other session management systems exist(ed) out there: LADCCA and its successor LASH, JackSession, the LADI Session Handler (LADISH), and the Non Session Manager. If they meet your needs, use them and stop reading this website! Especially Non Session Manager is quickly gainig traction, it is very usable and well designed.
The session managers mentioned above provide a 'load session' and a 'save session' button, and probably a lot more features. They cover any setup involving supported applications. Given that, one might call them 'general-purpose session managers'. In contrast, chino then is a 'special-purpose session manager', requiring customisation to cover one or more similar setups. Once customised, using it is dead simple.
Perhaps it is best to not overstress the term "session management", instead describing chino as a framework and toolset to build and manage a meta-application consisting of the user's favorite modular Jack audio and Midi tools, each started and interconnected in predefined ways.
Some features:
- a 'load session' command and a 'save session' keybinding (the latter saves only the session, the state of any involved application—if applicable—needs to be manually saved to the appropriate file from within the application);
- presets and template sessions for simple creation or forking of sessions;
- a runtime text user interface to add or remove applications—no manual connection-making involved;
- adding support for an application amounts to adding a file containing some variables and functions, thus no support on the application's side is required (apart from the ability to recover a state via command line options and/or file loading);
- mono-stereo-agnostic audio connecting and Jack-Alsa-agnostic Midi connecting;
- a hierarchical session layout with dependency check, suggestions and the option to view an image displaying the session graph (the passive "GUI").
This is ALPHA software. Not because of any known showstoppers—it runs just fine here—rather because it is only tested by the author, a self taught ex-nOOb.
