It was recently said on linux-audio-dev that there are two kinds of audio projects, one that leaves people saying "There's an old version at http://someurl.com/, but I don't think the author works on it any more..." and the other that people say "There's a version out on their web site, but development is so fast that you should really run it out of CVS..." -- Jack is in the latter group.

Point being, we try to make releases but CVS is always ahead of us.

jack releases

[ current release | past releases ]

In CVS, we bump the minor version rather frequently; releases will not occur for every version number change.

jack cvs

compiling out of cvs

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/jackit login 
[Hit <enter> if it asks you for a password]
$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/jackit co jack
[copious output]
$ cd jack
$ ./autogen.sh
[copious output]
$ make
[more output]
$ su -c 'make install'
[a password and output as well; an install is necessary so that the driver can be found]

browsing the source

You can use sourceforge's viewcvs installation for annotated and historical browsing, or lxr for easier navigation.