I am working on an embedded PowerPC system and I have been having trouble using ALSA's utilities aplay and arecord to route audio. I have audio coming in through usb and I need to route it to a codec. For demo purposes I figured I could route the audio using:

arecord -D plughw:1,0 | aplay -D plughw:0,0

This keeps giving me xruns (underruns and overruns). I have tried all that I can think of with ALSA, but I just started reading about JACK and this sounds like it works well with ALSA and it can do what I am looking for. Being new to Linux though I am not sure how to include JACK in my build. I downloaded jack-audio-connection-kit-0.103.0.tar.gz, but the README does not tell me how to configure, build, and install. I need to figure out how to cross compile on an i386 host for a PPC target.