Oh well. All change...

I had terrible probelms with Jack and both Ardour2 and Ardour3 on AV Linux. Jack kept stopping, sometimes I couldn't restart it. There were Jack processes I could not kill and Ardour2 crashed a couple of times with segmentation faults.

I decided to give KX Studio (which incidentally uses my preferred KDE dektop) another try.

This time round, I opened Cadence and it's configuration options, selected my mixer as the Device/Interface.

I then did a Jack Force Restart in Cadence. The 32 Jack inputs and outputs that had been confusing me before in Catia dissapeared and they were replaced by the Jack Input/Outputs I would expect!

I've since ran the software updates and rebooted a few times and Jack is starting itself correctly.

I've manged to record both on Audacity and Ardour3 without problem.

Fingers crossed, this may turn out to be the distro for me after all.