[wellylug] linux audio

[Pete Black]

Well, be prepared for the fiddliness to continue.

I've tried a lot of the linux audio apps, including ardour, seq24, 
rosegarden, ecasound, bristol, amsynth, spiralsynth, hydrogen and many 
others, and frankly, when i want to make music, i use my mac, or my 
hardware stuff, simple as that.

Personally, i just find the mess of APIs and the total lack of 
integration between the different programs (I mean, really, why isn't a 
JACK server and patchbay a GNOME/KDE-level component? ) a real turn-off. 
I want to pick up my guitar and play it, not spend half an hour trying 
to tweak things to work like they did last time i barely got it to work.

However, on the plus side, for audio recording, ardour works well if you 
can get JACK to work stably without lots of xruns (generally this means 
patching the kernel of any standard distro). When I last tried it, it 
was a bit flaky, crashing in some circumstances due to UI bugs, but I 
understand things have improved recently, and it did allow me to do 
multitrack recording quite well - feature wise its pretty good.

For MIDI, the only thing I found that i really liked using was seq24, 
and as as standalone loop-based sequencer, its pretty cool, if spartan 
w/regard to UI. If anything would keep me using Linux for music, its seq24.

Many of the others either didn't quite fit with the way i like to do 
stuff, didn't have the right features, were simply toys, were difficult 
to set up or drive through MIDI etc, hogged the CPU uneccessarily or 
just plain didn't work.

I've used these apps with a Sound Blaster Live, a crappy 6-channel PCI 
card, onboard motherboard sound on an old Athlon box, an Event Gina (8 
outs/2 ins+digital) and an M-Audio 1x1 external MIDI adapter - the 
latter two took some messing round with to get to work (custom ALSA 
drivers for the Gina, and hotplug firmware stuff for the MIDI interface).

So, it wasn't for lack of trying that led me to my conclusions, and 
maybe things are better now (the last time i really tried this stuff 
must have been at least a year ago), but it wouldn't surprise me one bit 
if the status quo re. music/audio on linux hadn't changed at all.

-Pete


> Hamish Low wrote:
>   
>> is anyone else producing music on a linux system?,
>> after technical hassles and so many soundcard incompatibility issues
>> too tedious to name, I'm almost at a working setup
>> pending my 32bit install of 64studio <http://64studio.com/>  - which
>> never seems to download properly - md5 sums always wrong
>> and the arrival of my new soundcard
>>
>> sharing knowledge can ease the learning curve
>> and when I'm up and running I'd be happy to help others do the same
>>
>> it's fully the future of music creation
>> a trillion tools, & lower latency,  for free
>>
>> Hamish
>>     
>
> Good one dude - this is something I've been meaning to get around to for
> ages but other things always seem to get in the way. I always had
> trouble getting realtime kernel patches to work, but if there's a live
> CD debian based distro that's got all that covered, I should just give
> that a go :)
>
> Ardour, Rosegarden good places to start, and Hydrogen for drum loops
>
> Cheers,
> J
>
>
>