[lug] RTOS -music to my ears

[rm at fabula.de]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 06:37:18PM +0000, mikeslugs at attbi.com wrote:
> 
>     I'm putting together a home recording studio.  Naturally, I'm looking in to 
> Linux for the OS.  I have heard nothing but good things about Linux and 
> professional audio/video editing/mastering. 

Where on earth did you hear that?!? 
By now (read: a rather new kernel, experimental sounddrivers (Alsa)
and a lot of patches applied) you can tweak decent sound capabilities 
out of Linux. You _might_ be able to do 'professional' editing and
mastering but on the recording side ou fight a battle against the
problems of unpredictable latency.

Now, there are two sides of this problem: first of all, Linux - as
a Unix like multi user system, focuses on the even and fair sharing 
of resources -- _not_ what you want (and need) for a dedicated recording
box (cool if in your OS decides to give precious cycles to 'updatedb'
or the like during your once-in-a-century cool improvised licks :-/ )
The other (unfortunate) side: Linus (the human) doesn't seem to care
too much about the needs of audiophile users. And most of the big-money
sponsored projects will focus on improvements that lead _away_ from
low latency (servers need fair schedulers and high bandwidth, not 
realtime and CPU-grabbing ...).

> Found a few interesting software 
> projects out on freshmeat that look like they could be very helpfull.  Seems 
> like there is some real speed potential here, but the distros I've tried are 
> just too "loaded" to be quick enough.  RH, SW, MDK, all are great dissies, but 
> I need real dedicated speed!  
>     Anyone know how to really speed things up for a music studio mixing machine 
> on Linux?  Suggestions on what distros/software (if any) are good to use?  
> Topic for soon-to-be discusion (hopefully)... RTOS/Produce.  No, not veggies! 

Debian DEMUNDI for a distro that focuses on Multimedia/Audio. 
Or have a look at 'Planet CCRMA at home' -- a RedHat-Based distribution.
<http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/>

For pointers to linux latency problems have a look at 
Dave Phillips excellent website at <http://linux-sound.org/>

 hth Ralf Mattes

> -TrumpetMic
> 
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