[linux-audio-dev] Old hat - comparison against windows

Stéphane Letz letz at grame.fr
Tue Jan 30 17:12:13 UTC 2007


Le 30 janv. 07 à 18:03, Michael Ost a écrit :

> Can anyone suggest ways to compare audio/midi performance between  
> Linux
> and Windows that (1) are relevant to non-technical musicians and (2)
> make Linux compare favorably?
>
> Not things like "I just don't like Windows" or software feature
> comparisons or the politics of open vs. closed source, but rather  
> things
> like responsiveness to audio interrupts, RAM footprint of the OS  
> and ...?
>
> I work for a company that sells a Linux based piece of hardware that
> plays windows VSTs. We spend alot of time on compatibility,   
> especially
> on getting the plugins to work with Wine. I often get asked about
> switching to Windows and I don't have a good answer.
>
> My sense is that the main benefit of Linux is that audio interrupts  
> are
> serviced faster and more predictably than in Windows because of
> SCHED_FIFO and Linux's low overhead. And clearly musicians could feel
> that, especially at lower buffer size settings so that's the kind of
> thing that could matter.
>
> But is it _really_ true? Is there a standard way to measure it? Or
> published results about it?
>
> Are there any other things to compare? Thanks for any input. I  
> _want_ to
> believe! %) ... mo
>
> PS: apologies for any confusion that comes from posting to both
> linux-dev and linux-user. I wasn't sure which list this is more
> appropriate to...?
>


You'll probably first have to decide which Windows version you're  
comparing since Vista is supposed to be better than XP:

See: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/01/19/vista-for-music-pro- 
audio-exclusive-under-the-hood-with-cakewalks-cto/

Regards

Stephane Letz


More information about the Linux-audio-dev mailing list