[linux-audio-user] live music with linux

[Dave Griffiths]

Hi all,

Thought I'd report on my first live gig experience with linux (or anything
else for that matter) at the placard headphone festival:
http://state51.org/placard/
For those that don't know, the festival consists of lots of performers doing
20 minute sets back to back - all listenable to on headphones only.

I was running jack and my apps as root using SHED_FIFO on my Thinkpad r31
running slackware 9.0 and the audioslack ll kernel and alsa packages:
http://www.audioslack.com/

I'd set up jack on a huge buffer (4096) as latency wasn't important for me, I
had no live input and just wanted 100% glitch free playback. Also enabled
softmode to stop the server ejecting apps if anything went too wrong.

Before the gig I went through my cron jobs commenting them all out just in
case. slocate is particually annoying - I guess most people disable this
anyway - even with jack using such a large buffer, all the disk access caused
problems.

I wanted to keep the setting up as quick and simple as possible, so I'd
written a shell script to launch jack with the right settings, launch my apps,
load samples and connect them all together with aconnect automatically. 

The applications I was using are new software I have yet to release, a midi
sequencer/sample playback engine that uses a lot of generative and alife based
processes, and a very small polyphonic multitimbral synth based on the code
from SpiralSynthModular. I'm trying to get the synth into a releasable state
very soon.

There is audio here of the 20 minute set:
http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=nebogeo-live-170704

cheers,

dave