[linux-audio-user] Demudi looking good, soundcard advice?

[Alejandro Lopez]

Chaps,

Just installed Demudi, sorry I can't remember versions, it's some beta that 
came out something like 2-3 months ago which was the first to merge Debian + 
music studio on the same CD (requiring one installation only).

Generally, I would recommend the distribution for an easy install (I've not 
used it yet), I'd like to make a couple of comments in case anyone is 
interested.

-My PC won't boot from CD-ROM. By browsing the directory structure, I kind 
of guessed I had at least a couple of choices for DOS: booting from a 
rawrite2'd floppy or run loadlin. Fair enough, there's a vmlinuz file there 
as well as several .bin floppy images. But: loadlin is not included in the 
CD image, not it is rawrite2. Not a big deal for me as I had several other 
distros handy but not elegant either. In the same directory where these 
images reside, there's a little text file which lists loadlin and rawrite2: 
should read "loadlin", reads "lodlin" (in case anyone would like report this 
for future versions).

-I was not able to select English language with a Spanish keyboard layout 
(I'm Spanish). You are supposed to select both in one go, the 2 different 
options in the menu (that you can see if you select back somewhere in the 
middle of the process) seem to be related and didn't work as such distinct 
options for me.

-At one point, I went back and selected Spanish (for everything, that is), 
next step was repartitioning my hard disk which is inherently a dangerous 
operation. The translation of the partitioning software to Spanish was so 
poor (wrong actually) that I was scared to repartition in Spanish. Went back 
to English so I could understand what the software would do with my hard 
disk but now my keyboard layout doesn't match. I'm planning installing to a 
different machine I imported from Germany, so I'll have the same layout 
problem (I'd rather not choose German language to repartition my disk in 
order to have the keyboard properly installed).

-From there on, the installation was as smooth as one could have asked for. 
All my hardware was detected and installed automagically including graphics 
card, monitor, mouse, sound card (ALSA), network card, modem, CD-ROM.

So generally I'd say it's a very easy to install distribution, and 
definitely a huge improvement over the classic "2 installation steps" 
approach that all the other music distributions have or used to have. I'm 
very pleased with regards to that.

The only other thing is I may need to buy a decent soundcard for this PC. It 
should have a GM synth (nothing special since I guess I'll be using soft 
synths anyway but I don't want to run a synth just to write a couple of 
arrangements), one stereo output and one stereo input both with good overall 
audio quality. Seemingly, the current trend is towards either USB 2.0, 
firewire or PCI. A colleague has just told me that USB 2.0 is supported by 
the Linux kernel starting from the latest version (2.6 I think?) only. Since 
music distributions are based on other distributions, chances are that they 
now run the 2.4 kernel or maybe older. Does that make sense or am I talking 
complete b*ll*cks? Also, this friend has heard about drops happening with 
audio over USB, but apparently this was on a Mac and the USB device was a 
hard disk rather than a soundcard. Still, he seems to think that USB 2.0 is 
not as good option as firewire for audio. (Which reminds me of SCSI vs IDE 
drives for audio a few years back, yes SCSI was the serious option for a 
couple of years but it was an 80% more expensive as well, and shortly 
afterwards IDE started to go "fast enough" and cheaper.) Is firewire better? 
Is it more expensive? Also, how does it compare to PCI? Lastly, if any of 
you has bought a soundcard (recently so the card is still in production) 
which is reasonably similar to what I need (wouldn't mind if it's slightly 
better, say 4 mono inputs and 4 mono outputs or something) and has succeed 
with having it running under a Linux based music studio, I'd be grateful if 
you drop a line.

Many thanks!!

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