[linux-audio-user] 64 studio

Malte Steiner steiner at block4.com
Thu Dec 21 17:18:20 EST 2006


Hello,
> 
> Wow, what did you do?  I have a Turion laptop and 64studio gives me
> xruns in jackd at 46.4 ms.
> 
> 
Thats odd. I did nothing special and I have a rather old Turion64 mk I, 
just a clean install of latest 64 Studio 1.0.
I started jackd (with qjackctl) with
  jackd -R -p128 -dalsa -dhw:2 -r48000 -p64 -n2
(which reads realtime mode, 64 frames, 2 Buffers, 128 ports max, no 
softmode, no hardwaremonitoring etc...) and it works great with the 
internal card. Its good for live action with PD and Zynaddsubfx synths.

RME Hammerfall needs a bit more in my current configuration so it runs 
with 5ms which is still great in my opinion, remember that hardware 
midisynths can have some lag too. I remember reading for instance that 
the Roland D-70 had a horrible timing and the LFOs on my Casio FZ-1 
Sampler get slower the more keys you press :)

A full loaded Ardour session with lot of tracks need higher values 
because the internal hdd is certainly not the fastest.

The pure install worked great with the opensource nv grafik driver which 
is actually a bit faster when it comes to 2d drawing. But I wanted the 
3D driver badly because I do a lot of realtime 3D grafics during my live 
performances. The driver in the repos wanted to do strange things like 
deinstalling complete X11 so its not a good idea. But it was no big 
thing to download and run the AMD64 driverinstaller from Nvidias site. 
But yes, I wish it would be opensourced, but at least there is a running 
hardware OpenGL implementation, situation was worse in Linuxland some 
years ago.

So first suggestion to Chuckk would be trying different jackd settings.
ACPI is known to be broken because strange implementations by the 
manufactures. Under nonrealtime 32bit Ubuntu I needed to boot with 
acpi=off noacpi parameters to avoid xruns, for strange reasons I dont 
need it on 64 Studio anymore.
Maybe a low ressource windows manager helps in your case so check out 
Blackbox which is in the Debian AMD64 repos. Blackbox is really bare 
bones so dont forget to install xterm so you can start programms. When 
you rightclick in the bare desktop a menu comes up with the xterm entry. 
Of course Blackbox can be configured to be more convinent, its just for 
testing.

In general I am happy with 64 Studio. Nonrealtime stuff like Cinelerra 
is much more responsive too. What I miss are some packages but I guess 
they will be added/updated soon. Namely csound 5 would be great, I cant 
get it running at the moment. The repos holds an old 4.23 version and a 
pure data version without many important externals and a bug with the 
tablewrite function. I tried to compile on my own but failed so far, I 
get many errors, I already posted to the appropriate mailinglists.

Some convinence laptop stuff is not working like cpu freq scaling, I 
guess these modules are not in the kernel and I am not sure if they 
belong there for a realtime system or if they beat down the performance.

Cheers,

Malte

-- 
Malte Steiner
media art + development
-www.block4.com-

next events:
concert 29.dec 2006 Notstandskomitee vs. TBC Hoerbar Hamburg

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