[linux-audio-user] Ubuntu as a music studio

[tim hall]

On Friday 27 January 2006 23:20, Jon Hoskins was like:
> Hey all, thought I would share some of my recent discoveries:
>
> As demudi 1.2.1 has been lacking a kernel source for awhile 

It does? Are you sure?

> and demudi 
> 1.30rc1 refuses to boot on my new hardware I've had to seek alternatives.
>
> After reading several threads on using Ubuntu as a music production OS I
> decided to give Ubuntu 5.10 'breezy' a shot.  Installing "realtime-lsm"
> with module-assistant was easy as pie and I got relatively good latency
> with the stock kernel, but real improvements came from two things:
>
> I decided to give Ubuntu 6.04 "Dapper Flight 3" a run and noticed that
> #cat /boot/config-2.6.15-4-386 | grep PREEMPT gives CONFIG_PREEMPT=y and
> has been the same in all the "dapper" kernels I've tried, something that
> was not enabled in the stable "breezy" kernels.  Does this mean the ubuntu
> guys are looking at releasing a stable kernel with PREEMPT enabled?

It does look rather like they they may be from what you say. !:)

> Anyway the second thing I found was using 'rtlimits' instead of
> "realtime-lsm".  Making use of a small app I found at:
> http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/~jwoithe/
>
> makes assigning realtime access on an app-per-app basis and even
> user/group basis a breeze.  This combination has lowered my latency *under
> load* to 5.8ms in KDE (Kubuntu is what I installed) and I can squeeze
> 2.9ms out of it in a very conservative fluxbox or even xfce4 enviroment
> with  no xruns and less than 10% cpu/dps usage (as reported by qjackctl).
> Most of the good sound apps are available in the repositories as well with
> the exceptions of Seq24 (conflicting libs) that I easily built from
> scratch, Freecycle, which I'm still trying to get to compile correctly,
> and Willem's wonderful DSSI packages.
>
> It looks like Ubuntu might have a stable release on the horizon suitable
> for serious audio work!  You are more than welcome to check my blog as
> well for an up-to-date journal of my ubuntu "studio" experiments and
> installed software list:  http://oktyabr.blogspot.com

Jon, thank you. I've been waiting for someone to report success with Audio on 
Ubuntu. Hopefully, recent moves to make sure A/DeMuDi releases enter the main 
Debian repositories in a timely fashion, will help bring all Debian based 
multimedia systems into focus and increase compatibility between the systems 
as well as ensuring that sources are always easily available.

-- 
cheers,

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim