[LAU] Best setup for sound recording under Intrepid

[Jacob Lee]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Stephen Nesbitt
<stephen_nesbitt at alumni.cmc.edu> wrote:
> All:
>
> In this maillist I have seen a lot of warning that realtime is broken in
> Intrepid. Ok that's understandable if not wonderful :-)
>
> But the question is then if one is running Intrepid what is the proper setup?
> I'm looking for something like "The (almost) Perfect Sound Recording  Setup
> for Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex". This is information I haven't seen and given the
> number of questions in reference to Intrepid being asked on this list, one
> that might be valuable.
>
> The fundamental requirement is that one is running Intrepid as one's main
> system. Replacing Intrepid with Hardy is not an option.
>
> Here are some possibilities that have crossed my mind:
> 1) Setup a dual boot Hardy/Intrepid system - doable but a pain because of 1)
> the need to reboot and 2) the potential loss of access to one's standard home
> directory, tools, email and system configuration.
>
> 2) Use Intrepid despite not having access to a realtime kernel. In this case
> information on realistic expectations on latency, how to best configure Jack to
> limit xruns, etc would be very nice. In other words, can Intrepid even be used
> as a base for music recording and what are the gotchas (if any)?
>

I'm stuck on non-realtime Intrepid (my motherboard + embedded Intel
graphics card are new enough to require 2.6.27), so I can give you one
data point: with a USB soundcard and -n 3 -p 512, I get at most a few
xruns per hour. Disabling cpu frequency scaling helped a lot, as has
avoiding high cpu usage. It's not good enough for click-free
recording, but it's reasonable for live performance.

(I tried the ubuntu 2.6.27-rt package, but it was broken for me in
many ways. YMMV of course.)

> 3) Run Hardy based studio as a guest OS in vmware or VirtualBox. I don't even
> know if this is possible? What does it mean to run a guest OS in a realtime
> environment when the host is not? And even if that isn't a problem, how does
> one configure the sound system? For instance how do I get the guest system to
> recognize my Delta 44 card? Or PulseAudio?
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> -steve

-- 
Jacob Lee
artdent at gmail.com