[LAU] ubuntustudio

[Geoff King]

>  On Tue, 2008-29-04 at 11:40 -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
>  > Malte Steiner wrote:
>  > > On a new machine I thought I give Ubuntustudio a try and it seems that
>  > > the lowlatency performance is much worse when the one of 64 Studio
>  > > (booted from a live cd) on the same machine. So it needs some tweaking,
>  > > are there any advices with UbuntuStudio? I read some past threads and
>  > > they deal for instance with changing the priorities of jackd and the
>  > > audioapplications but that improve the situation only slightly. I really
>  > > wonder about the magic of 64 Studio...
>  > > On the Ubuntuforums, which are a great resource even for Debian related
>  > > stuff anyway, there seems no talk about lowlatency settings, it concerns
>  > > only a minority.
>  >
>  > Why don't you go directly to the source?
>  >
>  > http://ubuntustudio.org/support
>
>  I imagine because he's hoping to get third party opinions? I am too.
>
>  Iain
>

I tried 64 Studio live cd a few months ago and had a similar
experience.  I did get better performance with 64 Studio than
ubuntustudio (gutsy at the time).  I'm currently using ubuntustudio
hardy since I like the some of the other non-audio features it
provides and share the computer with my wife.  But if you are truly
into only audio and need the lowest latency, 64 Studio may be better.

I've done many tweaks to ubuntustudio to get it to do both jobs (from memory):
-Install with the rtirq script (I think I got the package from either
the 64 Studio or debian archives and had to change something to make
it work). Learn about what this does.
-Tried to uninstall or turn off programs that I don't use or need such
as trackerd, bluetoothd, powernowd, apmd and acpid on my desktop.
-Usual memory tweaks (shmmax)
-Try not use artsd or pulseaudio and stick with jackd for most things.
Turn off system sounds and select alsa as gnome audio resource.
-Had to manually install the jack-alsa plulgin to get amarok to work.
There is an ubuntuforums page about this.

Not sure which helped the most, but I get pretty good performance now.
 There is a lot of information available, on the web, but it takes
some trial and error to get it right.

Plus sometimes you just can't get the latency down really low
depending on your hardware.

Good Luck, Geoff