[LAU] Live bass guitar -> analog synth on a 2007 laptop: viable?

Ken Restivo ken at restivo.org
Tue Jun 24 05:39:45 UTC 2014


On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 03:44:14AM +0400, Artem Vakhitov wrote:
> Hello fellow Linux audio users,
> 
> I'm back to dabbling with Linux as an audio system. Among other
> things, I play bass guitar in a synth pop band and recently started
> to get interested in bass synthesizers. I could of course buy
> something like Markbass Super Synth, but then I thought - maybe I
> could cobble together something using my Samsung Q35 laptop and
> Linux? The laptop has a dual core processor and 2.5GB RAM. The sound
> card is a variable here: it could be the built-in Intel HDA (for
> this particular purpose, why not), or an Infrasonic DeuX (Firewire)
> that I have, or even some used Echo Indigo (PCMCIA).
> 
> Is what I want viable at all with a reasonable latency? What
> software setup can I use for that? Does anybody here use something
> similar live?
> 

In my experience, you've got more than enough hardware there to do many things.

I made tons of music with softsynths on top of softsynths, plugins, etc, on a 2007-era Asus Core2Duo at 2Ghz with 2GB RAM. Much of that music was posted here. I also mixed a band CD using that same hardware. And I used it as a live synth for a few years too.

The key is to get a low-latency kernel. At the time (2007) I had to homegrow that stuff, but nowadays it seems AVLinux is the easiest to set up with that.

The latency I got with my low-end FastTrack Pro USB interface was 3 periods at 128 each, 44.1khz. More than goood enough for recording/mixing/softsynths, and totally reliable, never glitched on me once after I got everything dialed in.

-ken


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