Re: [LAD] [LAU] So what do you think sucks about Linux audio ?

on Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 09:58:14AM -0500, Dave Phillips wrote: i'd like to weigh in on some of these as well. as i post here infrequently, a quick bit of background on me: i am an electronic musician who also records real instruments, though infrequently. i have been running Linux exclusively throughout my music explorations. i use renoise at the moment. you can listen to my music at http://soundcloud.com/visinin if you'd like. i can't comment on these, having been using the same distribution (arch) for the past 4 or so years. absolutely an issue. my workhorse plugin is Loomer Aspect (a semi-modular synthesizer), which is a native Linux VST. I own several more Loomer plugins and have been considering picking up a license for DiscoDSP Discovery. extent of the jam recently released his Digits synthesizer VST for linux as well (http://extentofthejam.com/ if you haven't seen it), which is nice. regardless, though. Linux audio has this problem of critical mass. when energyXT came out, nobody really released much new stuff. it was all jorgen porting stuff, and then jucetice. highlife, discovery, loomer plugs...all fantastic, certainly, but there's not much of it. it will be interesting to see what happens if and when bitwig is released. a lot of people are using JUCE now, and that makes porting at least possible. renoise's plugin support is pretty good. i would really like LV2 support but that's not my decision to make. in order, i've used beast/BSE, seq24 routed into a bunch of fluidsynths, csound with blue, some toying with ardour, energyXT and finally renoise. some software i just never got working. i never figured rosegarden out (but for a long time it couldn't do instrument plugins), compiling MusE was hit or miss, LMMS is good but I had XT and renoise by then...and every time i use ardour i crash it somehow. it doesn't seem to like my little micro-editing aphex-twin-wannabe style. i really like LV2 but the documentation is nigh-impenetrable. i've made a few comments to this effect on drobilla's blog, and i agree that an LV2 book would go a long way. side note: did anybody else see pitracker? somebody wrote an LV2 synth host that runs on the raspberry pi. https://github.com/Joeboy/pixperiments/tree/master/pitracker haven't tried any, i work entirely inside my host. absolutely. everybody likes to use ableton live here, but i still think we're missing a really good NLE. hell, i own a REAPER license and use it through wineasio occasionally just because it's so comfortable. i've tried ardour3 but i crash it every time. i have to disagree here, actually! i would first like to shout out daniel mack of caiaq for ensuring that all of the native instruments audio interfaces work on linux, and fantastically well at that. i recently picked up a focusrite saffire 2i2 and have had no problems at all with it. that said, the more pro it gets, the worse the support. i won't even touch FFADO, i'm sorry, it's just never worked for me. i sold an echo audiofire2 after i couldn't make it work and i have a secondhand ultralite mk1 that just gathers dust. it's interesting to me that manufacturers are starting to make class-compliant devices just to make them work on apple's iDevices. also, modern midi controller hardware works on a driver level but very few programs support it. as a dwm user, i will stay out of this one. i don't really like either gtk or qt though, which sort of limits my options. i don't have any issues and i generally run vanilla kernels. lately i've been playing with the -ck patchset with BFS and have been very happy with it. i'm comfortable playing live (both djing with xwax and doing live monome sets with my own software, rove) with this configuration. maybe i'll drop the JACK buffer size a little. at least it's not pulseaudio. also, i haven't had any trouble setting JACK up since i ditched my firewire interfaces. *that* was a nightmare. but JACK on ALSA? buttery smooth. JACK could perhaps be a bit better about autodiscovering soundcard parameters. maybe my memory is failing me here, but i faintly recall having issues when JACK couldn't get the sample format it wanted. maybe? i feel like it's a lot better than it used to be now that there's just more software around. it's interesting to me that free (source and/or beer) music software on OSX and windows has come further than it has on Linux. off the top of my head: http://psycle.pastnotecut.org/portal.php http://www.buzzmachines.com/ is it because of the userbase? is it because of the maturity and availability of toolkits on other platforms? buzz's website has been around since 2000. what was audio on linux like then? i'm thinking it might be the userbase, or at least that makes more sense. anyway, i've written quite a bit more here than i've intended, but i'm absolutely up to discuss any of it. thanks again, dave. you've been a fixture in this scene for as long as i can remember. peace, -w