Linux-audio-tuning

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53 discussions

presonus firebox and 2.6.31-9-rt gives tons of xruns

by yvan volochine

hello, this is my first post here. I'm using pure-dyne 9.11 (with kernel 2.6.31-9-rt) and a Presonus Firebox. For some reasons, I cannot use this FW soundcard with jack as I have *a lot* of xruns (1 every 2 or 3 seconds). I asked for help on the puredyne mailing-list but it seems that nobody knows where this problem comes from (it was working perfectly fine with an older puredyne version which was debian-based). I was told to install the package ffado-debus-server but it didn't help. here are my jackd settings: jackd -P 70 -R -P89 -p512 -dfreebob -dhw:0 -r44100 -p1024 -n3 -D in my /etc/security/limits.conf: @audio - rtprio 90 @audio - nice -15 @audio - memlock unlimited I have another usb soundcard which does work fine with jack (and alsa driver) but it has no inputs, etc, it's a pain not to be able anymore to use the Firebox. any help would be greatly appreciated !! cheers, _yvan

14 years, 7 months

We're back online !

by Marc-Olivier Barre

Dear mailing list users, The list migration to the brand new virtual is complete and all the problems seems to be fixed. As Robin told me when we were in the middle of this panicky evening: "when we find what the problem is, we will all laugh about it". Well, let me share the laughing with you: It was just a typo ! Funny how trouble in the computer world eventually always turn out to be an invisible typo in a configuration file :) Enjoy your new server and post away ! Cheers, -- Marc-Olivier Barre XMPP ID : marco(a)marcochapeau.org www.MarcOChapeau.org

14 years, 8 months

RT kernel for audio and dynamic vs static ticks

by Lars-Erik Helander

In móst guides on how to build an RT kernel for audio you advised to untick the Dynamic Tick selection and change the default tick period from 300 Hz to 1000Hz, during kernel configuration.. I have built an RT kernel without unticking the Dynamic Tick selection, i.e. the kernel has a dynamic tick length. With this kernel I do not experience any audible difference from the same kernel but with static tick at 1000Hz rate. Is the advise to use static ticks at 1000Hz still valid? Anyone that has insight on this are more than welcome to share their knowledge :) Kind Regards Lars

14 years, 11 months

Re: [LAT] Setting up a performance synth

by Brian Bergstrom

I use an old Thinkpad T21 P3-900MHz as a live MIDI controlled synth and sampler. It has been working well with 64 Studio 2.1 on it using Jack, AMSynth and Specimen. I use a Ozone USB audio interface and MIDI controller in one. I just installed the new Karmic Ubuntu Studio on my beefy production machine and it is working great there, but it does have a larger footprint. -Brian On 1/14/10 11:00 AM, linux-audio-tuning-request(a)lists.linuxaudio.org wrote: > Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:55:42 -0500 > From: David McClanahan<david.mcclanahan(a)gmail.com> > Subject: [LAT] Setting up a performance synth > To: linux-audio-tuning(a)lists.linuxaudio.org > Message-ID: > <977676ab1001131355x1ec62682mf78b8faa15dc68cd(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Hi, > > I'm trying get a Dell 7000 laptop(with about a 3G harddrive) to be a > synthesizer. Yes it's older(How old is tooo old?) Yes its slower(How slow is > too slow?) But it's what I've got and I'm not convinced it can't do the job > yet. > > Anyway when I say "synthesizer", I mean > > 1. It's tweakable(like a minimoog etc) as in has ADSR, filters, and the like > that can be controlled(via midi) on the fly. > > 2. It doesn't crack and wheeze(or xrun all over me) > > 3. It's doesn't lock up when I bend over to tie my shoes. > > 4. It's midi controllable > > I have managed to install Ubuntu and crippled piece of Ubuntu Studio(Karma I > think). I say that it's crippled because a full installation took up more > disk space than I had so I took some things off(using the normal packaging > mechanisms 'apt' etc). The realtime kernel is still present however along > with the Jack stuff. The sound works-I can play an mp3. > > But soft synths like Bristol either don't work or lock up the machine. I > managed to get Bristol to partially work by starting the network loop > interface, but even then it was sluggish and eventually locked up the whole > machine. Same goes for PD and Zyn. > > Fluidsynth(qsynth) works but it's pretty easy to cause xruns(and the pops). > > So here's my question/comment. > > Is it worth trying to get something working on this(or another) > distribution? > > I'd like to just get something working but these distribution(Puredyne, > Ubuntu Studio, etc) seem to have a heavy footprint and they don't seem very > configurable. Ubuntu seems heavily coupled to GNOME, PulseAudio, LASH and > stuff for which I have no clue what they're for. As a side question, from > the perspective of sound synthesis, is Jack useful? It seems to provide > interprocess communication between audio apps. I can see it being useful if > you have multiple apps talking audio to each other. But if you have a single > process soft synth and ALSA what's on top of the hardware how does Jack > help? m-dist might be an exception. It worked on my desktop but locked up > on my laptops. > > OR would it be better to build a dedicated synth on a hard realtime > platform. > > Has anyone just adapted Linux to just boot a computer as a dedicated > synthbox(or engine) with little or no other I/O concerns to get in the way? > I don't care if I can play Space Invaders and write my resume at the same > time. I've got a Roland JV1010 tone box and I doubt it has 10th of the > processing power or memory of the Dell and yet it doesn't crack or wheeze. I > don't even care if it drove the display. As long as it acted like a stable > hardware synth and was midi controllable I could get along. Maybe such a > thing already is out there. I've looked but had no success. >

14 years, 11 months

Setting up a performance synth

by David McClanahan

Hi, I'm trying get a Dell 7000 laptop(with about a 3G harddrive) to be a synthesizer. Yes it's older(How old is tooo old?) Yes its slower(How slow is too slow?) But it's what I've got and I'm not convinced it can't do the job yet. Anyway when I say "synthesizer", I mean 1. It's tweakable(like a minimoog etc) as in has ADSR, filters, and the like that can be controlled(via midi) on the fly. 2. It doesn't crack and wheeze(or xrun all over me) 3. It's doesn't lock up when I bend over to tie my shoes. 4. It's midi controllable I have managed to install Ubuntu and crippled piece of Ubuntu Studio(Karma I think). I say that it's crippled because a full installation took up more disk space than I had so I took some things off(using the normal packaging mechanisms 'apt' etc). The realtime kernel is still present however along with the Jack stuff. The sound works-I can play an mp3. But soft synths like Bristol either don't work or lock up the machine. I managed to get Bristol to partially work by starting the network loop interface, but even then it was sluggish and eventually locked up the whole machine. Same goes for PD and Zyn. Fluidsynth(qsynth) works but it's pretty easy to cause xruns(and the pops). So here's my question/comment. Is it worth trying to get something working on this(or another) distribution? I'd like to just get something working but these distribution(Puredyne, Ubuntu Studio, etc) seem to have a heavy footprint and they don't seem very configurable. Ubuntu seems heavily coupled to GNOME, PulseAudio, LASH and stuff for which I have no clue what they're for. As a side question, from the perspective of sound synthesis, is Jack useful? It seems to provide interprocess communication between audio apps. I can see it being useful if you have multiple apps talking audio to each other. But if you have a single process soft synth and ALSA what's on top of the hardware how does Jack help? m-dist might be an exception. It worked on my desktop but locked up on my laptops. OR would it be better to build a dedicated synth on a hard realtime platform. Has anyone just adapted Linux to just boot a computer as a dedicated synthbox(or engine) with little or no other I/O concerns to get in the way? I don't care if I can play Space Invaders and write my resume at the same time. I've got a Roland JV1010 tone box and I doubt it has 10th of the processing power or memory of the Dell and yet it doesn't crack or wheeze. I don't even care if it drove the display. As long as it acted like a stable hardware synth and was midi controllable I could get along. Maybe such a thing already is out there. I've looked but had no success.

14 years, 11 months

Re: [LAT] 2.6.29-rt1

by Robin Gareus

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: > On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 18:27 +0100, Robin Gareus wrote: >> Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: >>> On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 22:20 +0100, Robin Gareus wrote: >>>> Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: >>>>> On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 19:52 +0100, Robin Gareus wrote: >>>>> We've got a winner! 2.6.29-rt1 >>>>> >>>>>> Hmmmm, getting close but not yet a winner :-) >>>>>> I've been tracking the 2.6.29 rcx series and I'm still having some >>>>>> problems. 2.6.29-rt1 still does not shutdown correctly with my kernel >>>>>> configuration options (you need to specify "noreplace-smp" in the kernel >>>>>> startup line for shutdown to happen - otherwise you get a problem at the >>>>>> very end of the halt and the machine does not power down). >>>> This is related to your BIOS or motherboard. Do you have the same >>>> problem with a vanilla 2.6.29? >>> I have not tested with vanilla 2.6.29 but the problem happens in several >>> very different machines. I have sent feedback to lkml/Thomas/Ingo. >>> >> Can you upload your .config ? It might also be some missing ACPI option. > > Attached... > -- Fernando > I just compiled a kernel with your .config and got a few surprises: - 2.6.29-rt1-ccrma works just fine with "irqbalance" - over here it shuts down and halts the system even without "noreplace-smp" (intel core duo in a Thinkpad X60s) - using x86 generic compatibility dramatically increases the size kernel+modules MCORE2: 21MB ; i686+x86-generic: 250MB ! more later, robin

15 years, 8 months

2.6.29-rt1

by Robin Gareus

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 We've got a winner! 2.6.29-rt1 I've just succeeded with a few tests: jackd realtime (64fpp with a USB UA25) recording/playing Audio and MIDI with qtractor & qsynth and I played a 32 channel ardour session - no xrun in sight! I know this is old news since 64studio already ships a 2.6.29 pre-release - However, I run a debian squeeze/sid and 2.6.29-release-candidates were causing an OOPS on this system. As it turned out it was caused by "irqbalance"! It took me quite a while to track down that the rt kernel is no longer compatible with irqbalance (it works fine with 2.6.24-rt). Here's a debian package built for core2: http://rg42.org/_media/wiki/kernel/linux-image-2.6.29-rt1_2.6.29-rt1-10.00.… and the corresponding .config file: http://rg42.org/_media/wiki/kernel/config-2.6.29-rt1.txt kudos to the rt-linux devs. have fun, robin -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAknLzvgACgkQeVUk8U+VK0KgfwCfWyxyyVYMDVx+CNLFzUL3kf57 b48An1WorJjnPNFEDWjv3mUjFrjpvj1Q =B4PU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

15 years, 8 months

First version of alsa-midi-latency-test released (v0.0.1)

by Jakob Flierl

Heyda, sorry for cross-posting: the first version of "alsa-midi-latency-test" is available at: http://github.com/koppi/alsa-midi-latency-test/ The console application aims to become a Linux drop-in-replacement for the Windows application "MidiTest": http://earthvegaconnection.com/evc/products/miditest/index.html It would be nice to hear some feedback, especially from - linux-audio-tuning users (-- what latencies are you measuring?!) and from - alsa-developers (-- would be nice, to include this tool to the alsa-utils package). Kind regards, ++Jakob

15 years, 9 months

2.6.29-rc4-rt2

by Emanuel Rumpf

Hi I just successfully installed 2.6.29-rc4-rt2 $ uname -a Linux mech 2.6.29-rc4-rt2-tip #2 SMP PREEMPT RT Sat Feb 14 17:23:59 CET 2009 i686 GNU/Linux Let me also mention, that the binary nvidia beta driver is working with it (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.18-pkg1.run). My problem: jack doesn't start with the real-time option enabled - output: JACK compiled with System V SHM support. cannot use real-time scheduling (FIFO at priority 10) [for thread -1210911056, from thread -1210911056] (1: Operation not permitted) In limits.conf , I have: @audio - rtprio 99 @audio - memlock 600000 @audio - nice -14 This setup used to work fine with my previous RT-kernel (2.6.25) Any idea and help is welcome. Thanks -- Emanuel Rumpf

15 years, 10 months

Re: [LAT] [LAU] Are RT-patches needed anymore? (Was Re: >= 2.6.27 RT ETA?)

by Fernando Lopez-Lezcano

On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 20:24 +0100, Lars-Erik Helander wrote: > Fernando your elaborate response is highly appreciated, thanks!! > > >> - Will "rtirq" make a difference on a non-RT-patched kernel system? > > > > No AFAIK. Non-rt patched kernels do not have irq processes running as > > separate SCHED_FIFO threads (which is what is tuned by rtirq). > > > This was my thought to. > > >> - Do I need to assign rtprios explicitly to all my processes > >> (qjackctl, qsynth, ...) or is that "automagic"? > > > > Automagic. Jackd gives the proper priority to the clients (to the thread > > of the client that handles audio i/o) > > > I use "lmms" every now and then. I have never been able to get "lmms" > to work well with jack so I use it with ALSA as the audio driver. This > works fine though I can not use jack application simultaneously. So in > this case do I have to explicitly give "lmms" SCHED_FIFO and rtprio? > How (using chrt?) ? If you want you could use chrt. I don't know if lmms is multithreaded, if so you would/should change into SCHED_FIFO the audio thread. Even then the application should be well designed, otherwise it could hang the whole machine. > >> I have close to 30 years experience in developing realtime systems and > >> has been using Linux for audio in various distribution the last two > >> years. Further I have built RT-kernel for couple of distributions > >> (this weekend I successfully built and ran a 2.6.28-rt kernel from the > >> new git tree :) ). > > > > Ah, I have not tried this yet! How did that work out? Any errors or > > problems on boot? How exactly did you go about building the whole thing? > > > About a week ago building from the git produced a kernel that did not > boot properly, actually it did not even build properly and my own > remedy for the build problem resulted in a kernel that was not able to > boot up properly. However building from the git this weekend produced > a well working kernel. Only problem found is the softirq.c bug that > has been around for a while (it makes USB MIDI keyboards etc not to > work - they are discovered but no MIDI events are received) so I had > to apply a patch for that problem. > Build procedure was very straightforward using the git url I cloned > the git and got myself a complete (already "patched" kernel source > tree) and it was just to do the normal "make oldconfig", "make > menuconfig" ... procedures. I see, I just tried with no luck. It may be a configuration option that triggers compile errors (or something else I'm not doing right). -- Fernando > >> However I have no experience in using newer non-RT > >> kernels but I am very interested to find out how well you can have > >> them work, especially since whenever you find a nice distro you can > >> not use it because the hazzle of building an RT-kernel for that > >> particular distro is so big :(. > > > > Planet CCRMA (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/) has rt > > patched kernels of the 2.6.26.8* flavor for fc9 (in the "testing" > > repository) and fc10, and should be easy to install (not an objective > > assessment, I created and maintain Planet CCRMA :-). > > I have also sucsessfully built and used 2.6.26.8-rt13 with the Slitaz > (www.slitaz.org) distribution (the git kernel also works with that > distribution). > In order to use the kernel with my USB MIDI devices I had to apply the > above mentioned softirq.c patch.

15 years, 10 months

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Linux-audio-tuning