The best way to test if your Linux setup is ready for audio, I think, is
here:

http://wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku.php?id=system_configuration

Download the .pl file, make it executable, and run it in a terminal. In
other words, in a terminal:

wget
http://realtimeconfigquickscan.googlecode.com/hg/realTimeConfigQuickScan.pl
chmod +x realTimeConfigQuickScan.pl
./realTimeConfigQuickScan.pl | less

and study the results. My hardware is such that realtime kernel is not
necessary, and I'm not sure about 'noatime' on the filesystems, but
everything else it reports has been extremely valuable. AVLinux ran
well before I did all the things it requested; after I did them, it
began to run screamingly.

There is a list of multimedia-oriented distros on that page, but some of
the listings are alpha quality, no longer in existence, et cetera.

J.E.B.

noatime means no record of access time: http://tldp.org/LDP/solrhe/Securing-Optimizing-Linux-RH-Edition-v1.3/chap6sec73.html

Since on a Linux system files are written to almost every minute, recording atime everytime an access occurs increases the disk I/O.

I need to know access times for some files so I don't quite like that. I use relatime: http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148

Such tests like to assume a lot of things, so I don't like those either. Anyway this isn't really a test, it's just a mockup a user put up because he was asking for something similar and realised there was no answer.