23 Dec
2009
23 Dec
'09
3:46 a.m.
Jonathan E. Brickman wrote:
That's sort of what musicbox is headed for.
Just wondering. Without an RT kernel here, my 2
laptops seem to run my
simple audio needs pretty well at 64msec latency. At least, it's never
bothered my playing along with computer-generated audio.
I don't do any heavy-duty audio work here. Once I tried Jackrack, put
one effect in it (that worked) or one amplifer (that worked) but trying
to use both didn't. But I don't know if that had so much to do with
latency or lack of RT kernel as with a smallish amount of memory and an
underpowered processor driving the whole thing. Now that I''ve upgraded
the memory on both laptops, perhaps it would work? On musicbox, with
512MB, using a single good quality (larger) soundfont was enough to
cause problems. With 768MB in it, it works without problems.
I see people on the list running much lower latencies than 64msec, and
seemingly trying to get even lower ...
So, just wondering.
Depends entirely on specifically what you're trying to do. I'm using
my
setup as a live-gig MIDI module, in the sense that when I play a note on
my keyboard, it sends noteon/noteoff via MIDI to the box, which either
(a) puts out that note as close to zero-latency as possible or (b)
delays everything, which hurts live cohesion in many ways, not the least
being my fellow band-members taking cues from the positions my fingers
are in. It's true that RAM and CPU are both needed if
you're going to use your
laptop for effects. A good sound system can ease the CPU needs some,
but not much in the effects zone. Apart from MIDI event processing,
soundfonts are actually perhaps the least resource-intensive
music-generation task in my current experience, as long as your sound
system is reasonably tweaked, except some simple sound synthesis tasks
in well-written code, e.g., some organ-only simulators. Sophisticated
sound synthesis will eat your CPU alive (that's why I bought this AMD
X4), as will anything but the simplest effects setup.
Which brings me to a 'hmmm'. CPU. GPU? :-) Not yet, but we can pray
for it :-)
CPU in musicbox is a 2.8GHz Celeron processor. Not the Celeron M, the
non-M version.
The "GPU" is old Intel 8xx series junk, and probably the source of about
half of the xrum problems ... I tried a music distro on it that used
KDE3 with Compiz, and having any of the video effects turn on would peg
the CPU and bring sound processing to a silent halt.
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community