9 Feb
2004
9 Feb
'04
2:49 p.m.
Followed the tips everyone offered on my "Latency, Mandrake and Dell
post...missed the emails because I was on "digest" delivery and had only
signed up that day...
Anyway, here's what I have so far for using my Latitude CPXj 650 as a
live fx unit...
I have found that the "Freeverb" LADSPA plugin is about the best. Does
not seem to be a resource hog and has very clean and flexible digital
reverbs. I was using Ecamegapedal to host the plugins but it seems a bit
lacking. For example, I can only run one plug at a time. If I want to eq
the reverb I dont think I can.(?)
So here's what I settled on (The Ardour guys will probably not be
impressed) I'm using Ardour as the host because the layout is killer and
the flexibility is there (in Mixer window) to add plugins as if it were
on a real console. I can add the Reverb in pre fader and a parametric
post fade, etc and have complete control. The latency is probably
running about 10ms in real world terms. It's not real noticeable in this
application anyway. This is an extreme underuseage of Ardour as it was
intended, but for now it's what I want. Good news is the realtime
latency and sound of the reverbs, etc, is running better than Sonar XL
on Win XP so thats a good thing!
I am still unable to run Jack at anything less than 1024 without having
Xrun hell. I set the HD to DMA "on" I had apm as opposed to acpi
running...turned it off and found no difference. I set /tmp up as tmpfs
in fstab per Austin's suggestion, I'm running in IceWM instead of KDE
because it seems to use less resources. But I have not been able to
improve the overall performance that much with these tweaks...
I notice that running Ardour (Beta .9beta 9 RPM from Thacs RPMs), after
I have fired up Jackstart or Jackd-realtime from Qjackctl with -d alsa
hw:0 1024 2 as root and then fire up Ardour and add a track, the pcm
chain is connected (also visible in Qjackctl "Connect")and I have sound
but the pc starts running slow and the Hard drive light is constantly
on. I'm not recording anything...is this Jack writing to disc? I only
have 128 megs in this machine...is the virtual memory trying to
substitute for Jack writing to ram? It is still useable but if there was
a solution for this one item, I'm in digital fx heaven ready for my next
live gig running this as my PA fx.
TIA