13 Oct
2014
13 Oct
'14
11:50 p.m.
Hi all,
To refine the question a bit;
Older laptops in this case... 1.6ghz - 2.2ghz dual core 64bit processors and their rough
equivalents, running say, current KDE4 Ubuntu like environment, vs flux/blackbox <add
ur choice here>, etc. anyone got any real results?
Like, I want to record at 128/2 ... Can I run a softsynth or Jammin on top of a few live
plugins running simultaneously kind of difference or ... The point I'm subtly pointing
toward... Does the lightweight WM or DT really give me anymore power to do something
useful??
The only user difference in experience, for the most part that I see, is losing the
automated bells n kazoo's tht heavy desktops handle. Of course there's more but
I'm just curious about case examples with something to back them up & not be
centered wholly on opinion.
~ Russell
14 Oct
14 Oct
12:13 a.m.
On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:50:05 -0700
Russell Hanaghan <hanaghan.osaudio(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
To refine the question a bit;
Older laptops in this case... 1.6ghz - 2.2ghz dual core 64bit processors and their rough
equivalents, running say, current KDE4 Ubuntu like environment, vs flux/blackbox <add
ur choice here>, etc. anyone got any real results?
Like, I want to record at 128/2 ... Can I run a softsynth or Jammin on top of a few live
plugins running simultaneously kind of difference or ... The point I'm subtly pointing
toward... Does the lightweight WM or DT really give me anymore power to do something
useful??
The only user difference in experience, for the most part that I see, is losing the
automated bells n kazoo's tht heavy desktops handle. Of course there's more but
I'm just curious about case examples with something to back them up & not be
centered wholly on opinion.
~ Russell
On an eeepc901 I'm running a cut-down debian wheezy in single user mode with
openbox as the wm and it's own session manager + ROX as the file manager. I can
run QjackCTL, Yoshimi and a USB MIDI keyboard without xruns provided I don't
try to do anything fast on the bigger multi-voice instrument patches. I can also
just about run Rosegarden as well with very simple 1 or 2 part tunes. The audio
quality from the headphone socket is surprisingly good.
--
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.
12:57 a.m.
On Mon, 13 Oct 2014, Russell Hanaghan wrote:
Hi all,
To refine the question a bit;
Older laptops in this case... 1.6ghz - 2.2ghz dual core 64bit processors
and their rough equivalents, running say, current KDE4 Ubuntu like
environment, vs flux/blackbox <add ur choice here>, etc. anyone got any
real results?
Atom single core, 1.6Ghz, 1G ram, 32bit... Not much difference from xfce
to lxde/blackbox, that I can tell. Nice thing about xfce stock menu is
that new SW just shows up in the menu... not much of a difference. Unity
and gnome session just don't work well enough to run a browser let alone
audio apps. This may be more video drivers related. KDE is tunable. But I
have found the performance hit with no tuning to be not noticable really.
I can run guitarix at 64/2 (USB AI) 64/3 (internal HDA) reasonably well.
The major problem is memory, 1G is really not enough, 2G makes a
difference. I have not added memory though because I don't use this for
audio. I am running xfce and using Jack as the audio backend with pulse
for desktop stuff, bvecause I do try some audio bits once in a while. So
there is a small step from KDE OOTB over xfce, but unity and gnome session
do take a lot more of something that my machine doesn't have. There are a
number of people using a P4 single core to run more than I do on this.
Like, I want to record at 128/2 ... Can I run a softsynth or Jammin on
top of a few live plugins running simultaneously kind of difference or
... The point I'm subtly pointing toward... Does the lightweight WM or DT
really give me anymore power to do something useful??
Like I say the biggest hit is memory. The WM generally is not the whole
story, xfce WM is not much bigger than xfwm for example, but xfce
generally has a whole pile of extra processes running.
Where this is noticable is that i use more than one "workspace". So the
systray WS switcher is pretty imortant. I set jack running and do jacl
connections in one screen then run Ardour on another. Part way through I
need to switch to another WS and so hit the WS switcher..... and find it
has swapped out and the audio just dies waiting for swap to finish.
Swappiness helps but doubling the memory fixes it.
so long as I stick to the one screen, I can run the cpu at 800mhz (half
speed) and have not xruns. kxstudio uses kde and ubuntustudio uses xfce,
both have live DVD isos so they can be tried without installing.
Soft Synths and effects vary rather a lot in what they need for
cpu/memory. I did have some things that just didn't run. foo yc20 for
example, was just a mess of xruns/noises on this box no matter the DE.
Hexter never glitched, it was fine.
--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net
8:41 a.m.
On 10/13/2014 12:56 PM, Len Ovens wrote:
On Mon, 13 Oct 2014, Russell Hanaghan wrote:
Not many to me, although I am puzzled as to why htop shows there are 63
"/usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon --no-daemon" processes running.
Hi all,
To refine the question a bit;
Older laptops in this case... 1.6ghz - 2.2ghz dual core 64bit
processors and their rough equivalents, running say, current KDE4
Ubuntu like environment, vs flux/blackbox <add ur choice here>, etc.
anyone got any real results?
Atom single core, 1.6Ghz, 1G ram, 32bit... Not much difference from xfce
to lxde/blackbox, that I can tell. Nice thing about xfce stock menu is
that new SW just shows up in the menu... not much of a difference. Unity
and gnome session just don't work well enough to run a browser let alone
audio apps. This may be more video drivers related. KDE is tunable. But
I have found the performance hit with no tuning to be not noticable
really. I can run guitarix at 64/2 (USB AI) 64/3 (internal HDA)
reasonably well. The major problem is memory, 1G is really not enough,
2G makes a difference. I have not added memory though because I don't
use this for audio. I am running xfce and using Jack as the audio
backend with pulse for desktop stuff, bvecause I do try some audio bits
once in a while. So there is a small step from KDE OOTB over xfce, but
unity and gnome session do take a lot more of something that my machine
doesn't have. There are a number of people using a P4 single core to run
more than I do on this.
Like, I want to record at 128/2 ... Can I run a softsynth or Jammin on
top of a few live plugins running simultaneously kind of difference or
... The point I'm subtly pointing toward... Does the lightweight WM or
DT really give me anymore power to do something useful??
Like I say the biggest hit is memory. The WM generally is not the whole
story, xfce WM is not much bigger than xfwm for example, but xfce
generally has a whole pile of extra processes running. Where this is noticable is that i use more than one
"workspace". So the
systray WS switcher is pretty imortant.
Why? I switch between workspaces in XFCE using ctrl-F1, ctrl-F2, etc.
Much faster than mousing around!
--
David W. Jones
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com
1:56 a.m.
On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:50:05 -0700
Russell Hanaghan <hanaghan.osaudio(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Older laptops in this case... 1.6ghz - 2.2ghz dual
core 64bit processors and their rough equivalents, running say, current KDE4 Ubuntu like
environment, vs flux/blackbox <add ur choice here>, etc. anyone got any real
results?
That should be more than enough horsepower for the task...
Does the lightweight WM or DT really give me anymore
power to do something useful??
My experiences have definitely been consistent with this, though I haven't
used anything besides Fluxbox in ages.
If at all possible, swap out the hard drive with a SSD. Most laptop
drives are not chosen for performance, so 5200RPM drives are real common
and the less performant the drive, the harder the system works to keep
up with everything while recording.
--
======================================================================
Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa
8:34 a.m.
On 10/13/2014 01:56 PM, Joe Hartley wrote:
On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:50:05 -0700
Russell Hanaghan <hanaghan.osaudio(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'd think that the more memory your system has available for audio data,
the less it will depend on your fixed storage (spinning or SSD).
Heavyweight desktop environments like KDE4 and Gnome 3 use a lot more
memory for themselves, leaving less available for anything else.
And, sorry, had to laugh. When you mentioned "older laptops", my mind
went back to my older laptop (the one just before this present i7
system). A 32-bit 2.8GHz Celeron processor and 2 GB of RAM, without any
of these modern accelerated GPUs driving the video. KDE4 crawled on it.
And that was with a 7200RPM hard drive in it.
--
David W. Jones
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com
Older laptops in this case... 1.6ghz - 2.2ghz
dual core 64bit processors and their rough equivalents, running say, current KDE4 Ubuntu
like environment, vs flux/blackbox <add ur choice here>, etc. anyone got any real
results?
That should be more than enough horsepower for the task...
Does the lightweight WM or DT really give me
anymore power to do something useful??
My experiences have definitely been consistent with this, though I haven't
used anything besides Fluxbox in ages.
If at all possible, swap out the hard drive with a SSD. Most laptop
drives are not chosen for performance, so 5200RPM drives are real common
and the less performant the drive, the harder the system works to keep
up with everything while recording. 
11:11 a.m.
And, sorry, had to laugh. When you mentioned
"older laptops", my mind
went back to my older laptop (the one just before this present i7
system). A 32-bit 2.8GHz Celeron processor and 2 GB of RAM, without
any of these modern accelerated GPUs driving the video. KDE4 crawled
on it. And that was with a 7200RPM hard drive in it.
Actually off-topic:
A friend of mine just retired his laptop after twelve years. Half a
year ago I installed crunchbang because he no longer wanted to use XP
after support had ended. He never needed my help after installation, it
just worked and faster than before. Openbox is reasonable in its
resource usage, it works fine even on twelve year old laptops. He only
used the machine for browsing and writing, no audio work.
I'm surprised that the HD (30GB) survived all this time. I wiped it for
him, but I still have to check what the SMART data says.
Philipp
8:53 a.m.
On Tue, October 14, 2014 8:50 am, Russell Hanaghan wrote:
Hi all,
To refine the question a bit;
Older laptops in this case... 1.6ghz - 2.2ghz dual core 64bit processors
and their rough equivalents, running say, current KDE4 Ubuntu like
environment, vs flux/blackbox <add ur choice here>, etc. anyone got any
real results?
Like, I want to record at 128/2 ... Can I run a softsynth or Jammin on top
of a few live plugins running simultaneously kind of difference or ... The
point I'm subtly pointing toward... Does the lightweight WM or DT really
give me anymore power to do something useful??
The only user difference in experience, for the most part that I see, is
losing the automated bells n kazoo's tht heavy desktops handle. Of course
there's more but I'm just curious about case examples with something to
back them up & not be centered wholly on opinion.
I did some tests with a few desktops a few years back which I posted on
this list. I found that there was no hit to audio latency between the
different environments with my test rig. Assuming you have the physical
resources then my conclusion was that it comes down to personal choice.
I run gnome3 and find the workflow is fine. I have tried other
environments but I end up pulling them out and installing gnome3 for
consistency.
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd
3695
days inactive
3696
days old
linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
7 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
david -
Joe Hartley -
Len Ovens -
Patrick Shirkey -
Philipp Überbacher -
Russell Hanaghan -
Will Godfrey