Hey! Thanks for all the great responses! This is my kind of mailing list! :-) Okay, I'm really serious about making some hellacious new music, so I'm diving into this... Here are some questions leading off the new info... R Parker wrote: Wow. CCRMA...seems like some amazing work going on there. Okay, so I downloaded and installed the latest CCRMA kernel and the matching ALSA support. So far, it all seems to be working. The new kernel runs like a charm (2.4.26-1.11). Low latency is on. Things still work. So, now I have a tuned kernel and ALSA. Next... eviltwin69(a)cableone.net wrote: So, I went to the Ardour website and checked it out. Seems like ALSA/JACK/Ardour is a pretty good combination. But I'd like a little more input from folks who have tried this stuff. Any comparison tests out there among the various attempts at developing a Digital Audio Workstation? Ardour seems more robust than Audacity, yet Audacity seems easier to use. Is this just my newbie sense leading me astray or is my intuition telling me something? I'll get to this a little bit later... ;-) Pete Bessman wrote: So how about this one? - Creative Labs SoundBlaster MP3+ USB Audio unit Yeah, it's a cheapo, about 40 bucks at Fry's. Anybody using consumer grade stuff and getting decent (demo qulity) results? Or are the stock soundcards and/or motherboard sound units all crap? Remember, my last recordings were on reel-to-reel tape. I'm not looking for pro-studio 2-track ulti-bit quality here. I just wanna make cool music that sounds clean enough for my friends and fans to play in their car stereos and MP players. Okay, I'll bust it up and keep this short. I suppose I should pop over to Linux Audio *Developers* to ask about fine-tuning hard drives and interrupts, eh? ;-) Thanks for the quick feedback and input, y'all! ~Jos~

Just my 1/2 cent. USB has no latency or bandwidth guarantees on any aspect of its design. I would strongly suggest that you'll have much better results with software/hardware integration and smooth-running performance if you use a real PCI audio card instead of a USB device. All I hear are problems from people who own USB audio devices. At least with Firewire (IEEE-1394), there is an explicit isochronous transfer mode which at least pretends to maintain a QoS delivery mode. Shagrat, formerly of Cirith Ungol, maintains the Dark Lord threw away all of his USB audio replies, =MB= -- A focus on Quality.

more than that. In fact, USB 1.0 has bandwidth limitations. USB 2.0 probably doesn't (up to some limit) but I've not heard any good things about handling more than two tracks. The best PCI card (with more than two tracks) that I've seen at a reasonable price is the Delta 1010LT. Jan On Tue, 2004-05-11 at 06:10, wes schreiner wrote:

I would like to put in another major plug for Planet CCRMA. All of the aforementioned packages (ardour, audacity, jamin') and many others can be installed in one fell apt-get install. You will have more music and video apps than you know what to do with! I have had great luck with a relatively inexpensive Delta 1010LT sound card. There are a few things to note with this - it allows simultaneous multitrack recording, includes 2 balanced XLR inputs and in addition has a MIDI port and SPDIF i/o. It is very well supported with Alsa and Jack, etc. It doesn't connect to your CD-ROM drive as far as I can tell, so playing a CD from the computer doesn't work (at least for me, unless I am missing something obvious) It is essentially a brain-dead install if you follow the directions on the CCRMA website! Essentially, in purchasing a relatively descent PCI sound card and installing the Planet CCRMA stuff, then you will still spend a tiny fraction of what an equivalent Windoze system might cost you. Just my opinion, I could be wrong. -Joe D On Mon, 2004-05-10 at 21:53, Russell Hanaghan wrote:

On Tue, 2004-05-11 at 01:48, Daniel James wrote: True.

Hi, I'm working on setting up my box for recording with ardour+jack and I've been having trouble getting consistent two-channel recordings with 2.6 kernels (2.6.1-mm4, 2.6.3-mm4, 2.6.5-mm6). Things will go along fine for a variable length of time (but not enough to record a full song), then ardour will simply stop. This is usually associated with a quite long xrun (> 20 ms) - there aren't any other xruns happening. Recording under a 2.4.23 kernel with the low latency patches seems to work fine (I suppose I should just stick with that, but it would be nice to be running a current kernel). Additional info: 1) Dual 400 MHz PII, 0.5G RAM, 4 drive SCSI software RAID-0 2) Openbox (cut CPU load from 20% with Gnome to below 10% when running ardour) 3) ext3 filesystem 4) Ensonic AudioPCI ES1371 5) I also tried the irqprio patch for the 2.6.3 kernel mentioned on this list a while back to set the irq priority for the sound card high I get the impression that there is a sporatic event that is causing the unusually long xrun. If anyone has any ideas, I would greatly appreciate advice on how to track this down (reiserfs, maybe?). Thanks! Joel

Malcolm Baldridge wrote: Thanks for the reply and your suggestions. It looks like bdflush is no longer part of the 2.6 kernel; vm buffer flushing is now handled by pdflush. The fact that this part of the system is completely different in the 2.6 kernel may be a clue, particularly in light of what you say a couple of paragraphs down. I'll look into this a bit, I think. After reading your suggestion, I tried setting journal_data_writeback using tune2fs, still had the same problem. I might just try reiserfs, since I've read some people have had good luck with it for audio recording. I guess my main motivation for trying out the 2.6 kernel is laziness. Just build the kernel and get the performance and ALSA without patches or compiling extra stuff. At least, that was _supposed_ to be the way it worked! I'll keep trying the new kernels, but keep the old faithful 2.4 kernel around for recording. I'm _still_ curious about what causes the long xruns, though. Thanks again, Joel

Malcolm> Don't be fooled by the even-numbered version of the Malcolm> kernel. There's nothing "stable" about 2.6.x really. Malcolm> From rev-to-rev it's changing a great deal within the Malcolm> infrastructure. If 2.4.x is working for you, STICK WITH Malcolm> IT. where could i read about what patches for 2.4.x are a must for a reliable audio work? -- gr{oe|ee}t{en|ings} artm

On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 06:18:36PM -0700, Jos Laake wrote: The answer to both questions is "Yes!" ::-) Now, the number one thing to remember when doing home/budget music work, is to ignore the advice of people with money. They'll mostly just tell you about gear you need. What you need is an answer to the question "what can I do?" LAU is good for getting answers to that question! Don't worry about your hardware until it becomes a limitation. One you may run into - channels of I/O. You may soon want to be able to record more than two channels. But don't worry one bit about what you're using until you've tried to do something and not been able to, because of the hardware. No. The same advice applies here! You've got the basics covered - ALSA, Jack, and a low latency kernel. I'd just try it out - download some apps and start making music. Don't start screwing with stuff until you have a definitely problem. I suspect you'll find things are fine. -- Ross Vandegrift ross(a)willow.seitz.com A Pope has a Water Cannon. It is a Water Cannon. He fires Holy-Water from it. It is a Holy-Water Cannon. He Blesses it. It is a Holy Holy-Water Cannon. He Blesses the Hell out of it. It is a Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon. He has it pierced. It is a Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon. He makes it official. It is a Canon Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon. Batman and Robin arrive. He shoots them.