I have recently been thinking about going to linux on my DAW. I currently use fruity loops and run a winxp pro sp2, with a bunch of VST. There have been a couple of issues which made me try to seek another O/S for my audio. Number one is that I like to run a lot of VST, and I also like to have my project from sequencing to pre mastering all in one project. This, of course means a lot of CPU since i try to do as much as possible without rendering it to .wav and back, since this takes time, especially for little changes when mixing. Another issue is the windows 2gig ram application limit. I hit this a couple of times and was left in a dead end as to what to do. Vista is probably out of the option right now since I hate how much garbage is in there and how much cpu it needs just to run. So I am thinking to switching to linux, but would like to ask a couple of question. If someone can spare a couple of minutes and pass your opinion on these subjects/questions, i would appreciate it very much. 1) How is VST adaptors for linux? I was reading there a couple of them. Has anyone had trouble with them? 2) I assume linux is a lot better with RAM than windows, and was curious if there are any people who are on this list that actually switched over and could tell me if they really could "do" a lot more in linux with the same hardware specs than in windows.

Does linux have some sort of application RAM limit?

3) What is everyone's favority sequencer for linux? I know there are a couple of them. Which one is your favorite?

4) I have never used linux before. Would it be better for me to install linux first and after im comfortable try audio on it?

5) I assume there are DirectX adaptor also. Correct?

Hi Mike. On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 3:52 AM, JiNN <jinnproduction(a)gmail.com> wrote: time, was option One nice thing about ext3, the default filesystem for most Linux distributions, is that you almost never have to defragment the drive. That's not the same as using RAM efficiently, but it is very handy... curious if "do" a If nothing else, applications are less likely to be mysteriously added to your boot process automatically. Unfortunately, figuring out how to make a program NOT start automatically when it does so by default is actually quite harder on Linux. Killing a program that you don't want to be running is far more reliable in Linux... sometimes too reliable- if Windows won't let you kill a necessary system process, Linux doesn't even warn you... I wrote my own sequencer for microtonal music in Pure Data. I use it and Csound extensively, though neither is standard sequencer fare. I have found Rosegarden sufficient for that, but I have heard of others not finding it so. I do believe Linux is way behind in this department, partially because programming efficient and powerful user interfaces is BORING, and no one pays Linux developers to do it, so, I suspect, they let those kinds of things lag a bit; the software can DO great things, but it's not always easy to use. Ardour may be the exception, and someone was contracted to add MIDI sequencing support to it last summer. He did so, but to this day I don't believe his improvements have been added to the main branch >:( install In my experience this is a good idea; audio was really the only reason I wanted to use Linux, but that made me pretty miserable when trying to learn very basic things, realizing I was struggling to understand certain concepts and that even when I did understand them, I was barely any closer to making the music I wanted to make. Some people on this list may tell you, I was a huffy puffy bitch sometimes. Some key things to check out if you want to kickstart your audio setup: Jack, chrt, realtime preemption, kernel building, aconnect (for connecting MIDI apps, something like MIDIYoke), top and htop (for checking CPU and memory usage), and bash scripting. As others mentioned, you often string several programs together to do the necessary tasks, rather than one program doing it all. Because of this, knowing a little about "bash scripting" can make it far simpler; a "bash script" can start all of the necessary programs in the right order, so you don't have to always start them manually :) on I have never heard of ASIO4ALL on Linux; AFAIK ASIO in general only runs on Windows, and is probably unnecessary. Jack does low-latency (IMO better) on Linux. One thing I did like about ASIO4ALL was that it allowed realtime audio input to Reason- but, as we all know, Reason doesn't run on Linux, so no loss! have, but I got a lot from Florian Schmidt's page, I'm sure it's not hard to find. He provides some details that it always seemed like everyone else knew but me. One last word of advice: if you find Linux interests you, you're bound to encounter some outwardly rude people. Obviously getting nasty with them doesn't help, and it satisfies them in some kind of way; but sometimes a severely sarcastic remark, perhaps a self-deprecating one, really seems to win them over. It hasn't been my experience here, but if you ever go on the #debian IRC channel, you might want to set up some counseling beforehand, just in case. Good luck, hope to see you on the list in the future. -Chuckk -- http://www.badmuthahubbard.com _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user

I will try the music related linux build OS that was suggested and see where i go from there. I guess my main thing is that i want to spend most of the time working with music and not tinkering with, not sure if this describes it, "programming issues."

It's true that people using free software make the software better, eventually, when the developers care, but it's also true that some people using non-free software are meeting deadlines and making money.