On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 03:44:14AM +0400, Artem Vakhitov wrote:
Hello fellow Linux audio users,
I'm back to dabbling with Linux as an audio system. Among other
things, I play bass guitar in a synth pop band and recently started
to get interested in bass synthesizers. I could of course buy
something like Markbass Super Synth, but then I thought - maybe I
could cobble together something using my Samsung Q35 laptop and
Linux? The laptop has a dual core processor and 2.5GB RAM. The sound
card is a variable here: it could be the built-in Intel HDA (for
this particular purpose, why not), or an Infrasonic DeuX (Firewire)
that I have, or even some used Echo Indigo (PCMCIA).
Is what I want viable at all with a reasonable latency? What
software setup can I use for that? Does anybody here use something
similar live?
In my experience, you've got more than enough hardware there to do many things.
I made tons of music with softsynths on top of softsynths, plugins, etc, on a 2007-era
Asus Core2Duo at 2Ghz with 2GB RAM. Much of that music was posted here. I also mixed a
band CD using that same hardware. And I used it as a live synth for a few years too.
The key is to get a low-latency kernel. At the time (2007) I had to homegrow that stuff,
but nowadays it seems AVLinux is the easiest to set up with that.
The latency I got with my low-end FastTrack Pro USB interface was 3 periods at 128 each,
44.1khz. More than goood enough for recording/mixing/softsynths, and totally reliable,
never glitched on me once after I got everything dialed in.
-ken