16 Nov
2009
16 Nov
'09
5:39 p.m.
I've asked about this on the ubuntu forums to little avail...just wondering
what you guys might think. Far from a professor of linux audio, but I'm
getting more and more into it.
I've built a couple basic machines from scratch recently, amd dual cores w/
2gb of memory. Not wanting to spend the extra dough on a nice sound card +
interface yet, I settle with just using chipset sound. The 9.10 and 9.04
vanilla kernels have worked for me pretty well using Jack, but if I whenever
I try to get the RT working, all kinds of problems show up: insane amounts
of Xruns just as Jack starts up, Ardour can't connect, and processor ends up
using half its resources to stay running. Needless to say, recording is not
really possible.
This is after tweaking memlocks, nice %s , buffers and so on.
I know that chipset sound, is not a very efficient recording interface, but
it seems there is more going on, besides that.
I have two main questions here (they sum up to: how much of this is the
chipset?)
a. i had heard here and there in forums that the RT kernel in 9.04 and on
was 'broken'. is that true?
b. Is RT only worth using for higher end machines with more ram and separate
sound cards?
And one more: Would anyone recommend using a different audio OS for this
situation, like 64 studio? (i might have mentioned jacklab, but it seems
that project has been killed)
Im hoping someone can help settle my curiosity here......
16 Nov
16 Nov
5:45 p.m.
On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:39:11 -0600
Gary Morgan <gmorgan777(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've asked about this on the ubuntu forums to
little avail...just wondering
what you guys might think. Far from a professor of linux audio, but I'm
getting more and more into it.
I've built a couple basic machines from scratch recently, amd dual cores w/
2gb of memory. Not wanting to spend the extra dough on a nice sound card +
interface yet, I settle with just using chipset sound. The 9.10 and 9.04
vanilla kernels have worked for me pretty well using Jack, but if I whenever
I try to get the RT working, all kinds of problems show up: insane amounts
of Xruns just as Jack starts up, Ardour can't connect, and processor ends up
using half its resources to stay running. Needless to say, recording is not
really possible.
This is after tweaking memlocks, nice %s , buffers and so on.
I know that chipset sound, is not a very efficient recording interface, but
it seems there is more going on, besides that.
I have two main questions here (they sum up to: how much of this is the
chipset?)
a. i had heard here and there in forums that the RT kernel in 9.04 and on
was 'broken'. is that true?
b. Is RT only worth using for higher end machines with more ram and separate
sound cards?
And one more: Would anyone recommend using a different audio OS for this
situation, like 64 studio? (i might have mentioned jacklab, but it seems
that project has been killed)
Im hoping someone can help settle my curiosity here......
Try 64studio 3(beta). This works very well for me on a dual core
athlon. However, I do also have a 2496 sound card. Personally, I've not
found any of the plain ubuntu offerings stable enough.
Incidentally, it looks like we may end up going straight from there to
4 actually :o
--
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.
17 Nov
17 Nov
3:33 a.m.
Folderol wrote:
On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:39:11 -0600
Gary Morgan <gmorgan777(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe try jackdmp AKA Jack2? I've heard jackd (non-mp) might not find
dual-processor machines cooperative all the time?
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
I've asked about this on the ubuntu forums to
little avail...just wondering
what you guys might think. Far from a professor of linux audio, but I'm
getting more and more into it.
I've built a couple basic machines from scratch recently, amd dual cores w/
2gb of memory. Not wanting to spend the extra dough on a nice sound card +
interface yet, I settle with just using chipset sound. The 9.10 and 9.04
vanilla kernels have worked for me pretty well using Jack, but if I whenever
I try to get the RT working, all kinds of problems show up: insane amounts
of Xruns just as Jack starts up, Ardour can't connect, and processor ends up
using half its resources to stay running. Needless to say, recording is not
really possible.
This is after tweaking memlocks, nice %s , buffers and so on.
I know that chipset sound, is not a very efficient recording interface, but
it seems there is more going on, besides that.
I have two main questions here (they sum up to: how much of this is the
chipset?)
a. i had heard here and there in forums that the RT kernel in 9.04 and on
was 'broken'. is that true?
b. Is RT only worth using for higher end machines with more ram and separate
sound cards?
And one more: Would anyone recommend using a different audio OS for this
situation, like 64 studio? (i might have mentioned jacklab, but it seems
that project has been killed)
Im hoping someone can help settle my curiosity here......
Try 64studio 3(beta). This works very well for me on a dual core
athlon. However, I do also have a 2496 sound card. Personally, I've not
found any of the plain ubuntu offerings stable enough.
Incidentally, it looks like we may end up going straight from there to
4 actually :o 
16 Nov
16 Nov
6:37 p.m.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Gary Morgan schrieb:
This is after tweaking memlocks, nice %s , buffers and so on.
I know that chipset sound, is not a very efficient recording interface, but
it seems there is more going on, besides that.
I have two main questions here (they sum up to: how much of this is the
chipset?)
a. i had heard here and there in forums that the RT kernel in 9.04 and on
was 'broken'. is that true?
9.4 was broken 9.10 works very good for me...
b. Is RT only worth using for higher end machines with
more ram and separate
sound cards?
no - the opposite is true: with a proper rt-kernel you can run critical
stuff on lower machines also. It just grabs everything your box can do
for audio...
And one more: Would anyone recommend using a different
audio OS for this
situation, like 64 studio?
Not really, wait until it is stable I would suggest...
If you want to try something debianish go for pure:dyne or AVLinux.
(i might have mentioned jacklab, but it seems
that project has been killed)
Not so much killed but died more or less without big shock and awe...
Still OpenSuse is very good for audio with the rt-kernel from jengelh
installed...
best regs
HZN
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17 Nov
17 Nov
midnight
i see..... well, then i guess i have to question my memlock or nice settings
again, dont I?
I've tried the standard settings, nice @ -19 and then up to 19, memlock at
100%, rt prio at 99. Memlock to 50%, to 65%. I haven't screwed around with
rtprio much, though......
My question now, would be: what are these settings actually doing? memlock
seems to speak for itself, how much available mem is set for audio
purposes...right?
but I dont see the difference between rtprio and nice, I only know that
they handle interrupt priority in an indirect way. perhaps i've been setting
them incorrectly; for nice and rtprio, the lowest number = highest priority?
Otherwise, I just don't see why each time i changed the settings, i would
get no difference. It makes sense that my cpu would be constantly running at
60% if I were to set memlock to 50 or 60%, but the xrun count was always
rediculous. and yes, tried restarts each time, for the jack server, and my
computer itself.
Guess I'm looking for some good guidelines to follow while tweaking this
stuff, too. Like what settings might be good for an amd x2 using 2gb ram?
thanks for the help
On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Hartmut Noack <zettberlin(a)linuxuse.de>wrote;wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Gary Morgan schrieb:
This is after tweaking memlocks, nice %s , buffers and so on.
I know that chipset sound, is not a very efficient recording interface,
but
it seems there is more going on, besides that.
I have two main questions here (they sum up to: how much of this is the
chipset?)
a. i had heard here and there in forums that the RT kernel in 9.04 and on
was 'broken'. is that true?
9.4 was broken 9.10 works very good for me...
b. Is RT only worth using for higher end machines
with more ram and
separate
sound cards?
no - the opposite is true: with a proper rt-kernel you can run critical
stuff on lower machines also. It just grabs everything your box can do
for audio...
And one more: Would anyone recommend using a
different audio OS for this
situation, like 64 studio?
Not really, wait until it is stable I would suggest...
If you want to try something debianish go for pure:dyne or AVLinux.
(i might have mentioned jacklab, but it seems
that project has been killed)
Not so much killed but died more or less without big shock and awe...
Still OpenSuse is very good for audio with the rt-kernel from jengelh
installed...
best regs
HZN
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4:53 a.m.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Gary Morgan schrieb:
i see..... well, then i guess i have to question my
memlock or nice settings
again, dont I?
I do not think that this will help much...
My question now, would be: what are these settings
actually doing? memlock
seems to speak for itself, how much available mem is set for audio
purposes...right?
but I dont see the difference between rtprio and nice,
nice does not help much if working with audio expect for some very
special needs (such as: running the computer as a synth for a
live-performance maybe..) It only affects the normal load-balancing as
used on the average Linux-system. I never experienced any usable
improvement in performance with running jack or ardour with nice -10 or
so...
rtprio is the most important value. 99 is good (has always worked for
me) it allows group audio to wield the special preemption-magics that
are implemented with a rt-enabeled kernel.
I only know that
they handle interrupt priority in an indirect way. perhaps i've been setting
them incorrectly; for nice and rtprio, the lowest number = highest priority?
rtprio is higher number = higher prio
nice is reversed
Otherwise, I just don't see why each time i changed the settings, i would
get no difference. It makes sense that my cpu would be constantly running at
60% if I were to set memlock to 50 or 60%, but the xrun count was always
rediculous. and yes, tried restarts each time, for the jack server, and my
computer itself.
I suspect your audio-device as the weakest segment in your chain.
If you want to stick with it for now try to fiddle with the
jack-settings in qjackctl. Especially raising the number of
periods/buffer to 3 can do wonders with USB/FW or cheap onboard devices.
I also recommend to run jack with 48KHz or 96KHz - 44.1 does not perform
the same as good for me.
I run a cheapo-onboard chip with these settings:
/usr/bin/jackd -t1000 -u -dalsa -dhw:0 -r48000 -p512 -n3 -s -Xseq -zr
32ms latency is not really cool know but great performance does not come
at no-cost....
best regs
HZN
>
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9:49 a.m.
Gary Morgan wrote:
Guess I'm looking for some good guidelines to follow while tweaking this
stuff, too. Like what settings might be good for an amd x2 using 2gb ram?
Also make sure the cpu is always running at full speed. My amd64x2 is
working much better for audio since I removed the frequency scaling daemon.
Martin
10:14 a.m.
On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Gary Morgan <gmorgan777(a)gmail.com> wrote:
i see..... well, then i guess i have to question my
memlock or nice settings
again, dont I?
I've tried the standard settings, nice @ -19 and then up to 19, memlock at
100%, rt prio at 99. Memlock to 50%, to 65%. I haven't screwed around with
rtprio much, though......
just to reiterate a point that i regret needs to be made over and over
.. nice values have absolutely no relevance whatsoever to realtime
audio, and whoever originally started spreading the myth that they are
relevant should feel bad. occasionally, changing the nice value of an
application will make a difference, but its just good luck that it
works. applications either need more buffering or RT scheduling. nice
is irrelevant, and was never intended for this purpose.
16 Nov
16 Nov
6:45 p.m.
On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Gary Morgan <gmorgan777(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've asked about this on the ubuntu forums to
little avail...just wondering
what you guys might think. Far from a professor of linux audio, but I'm
getting more and more into it.
FYI, one thing that stumped me was that Ubuntu (9.10 anyway) doesn't
add the current user to the audio group. typically we setup our
/etc/security/limits.conf to allow for the audio group, hence the user
doesn't get the advantages. be sure to check and see if you are a
member of the audio group first, then you can move on to other
troubleshooting.
--
Josh Lawrence
http://www.hardbop200.com
11:34 p.m.
yeah, that had me a little miffed for a while, but I figured it out,
eventually. Before that, I couldn't even get the Jack server to start up,
let alone give me xruns. I'm pretty sure that's only 9.10. thanks, though.
On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Josh Lawrence <hardbop200(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Gary Morgan
<gmorgan777(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've asked about this on the ubuntu forums to
little avail...just
wondering
what you guys might think. Far from a professor
of linux audio, but I'm
getting more and more into it.
FYI, one thing that stumped me was that Ubuntu (9.10 anyway) doesn't
add the current user to the audio group. typically we setup our
/etc/security/limits.conf to allow for the audio group, hence the user
doesn't get the advantages. be sure to check and see if you are a
member of the audio group first, then you can move on to other
troubleshooting.
--
Josh Lawrence
http://www.hardbop200.com
17 Nov
17 Nov
9:42 a.m.
Gary Morgan <gmorgan777@...> writes:
a. i had heard here and there in forums that the RT kernel in 9.04 and on was
'broken'. is that true?b.
I had problems using the Ubuntu 9.04 rt kernel package, but when I compiled the
2.6.29.6-rt?? kernel from source it worked pretty well, even with the nvidia
drivers. I remember doing lots of other tweaks and recompiling a few programs
also, but cannot remember them now. You could try rtirq? Remove pulse.
Also, FYI I'm using M2496 card also. In the end I removed enough things to make
it not the best for general usage, but pretty good for audio. I have not
switched to 9.10 yet.
Geoff
10:11 a.m.
Geoffrey wrote:
Gary Morgan <gmorgan777@...> writes:
You might be interested in this article:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/judgement-day-studio-dave-tests-ubuntu-…
I had beaucoup problems with that system, but eventually I got it fixed
up for audio. Btw, I installed it on my HP G60 notebook, as per the article.
I picked up a contract to review some software on Karmic, so I upgraded
the notebook to 9.10. The upgrade went well except for a few relatively
minor problems. The default choice for grub's menu.lst didn't add the
new kernels, but I was able to fix that with a little googling (and
installing grub2). And as usual Ubuntu doesn't add the user to the audio
group, another easy repair. Finally I had to fix /etc/init.d/umountfs to
permit a full shutdown (i.e. without having to push the power button on
the machine). See Google for details.
I've done some very light testing with JACK under the normal kernel. I'm
impressed, so now it's on to test the rt kernel.
Best,
dp
a. i had heard here and there in forums that the
RT kernel in 9.04 and on was
'broken'. is that true?b.
I had problems using the Ubuntu 9.04 rt kernel package, but when I compiled the
2.6.29.6-rt?? kernel from source it worked pretty well, even with the nvidia
drivers. I remember doing lots of other tweaks and recompiling a few programs
also, but cannot remember them now. You could try rtirq? Remove pulse.
Also, FYI I'm using M2496 card also. In the end I removed enough things to make
it not the best for general usage, but pretty good for audio. I have not
switched to 9.10 yet.
25 Nov
25 Nov
5:24 p.m.
I could run Ubuntu 9.04 with my quad-core AMD64 machine, but a couple of
weeks ago I noticed the 9.10 upgrade was available, blithely clicked on it,
it downloaded all night and, when it was ready to reboot to the new
release....it died. I fooled with it in a dumb terminal mode and was able to
do some simple things. Finally, using a 9.04 live disk I backed up my drive.
I was never able to configure audio to my satisfaction even in 9.04. Some
applications worked. A lot did not.
Anyway I went to Planet CCRMA which works only with Fedora (I went with 10),
and then loaded the Planet CCRMA applications. The install was smooth. No
apparent problems.
It is a good improvement for audio. (I also have a cheap, non-standard sound
card so it should get better.) There is a real-time kernel which I have yet
to install.
Check it out.
Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: "Geoffrey" <gsking1(a)gmail.com>
To: <linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 8:41 AM
Subject: Re: [LAU] ubuntu 9.10 RT and Jack
Gary Morgan <gmorgan777@...> writes:
a. i had heard here and there in forums that the RT kernel in 9.04 and on
was
'broken'. is that true?b.
I had problems using the Ubuntu 9.04 rt kernel package, but when I
compiled the
2.6.29.6-rt?? kernel from source it worked pretty well, even with the
nvidia
drivers. I remember doing lots of other tweaks and recompiling a few
programs
also, but cannot remember them now. You could try rtirq? Remove pulse.
Also, FYI I'm using M2496 card also. In the end I removed enough things
to make
it not the best for general usage, but pretty good for audio. I have not
switched to 9.10 yet.
Geoff
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12 comments
10 participants
participants (10)
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Dave Phillips -
david -
Folderol -
Gary Morgan -
Geoffrey -
Hartmut Noack -
Josh Lawrence -
Martin Peach -
Paul Davis -
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