giving linux a shot

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 8:49 am

I got a couple of audio things I need to do for work, and since I can fall back on my XP system, I decided to give linux a go. See how far it can go in a real life situation. The test won't be "will it work out of the box", so I'll spend some time tweaking it, but still, I'm hoping to get things to work within 1 day.

I'll be using Xubuntu, because it's super light. Install all the necessary apps, and use my old M-Audio Audiophile USB to hook up to my monitor speakers. It's really like a poor man's setup, but I want to see if it performs well.

I'm downloading the live CD as I type. Planning to install this on a USB external drive so I won't be able to mess anything up on my XP machine. I'll keep updating as I progress.

Gordon Gekko · Post by **Gordon Gekko** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 9:17 am

that's interesting. are you going to boot from the usb drive? I didn't know this was possible, what's your hardware host?

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 12:29 pm

I'm trying to install to a usb externall hard drive, which seems a little different than installing to a flash drive. For flash drive installation, it seems to be copyong a liveCD on there, and modifying it to save changes. An external hd install seems to be a little more straight forward, especially with distros based on Ubuntu "gutsy" 7.10.

One trick I read on forums is to unplug all your other hd during install so install only sees your external drive. That way the boot loader won't get installed in your "real" primary drive. (internal XP drive) Although there probably are other ways to do this, it seems easier this way.

Once strange thing happened already though.. I disabled all my drived in BIOS, thinking that it'll save me the hassle of unpluging the power on my internal drives.. but lo and behold, I see ALL my drives on my boot into the live cd. (I'm writing from live cd btw) So, I guess linux can bypass BIOS? Not sure why this is happening, but I guess I might as well open up and unplug.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 12:59 pm

well, unplugged, and got backups of final things I needed off the drive I'm going to use, and I'm good to go. It's always scary when I do a full HD overwrite, even if I know in my head that I've got everything that I need. Anyway, here it goes, "the install".

"blink blink". My 200gb hd is formatting right now into ext3 file system. I chose the "use entire disk" option since I didn't know what size swap disk I should create. (linux creates a swap disk instead of a swap file) I remember reading somewhere that it's supposed to be twice your RAM or something, but might as well let it auto set it, and then resize my partition smaller later. BTW, most linux live CDs have a nice graphical partition tool called Partition Editor (very creative name) that can make your life easier when you want to partition before installing an OS.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 1:29 pm

wow, a good 20 minutes and it's still a little over 80%. I get a feeling that either my USB isn't running at full 2.0 speed, or maybe it's just alot of files? I guess if you try it and it takes a long time to copy stuff, there's nothing wrong about it.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 1:43 pm

great, first boot went fine. I'm greeted with updates and also availability of drivers for my ATI card. I think this means there are drivers for ATI that aren't bundled with the install CD because they're not opensource. (or something to that effect)

One thing I do feel is that the keyboard chokes up once every few seconds. Maybe something to do with USB traffic I'm not sure. Will have to look into that.

So I need to:
1. fix mouse hickup
2. get dual display to work
3. install all audio software
4. get some of my VSTs to load. (especially sampletank)
5. write 7-8 1 minute soundtracks

All this in one day. Actually, if I can accomplish this regardless of "rush job" quality with minimal effects, it's going to say alot about the potential of this platform. But I'm not going to make false promises tho. Let's see how it goes.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 2:14 pm

as I checked the app manager to install audio related applications, it's immediately apparent that perhaps ubuntu studio was a better choice. I say this because many audio apps are GNOME.

Linux operating systems consist of a core, and a desktop. Ubuntu uses a desktop system called GNOME, and Kubuntu uses KDE, and Xubuntu (which I chose) uses xfce. Many applications use GNOME, and although I read that I can run GNOME applications in xfce, I'm not sure at what cost. For some reason, I was not able to select Ardour 2, which is the flagship multitrack recorder in linux.

I hear that you can install gnome onto xfce (a swap?) or have kde coexist with xfce... all this is extremely confusing since this really makes the differentiating between different versions hard. So if I install GNOME onto Xubuntu, when that makes it Ubuntu? Or maybe UbuXubuntu?

Also, about audio hardware. From what I gather, linux audio is handled by an API called ALSA. So if ALSA supports your soundcard / audio io / firewire device, you good to go. For firewire devices, there is a tool called freebob that allows you to use select firewire devices. Don't get your hopes up in this corner, most devices are along the same vein as sb Live and cheaper M-Audio devices. You won't find TC, Focusrite, or any other higher end support. I could never understand how these people want to build a "OS built for pro audio" when alot of these people are inevitably working on soundblaster products..

Anyway, that's all I collect so far. Correct me if I'm wrong, there's way too much information for me to process, and it's spread out all over the internet, in forums or mailing list archives most of the time. So, learning this stuff is really hard.

Post by **hubird** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 2:22 pm

good luck Ken

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 3:09 pm

well, the thing is running.. got the audiophile usb to work through jack, but I'm not sure why the alsa mixer won't work. This is very confusing. I don't understand why I can point jack to the alsa driver.. Maybe alsa is the driver, and jack is the sound server/ api that runs on top of alsa? I hate it how there is no real way to find out how these things are organized. This isn't turning out good.

But I managed to get some sound out of Hydrogen. (drum machine) It seems like anything that is not jack related simply doesn't run. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong since the programs don't even get far enough to throw an error. hmm.. not good.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 4:04 pm

something just not right with trying to do this in Xubuntu. I might as well download Ubuntu studio, and see where that takes me.

This is what I got after what seemed to be an easy install:
1. got sound through M-Audio audiophile USB, but with cloes 100ms latency. Alsa recognized the device, and I was able to access from jack. Hydrogen played sample based drums.

2. Alsa mixer didn't work for audiophile. But it seems to be that there isn't anything controlable on the audiophile. Switching on the onboard ac97, I was able to control all aspects of it through ac97. But this doesn't really help.

3. My toolbar (system toolbar) disappeared and I can't figure out how to bring it back.

4. some programs access sound card directly, some through jack, which seems to cause problems. I'm not sure.

5. Programs crash and hang as i change parameters for jack... which is understandable. I just don't know how to force quit frozen apps.

6. Onboard ac97 had latency over 50ms.

So anyway, this is a complete disaster so I am going to trash this install. I'm downloading Ubuntu Studio as I type. If that fails to perform, I will have to leave linux for the time being. I thought I'd at least get far enough to be checking out some of the effects...

Either way though, this is much harder than I thought. I thought that with ALSA support for audiophile, at least getting the audio applications to work would be fine. And honestly, I was expecting much lower latency. 100ms? It's not a funny joke. A more suitable soundcard may solve the latency issue, but since things are "questionable", it's hard to think I'd invest in a "test" sound card for better performance.

Am I missing something here? It really doesn't work.

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 5:32 pm

I suggest the Knoppix DVD. It comes with a bunch of Music Apps. The Knoppix CD does not have much. There is a way to tell Knoppix to save your settings to a thumb drive.

Post by **hubird** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 5:36 pm

OSX.
Works

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 5:46 pm

back on ubuntu studio. The installs are a breeze, I'll give them that much. On first load, I was greeted with a error saying GNOME settings daemon wasn't running.. this just isn't impressive at all.

I'll try to get something to work, and if not, I'm going to call it quits.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 6:11 pm

bingo, I think I've hit jackpot. Ubuntu studio's audio performance is much better. I haven't stressed it but I can go down to 5ms just playing back Hydrogen. Quite a leap from Xubuntu's 100ms. Not sure what the big difference is, but this is looking much better.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 7:42 pm

just got some sort of soft synth to work on a sequencer called Muse. Not much I can work with.. it's got a very heavy fm synth, a couple of soundfont players, on organ emu, a bad monosynth, and a drum machine that loads in wav files. Lots of effects to work with, but since I won't be able to load vsti's at the moment, i'm not sure if I should go hunt for soundfonts, or just give up for this particular project.

The sound playback is glitchy. It crackles at random intervals (like 2-3secs apart) Perhaps it could be the USB bus being loaded with access to HD, or maybe some conflict with the LAN card, not sure.

If all this works tho, it might not be too bad.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sun Nov 11, 2007 12:21 am

It turns out that if I run jack in realtime mode, the performance is almost faultless. Even down to 11ms, although I was just playing one of those 2mb sound fonts I found + a couple of dsp effects.

Still, more problems. Dual head display. This is definitely possible, but after 5 hours of manually editing the configuration file, I still haven't made any progress. Every single step is a painstaking process of research and trial and error. This is insane.

Post by **garyb** » Sun Nov 11, 2007 12:54 am

Gordon Gekko · Post by **Gordon Gekko** » Sun Nov 11, 2007 4:45 am

Every single step is a painstaking process of research and trial and error.

I felt the same thing when I installed fedora 6 last summer. But the performance you seem to get off an OS installed on a usb drive is quite amazing

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Sun Nov 11, 2007 7:04 am

you're not alone

zangsta · Post by **zangsta** » Sun Nov 11, 2007 7:43 am

astroman wrote:you're not alone

Glad someone is investigating Linux here, I´ve spent some hours with Knoppix, Dynebolic, Ubuntu, and nothing is really painless. And I´ve not really done anything worth mentioning. Even getting on-line was a problem back when I first tried Knoppix.
It´s comforting to see that the IT-professionals I have been working with this year also have problems with linux, make me feel less stupid.

Going Linux does makes sense though, and I will keep an eye open on the developments going on, and eventually; Goodbye, Windoze!

J_S