[Techtalk] Re: making music under linux

[Maluvia]

Hi Anna!
Sorry for the delayed response - I'm way behind on the lists.

You can get a lot of ideas for linux audio setups by perusing the archives of the linux audio developer's mailing list: http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
You'll get about as many different opinions on the ideal setup as there are list members.
(Some people get kind of religious about their particular audio distribution and apps.)

My 2 cents:
I opted early on to stay away from the big audio distributions like Agnula DeMuDi and Planet CCRMA.

Firstly, because they are based on what I consider to be huge, overloaded distributions which have way more than what you need for audio production, and especially in the case of Debian, are excruciatingly slow about updating their kernel and apps - to the point of fanatacism.

Secondly, the heavy kernel patching they do for low-latency is quite simply no longer necessary.
I won't go into details, but I have been following this subject for a long time, and with all the new kernel optimizations in the way of preempts and scheduler choices, all you need is a well-configured version of the latest kernel sources and you've already got excellent low-latency performance - without any patches.
The kernel developers have really done an outstanding job of dealing with this issue in a way that keeps everyone happy. 

Thirdly, those big audio distros throw in everything-including-the-kitchen-sink in the way of audio applications just so they can call it an audio distribution.
That is just plain silly.
Imo, the end-user should decide which applications they want to use and install just those.

I wanted something small, simple and fast that could just support the audio apps we wanted to use without all the bloat, and that I could easily keep up-to-date.
My solution was to build a sort-of roll-your-own: I  installed the Arch Linux base system, compiled a custom version of Xfree86 4.5 (so I could use the wonderful little Xvesa server), and just installed the audio applications we want to use - right now, just Jack, qjackctl and Ardour.
(I recently managed to get JAMin mastering suite compiled, but haven't had a chance to try it out yet.)
We are having great results so far, even though we still have a number of bugs to work out.

(I am just now in the process of setting up a blog: http://linuxaudyssey.com, where I am going to detail how we built our system, how we have solved the many problems we have had, and will be keeping an ongoing log of our progress with our Linux-based audio production projects.)

Good Luck!
-Maluvia