Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Using Linux for audio
From: Benno Senoner (sbenno_AT_gardena.net)
Date: Sun Apr 16 2000 - 18:59:37 EEST
On Sun, 16 Apr 2000, Luis Pablo Gasparotto wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Can you tell me the advantages and disadvantages of using Linux for
> audio? How is Linux for audio compared with others OSs?
>
> Thank you very much.
>
> Luis Pablo Gasparotto
>
DISADVANTAGES:
- currently no commercial software available , but the "big boys" are looking at
Linux with great interest
- audio I/O API (ALSA) not mainstream yet but will be soon
- no widespead defacto audio plugin standard on linux, although, LADSPA 1.0
got officially released and Paul already got a simple VST2.0 host running on
Linux
the audio plugin API problem includes the GUI issues (no unified toolkit etc),
one solution would be to port VSTGUI to Linux (being worked on?).
- no intercommunication standard between apps (like Steinberg's ReWire),
that would be one of the goals of MuCoS ( http://www.linuxdj.com/mucos )
ADVANTAGES:
- FREE OS: you are not dependent on a SW vendor, your OS will never go away
you can fix bugs, improve performance , make enhancements that YOU need etc
etc etc.
- high performance multitasking / multiuser / multiprocessor OS
- if the lowlatency patches go mainstream, we can deliver 2-3ms audio latencies,
orders of magnitude better than Windows (even W2K) and probably at par or
- better than BeOS
- Linux is born with networking in mind, therefore distributed enviroments,
remote access (through X11), clusters etc is easily possible.
... out of ideas ...
:-)
Benno.
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