Re: [LAU] Going from window to linux

Hi Mike.

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 3:52 AM, JiNN <jinnproduction@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> project. This, of course means a lot of CPU since i try to do as much
> as possible without rendering it to .wav and back, since this takes time,
> especially for little changes when mixing. Another issue is the
> windows 2gig ram application limit. I hit this a couple of times and was
> left in a dead end as to what to do. Vista is probably out of the option
> right

One nice thing about ext3, the default filesystem for most Linux
distributions, is that you almost never have to defragment the drive.
That's not the same as using RAM efficiently, but it is very handy...

> 2) I assume linux is a lot better with RAM than windows, and was curious if
> there are any people who are on this list
> that actually switched over and could tell me if they really could "do" a
> lot more in linux with the same hardware specs than in windows.
> Does linux have some sort of application RAM limit?

If nothing else, applications are less likely to be mysteriously added
to your boot process automatically. Unfortunately, figuring out how
to make a program NOT start automatically when it does so by default
is actually quite harder on Linux. Killing a program that you don't
want to be running is far more reliable in Linux... sometimes too
reliable- if Windows won't let you kill a necessary system process,
Linux doesn't even warn you...

> 3) What is everyone's favority sequencer for linux? I know there are a
> couple of them. Which one is your favorite?

I wrote my own sequencer for microtonal music in Pure Data. I use it
and Csound extensively, though neither is standard sequencer fare. I
have found Rosegarden sufficient for that, but I have heard of others
not finding it so. I do believe Linux is way behind in this
department, partially because programming efficient and powerful user
interfaces is BORING, and no one pays Linux developers to do it, so, I
suspect, they let those kinds of things lag a bit; the software can DO
great things, but it's not always easy to use. Ardour may be the
exception, and someone was contracted to add MIDI sequencing support
to it last summer. He did so, but to this day I don't believe his
improvements have been added to the main branch >:(

> 4) I have never used linux before. Would it be better for me to install
> linux first and after im comfortable try audio on it?

In my experience this is a good idea; audio was really the only reason
I wanted to use Linux, but that made me pretty miserable when trying
to learn very basic things, realizing I was struggling to understand
certain concepts and that even when I did understand them, I was
barely any closer to making the music I wanted to make. Some people
on this list may tell you, I was a huffy puffy bitch sometimes.
Some key things to check out if you want to kickstart your audio
setup: Jack, chrt, realtime preemption, kernel building, aconnect (for
connecting MIDI apps, something like MIDIYoke), top and htop (for
checking CPU and memory usage), and bash scripting. As others
mentioned, you often string several programs together to do the
necessary tasks, rather than one program doing it all. Because of
this, knowing a little about "bash scripting" can make it far simpler;
a "bash script" can start all of the necessary programs in the right
order, so you don't have to always start them manually :)

> 6) Audio drivers? I currently own the t.c. electronic konnekt8 audio
> interface and going from whats on the website they
> dont have linux drivers? Could i use AISO4ALL? I used those drivers on
> windows with no problems before, anyone have
> any problems with them on linux?

I have never heard of ASIO4ALL on Linux; AFAIK ASIO in general only
runs on Windows, and is probably unnecessary. Jack does low-latency
(IMO better) on Linux. One thing I did like about ASIO4ALL was that
it allowed realtime audio input to Reason- but, as we all know, Reason
doesn't run on Linux, so no loss!

> I guess this is all for now. There are many more questions which i have, but
> i will do the research for those. If someone can also
> point em to some good resources on the web on linux audio i would def
> appreciate it.

I got a lot from Florian Schmidt's page, I'm sure it's not hard to
find. He provides some details that it always seemed like everyone
else knew but me.
One last word of advice: if you find Linux interests you, you're bound
to encounter some outwardly rude people. Obviously getting nasty with
them doesn't help, and it satisfies them in some kind of way; but
sometimes a severely sarcastic remark, perhaps a self-deprecating one,
really seems to win them over. It hasn't been my experience here, but
if you ever go on the #debian IRC channel, you might want to set up
some counseling beforehand, just in case.
Good luck, hope to see you on the list in the future.

-Chuckk

-- 
http://www.badmuthahubbard.com
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