On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 8:40 AM, David Nielson <naptastic@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
>> ... After installing, I can plugin a USB keyboard (Akai LPK25), setup
>> routing in qjackctl, and run qtractor (with fluidsynth dssi plugin
>> synthesizer) and hear/record music. Works beautifully, even with the
>> built-in audio on an acer aspireone netbook.
> A close friend of mine has an Acer Aspire One and we have never managed to
> get good playback quality under any conditions--not Windows, Ubuntu, or
> Fedora; neither playing back MP3 or OGG files, nor synthesizing new sounds
> using qsynth. No matter what settings we try, there are always audible skips
> and dropouts. Do you experience this with your Aspire One? (How) Did you fix
> it?
I was as surprised as you were that it all worked, and wasn't
glitching. Meego, IMHO, is very snappy. However, the music apps were
all that was running on the netbook. (In particular, don't run a web
browser like chrome while visiting a javascript-heavy site while doing
audio apps -- the javascript will win :-) ).
Of course, I really wasn't taxing it much... Diddling around on a
little keyboard into qtractor and hearing sounds coming out of the
dssi fluidsynth plugin I was using; and recording, playing back
sounded ok as well. Even more surprising because qtractor was giving
the message 'unable to obtain realtime scheduling RR/55" or somesuch,
but qjackctl and jackd were running w/ realtime. Qjackctl was
certainly indicating a much larger DSP load (50%ish) than I normally
see on my desktop. However it kept up, even while recording in
qtractor. (TODO: need to see if hpet timer exists and if enough extra
are available for app use on atom/netbook platform as qtractor's
current timing on the netbook is based on the dinosaur-era 1000Hz or
the audio card timing).
Similarly, qsynth also performed nicely. I'm curious to find out how
something like linuxsampler dssi plugin or qsampler work on the
netbook, which is one of the reasons why I installed but did not
manage to test other than an initial "it's got enough libraries
installed to come up" test. I also want to test out "mixxx" (mixxx
1.7.2-1 just updated on rpmfusion) as a netbook might well be a
perfectly good platform for DJing, combined with a Behringer BCD3000
as control surface and 4 channel USB audio device.
In general "pure Qt" apps (like qtractor) are well targeted for Meego
since Meego is supposed to be Qt-based, so in theory, at least you
should be sharing memory between "desktop" and apps like qtractor. (My
perceived reality is that meego is moblin updated from f10 to f13 --
fundamentally based on gnome -- with Qt more as a marketing direction
from merging in Nokia's Maemo: "MeeGo's UI API is based on the Qt
toolkit as described in the architecture; MeeGo will also include
Clutter and GTK+." ( http://meego.com/about/faq ))
Meego is suprisingly snappy on the netbook, despite 1.6G atom and 1G memory.
Some of it seems like its the btrfs filesystem. Intel claims meego is
specially tuned for the Atom. Not sure if that's based on engineering
or marketing. From reading
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=meego_10_perf one
might notice something about maths performance that's better than
competing distros (???) and one could speculate this may be helping
audio performance as well (??).
> MeeGo 1.0 took its first win when it came to being the fastest at encoding an MP3 using the LAME
> software. Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 LTS came in third while Fedora 13 took second.
> ...
> MeeGo 1.0 was the fastest Linux distribution again in another test. This time it was FFmpeg
> where it took just 82 seconds to encode a video file while the three other tested distributions
> all took 91~92 seconds.
FYI, part of the reason for adding rpmfusion repos to meego was so I
could easily compile and test my first foray into Vala programming --
http://spekle.googlecode.com -- which makes heavy use of FFmpeg for
performing audio decompression and FFTs. I concur with Phoronix's
tests at the surprising speed at which FFmpeg does it's thing on the
atom processor. As 'spekle' is vala based -- it is perfectly suited
for running on meego, and vala seems like an ideal language for doing
netbook applications due to its combined performance (it's basically
C) and modernity. Fortunately, Vala appears to be a standard part of
Meego, by virtue of being a standard part of Gnome.
Niels
http://nielsmayer.com
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Received on Tue Sep 21 00:15:04 2010
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