Goodbye Apple, Hello Music Production On Ubuntu 513
Adam Wrzeski notes a piece up at Create Digital Music by musician Kim Cascone (artist's bio) on switching from Apple to Linux for audio production: "The [Apple] computer functioned as both sound design studio and stage instrument. I worked this way for ten years, faithfully following the upgrade path set forth by Apple and the various developers of the software I used. Continually upgrading required a substantial financial commitment on my part. ... I loaded up my Dell with a selection of Linux audio applications and brought it with me on tour as an emergency backup to my tottering PowerBook. The Mini 9 could play back four tracks of 24-bit/96 kHz audio with effects — not bad for a netbook. The solution to my financial constraint became clear, and I bought a refurbished Dell Studio 15, installed Ubuntu on it, and set it up for sound production and business administration. The total cost was around $600 for the laptop plus a donation to a software developer — a far cry from the $3000 price tag and weeks of my time it would have cost me to stay locked-in to Apple. After a couple of months of solid use, I have had no problems with my laptop or Ubuntu. Both have performed flawlessly, remaining stable and reliable."
Re:I know this guy... (Score:5, Informative)
Eh... (Score:4, Informative)
Allow me to be the first to say... (Score:5, Informative)
So what? I'm not trying to troll here (well, maybe a little) but honestly, who cares?
This whole mentality of "Us against the world" is kinda amusing to me. I guess it's because I'm not a developer, or something, I dunno.
But this is one artist saying "Software X is/was expensive, so I'm using a different and free solution." Ok, great, good for her. So now what?
Nothing beats Reaper! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why MacBook Pro? (Score:0, Informative)
The $3000 one is the only one with an expresscard slot.
Re:I know this guy... (Score:5, Informative)
Linux Sound Support (Score:5, Informative)
Many people have problems with sound in Linux. The situation is certainly less than ideal. However, on most computers, sound in Linux works flawlessly. If you have problem with sound in Linux, you are part of the exception, rather than the rule.
OSS4 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=12200#12200 [4front-tech.com]
It fixed all my problems with sound, anyway.
Re:I know this guy... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, what about LMMS? (Score:4, Informative)
There's lots of software that is pretty much exactly like GarageBand.
Cakewalk [cakewalk.com] - Sonar
Propellerhead [propellerheads.se] - Reason
Steinberg [steinberg.net] - Cubase
Magix [magix.com] - Samplitude
Image-Line [image-line.com] - FL Studio ... can even do most, if not all of what GarageBand does.
Re:I know this guy... (Score:2, Informative)
Jackd also crashes at the drop of a hat.
Also, it would be nice if you didn't have to dedicate a machine specifically to recording. Unfortunately, Jack is required for doing any real audio work, and yet it gets in the way of running anything else.
I used to run brutefir as a digital crossover, which I ran to my subs, woofers, and tweeters individually.
It's really awesome that you can do stuff like that, but unfortunately, application support was pretty weak. I had to run pulse's jack-sink module to make certain apps work, Native jack plugins for others, alsa's jack plugins for some.
It was so cumbersome that I eventually gave up.
Re:Good on him (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it is actually... (Score:4, Informative)
Apple has decided that they would write the JVM for OS X, citing better integration into OS X and making OS premium Java development platform at one point. Of course they back tracked on it and now Java on OS X is lagging behind 2-3 years behind major releases and versions on other OSes for which Sun and others are writing JVMs.
Re:Linux Sound Support (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux Sound Support (Score:3, Informative)
PulseAudio is good unless, as I do, you need low-latency audio for digital audio work.
JACK, while an admirable idea, is currently a shit popsicle in terms of usefulness in this area. I have a Dell Studio 15 much like the article author's and ran Ubuntu 9.04 in an attempt to try out Linux for digital audio. Ardour and Rosegarden were okay (though nowhere near as useful as Ableton Live or Propellerhead Reason), but the problems with JACK were just way too much for me to fuck with. ASIO under Windows is optimal; DirectX under Windows is almost as good. JACK's latency was higher than DX, though lower than MME, and just wasn't really worth it for me.
Also, it's not their fault, I know, but the lack of VST support without a ton of stupid workarounds is really a deal-breaker.
Re:Did you document this? (Score:5, Informative)
I blogged [marcansoft.com] about it and submitted the patches to the ALSA tree. It should hit mainline eventually (I'm not sure how often they sync up with ALSA).
Re:I know this guy... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm the editor of CDM and also run our servers. (apparently not terribly well, though I am in the middle of a migration to a new server config -- should've, uh, waited on this story!)
I'd like to get more data on hardware, too, and I'm curious what's been giving you trouble. I regularly see various problems on all three platforms, though I agree Linux is probably the least familiar and needs information dissemination most urgently (at least for music production).
While I'm waiting and restarting Apache (cough), some of the things folks are claiming here seem to be misinformed. That's not necessarily their fault; it illustrates that better documentation is needed, and simply pointing people to audio-centric distros I think is not enough.
For driver support -- RME fills the pro audio gap nicely if you're looking at the high end; they're the ones that are really doing it right. You'll also have good luck with any class-compliant USB audio interface. I'm getting good results out of a Cakewalk SPS-25 (basically equivalent to an Edirol UA-25). FireWire support is greatly improved, and you can check there at ffado.org. Most internal chipsets are also well-supported by ALSA - not a high-end option, true, but it means you can mix something on the road listening to the headphone jack without having to muck about with something like ASIO4ALL on PC.
Software: it's true there isn't much in the way of Linux-*only* software, but not that you don't have choices. Renoise and energyXT now both run natively, Renoise being a huge deal to fans of trackers. And many Windows apps can run better under WINE, with ALSA, WINEASIO, and JACK, than they do on Windows. That's the reason Native Instruments software can run on the MUSE Receptor, specialized hardware that runs Linux and WINE under the hood. It's solid enough that it winds up being preferable for people to buy that hardware over a laptop - yes, even over a Mac laptop. You probably won't get that kind of reliability out of a Linux setup out of the box, really, regardless of distro. But if you can set it up in a way that will be rock-solid, that could be worth the time for people.
I think that's the bottom line: a lot of people would be happy to invest a little extra time and effort to get an open system running. The problem is, they don't know how. The responses here demonstrate that people aren't aware of what some of their choices are, or have had (understandable) frustration because the distros ship out-of-box in a way that doesn't quite work, and there's not much clear documentation to tell you how to fix it.
ALSA isn't perfect, but neither is Core Audio, let alone ASIO. ALSA combined with JACK can be an exceptionally-terrific audio system for these applications.
So, I can make you a deal - I will put more of that information online, *and* fix our servers, too, so you can actually read it. ;)
Re:Linux Sound Support (Score:5, Informative)
I have gotten practically inaudible latencies from jack. The critical detail is to make it output directly to the ALSA hardware device (hw:0, usually). Having it go through dmix (which tends to be the default ALSA output device) kills your latency because it has to go through the mixing buffer.
Re:Big Question... (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you. yes, the site is slashdotted so I can't get to it right now :/
On that first link on jackaudio.org there were resources for tons of things!
I am still curious how one might produce with it if there isn't much for pro-audio hardware that directly connects with linux... by that I mean multiple input channels analog/digital, etc.
Re:This is a joke (Score:2, Informative)
I only started in 2007 (Score:1, Informative)
>I used linux exclusively on my notebooks from 98-06
>and I can tell you about 1000s of hours wasted
Ive been working on Linux for 10 years and its been on my laptop since then.
I only decided to move my family and relatives to Linux in 2007 because I didnt think Linux on the desktop was ready before then (it was PCLinuxOS2007 and Mandriva that I chose for them),
Now that the desktop is finally raedy, you went a blew a bundle.
THats ass backwards.
I use Ubuntu Studio on the road and we do over 100 gigs a year. With the live recordiings Ive made weve even made some live bootleg cd's which are of equal quality that the sound guy does on his Mac.
Would I have done sound on Linux 2-3 years ago?
No.
Now? Of course.
Backwards.
Re:Good on him (Score:4, Informative)
That is, the details of how much CPU are used by the IO system aren't written to the process header, because the process header isn't in the computable scope (an area defined by a set of active register values). Ergo, "top" doesn't report that CPU because it isn't there.
You can get some idea of that usage by looking at the "Cpu(s):" line in top. Specifically, "sy"=system (kernel) time and wa and hi are related to time dealing with hardware. See man top for more details. That information is not separated out by process, but you will be able to tell the difference between a program at 30% CPU usage because it is just not doing much and a program at 30% CPU usage because the processor is busy with other tasks (possibly the I/O for that process).
I recommend using htop [wikipedia.org] as it gives a visual with all of the different types of CPU usage in different colors so you can get the information at a glance (and it can separate it by CPU/core).
Re:Good on him (Score:2, Informative)
The only thing the article's author was locked in to was the belief that they must have the latest and greatest version of everything. If it works, DON'T FIX IT.
From the article:
Then, during my 2009 spring tour, my PowerBook G4 exhibited signs of age, with missing keystrokes, intermittent backlighting, the failure of a RAM slot, and reduced performance.
It sounds like that's exactly what he did. His system and workflow worked great up until a few months ago when his years old laptop broke down. And since he had to fix it, he re-evaluated the situation and came up with something that works as well for less money.
Re:Good on him (Score:3, Informative)
You do realize that the 10.x the x is a major upgrade to the product. The difference between OS 10.3 and 10.4 and 10.5 is like the difference between Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. (well 10.5 isn't as crappy as vista is but you get the point) . The Current Version of OS X is 10.5.7 the .7 being the minor version which is free and most software works well being a few minor versions behind.
The differences between the OS 8, 9, 10 is like for Microsoft the difference between DOS, Windows(3.1-ME), and NT(2000-7)
Re:This is a joke (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody who is serious about audio production attempts to sync two audio interfaces without an explicit sample clock (aka "word clock") sync connection. Whether this is done implicitly, as is possible with firewire based interfaces, or via an additional coax cable with suitable termination on a PCI card doesn't matter: you don't get sync out of two separate clocks without resampling, which is the enemy. You can even take out your soldering iron if you want and run a wire between two el-cheapo consumer interfaces. Not recommended for beginners.
People commenting on technical matters that they know less about than they make it sound: $0.02
People commenting on technical matters and honestly reflecting their knowledge level: $10.00
People who actually understand this stuff: priceless.