Linux audio (pt. 2)

phil phillip-l+pbsqP8NtUm29vl6s1fFg at public.gmane.org
Sun Apr 30 13:15:03 UTC 2006


This is a long-winded rant; feel free to ignore it.  I don't expect any 
solutions to the various problems mentioned, but letting off a little 
steam and getting my thoughts organized may help my emotional state.  
:-)

======

The first time I ever installed Linux was ten years ago next month.  I 
remember it as being an adventure, trying to find a kernel that had 
enough of the right drivers to support our hardware, odd boot 
configurations....  I'm very glad that for most purposes today I can 
boot a CD and, perhaps an hour later, have a configured system for 
development with databases, assorted servers, and a usable desktop.

On the other hand, there's music.

When I first bought my current system in February, I tried connecting a 
Tascam USB audio interface and discovered that the driver for it didn't 
actually work.  While deciding which Linux distribution I wanted to run 
as my main OS, I tried the USB audio driver on each of them.  It would 
typically load OK and then either crash configuration tools or simply 
not talk to the device.  Even in the best cases, it might appear, but 
without any interface for selecting it.

However, I was still intrigued by the feature list for the latest 
version of Rosegarden4, a package for combining audio and MIDI music 
tracks, editing notation, applying plug-in effects and more, so I came 
up with the idea that I could use the USB box under Windows XP (where 
it worked fine) to do audio recording and MIDI input, then reboot to 
Linux for mixing, production effects, and rendering.  A bit annoying as 
workflow goes, but this is a hobby, not a profession.

I installed some packages under SuSE 10, figuring out enough about 
ALSA, jackd, DSSI, and LADSPA to get them working with the motherboard 
sound card.  Then came the big moment when I brought up Rosegarden4 and 
it told me it didn't like the 2.6.13 kernel supplied with the 
distribution because the timer resolution was too low.

Sigh.  Back when I was looking at various distributions, I'd heard of 
something called DeMuDi, a somewhat rare beast that was said to be 
customized for music applications.  Ok, I have a spare partition; why 
not go for the software that's designed for this purpose?  DistroWatch 
didn't seem to know anything about it, possibly because it is now being 
promoted as Agnula instead.  Finally finding it, I started installing.  
My first hint that something might be wrong was when it failed to 
identify various bits of hardware that were correctly detected by the 
other eight-or-ten distributions I'd tried on this machine.  The second 
hint was learning that all the versions of the music software in DeMuDi 
were both seriously out-of-date and mostly incompatible with each other 
in terms of dependencies.  Third, it reported all kinds of errors 
during boot.  Fourth, it detected my existing SuSE installation and 
wrote unusable entries for it into menu.lst, making it unbootable from 
that grub instance.  (Now fixed.)

After all that, DeMuDi surprised me by recognizing *both* of my sound 
interfaces.  It then reverted to form by refusing to talk to *either* 
of them -- not even a beep, let alone playing a CD or MP3.  (And even 
if it had worked, its version of Rosegarden4 was too old, and not 
upgradable without breaking too many other packages.)

At the moment, the best option I can think of under Linux is to search 
for (or build) an alternate kernel for SuSE 10 that has better timer 
resolution.  But I also think that insanity my lurk in that direction.  
Cakewalk's home edition of Sonar for XP, which appears to do everything 
Rosegarden4 promises, is a couple of hundred bucks and is looking 
cheaper all the time.  (But I don't *like* Windows!  And I need 
abcm2ps, which means I'd want to run Emacs on XP to edit those 
files...ick!)

Mostly, over the past ten years, setting up Linux has become nice and 
boring, but for some applications, unfortunately, the spirit of 
adventure lives on.

........................
Phillip Mills
Multi-platform software development
(416) 224-0714

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