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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