[ubuntu-studio-devel] support for wine-rt out-of-box?

[Len Ovens]

On Thu, 18 Aug 2016, Hank Stanglow wrote:

> Hello, I am a Web Developer, Artist, Musician, and long time user of Ubuntu 
> Studio. You guys do a great job! This distribution gives me the best 
> out-of-box experience for Web Development and I find the Art and Publishing 
> tools perfectly adequate for my needs. Music and Video? Not so much, but this 
> a problem for all Linux distributions. In fact, after seven years of fumbling 
> with the JACK/ALSA/Pulse nightmare I've given up using native tools and now 
> use WINE exclusively for audio work. Even KX Studio has more problems than I

Wow. Your experience and mine are completely different. I have never 
managed to do anything useful in wine RT or not :) I get frustrated almost 
as fast as I get frustrated using windows. My experience with 
pulse->jack->alsa has been one of stability and just works once properly 
set up. The main trick I have used is to use pulse only as a front end to 
jack (jack runs at startup) with pulse having the alsa and udev modules 
unloaded.

Pulse in particular (jack as well) has seen much improvement over the past 
few years and there is a huge difference from 2012 to now.

> care to deal with and the only thing I take from its repos is wine-rt. If I 
> were to make ONE suggestion for Ubuntu Studio it would be to have a super 
> stable, low-latency WINE-rt environment for audio users (or good instructions 
> on how to set one up).

Including the package (if it was available) is one thing, but I could not 
recomend using wine for sound over native linux solutions. wine-rt relies 
on alsa in any case. That is including wine-rt so someone who really wants 
to use can is one thing. Setting wine-rt up to be default, not so much.

> That said, I am currently NOT using Ubuntu Studio as of 16.04. This is 
> because of one reason only, that is, too many bugs in Thunar. I know could 
> install a different tool (pcmanfm is great), but the file manager is an 
> integral part of a system and I really love Thunar above others. I also know

I am only aware of one bug in Thunar (lots of renaming crashes). I hope 
you have reported any others as well.

Note: While I would not run Wine-RT for audio work, I am in no way 
suggesting you should do things different than you are. The only reason to 
run audio things in wine is the use of windows VST(i) plugins. I would 
suggest though in that case just using a windows platform. I am happy to 
report that there is a growing number of VST(i) developers who are 
supplying native Linux VST plugins these days including pianotech (the 
best piano synth I have heard yet).

It may be that you require other Windows applications for your work and so 
have to run wine of some sort anyway.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net