What HW/SW do people have working?

[Scott]

Larry David wrote:
> On Jan 25, 2009, at 10:51 PM, Scott wrote:
> 
>> Larry David wrote:
>>> Are you using a Linux machine regularly to do audio/MIDI and finding it solid
>>> and useable, or is this still mostly an experiment to see what you can get
>>> running and for how long?
>> I'm not doing any MIDI, just audio recording 12 tracks in Ardour. It's working
>> 100% with no xruns or crashes.  My longest continuous session was 45 minutes
>> before I stopped it to save.  I'm actually a little surprised it's working so
>> well in 8.10 considering it was complete trash in 8.04.
> 
> I see, that's very interesting.  Please forgive my complete ignorance of all things
> Linux, but what's an xrun?  Do you know why Ardour works for you in 8.10 and didn't
> in 8.04?  I mean did you figure something out or did you do everything the same and
> it just worked differently?

I did everything in 8.10 as I did it in 8.04.  I honestly don't know what's different
since I'm just a user, not a programmer.  This may answer your questions about xruns, 
latency, etc.

http://subversion.ffado.org/wiki/SomeNotesOnLatency

Pay attention to the section titled "So why is the latency higher than on OS XYZ?"  In 
any case,

> Now this is very interesting.  RT means "real time", right?  Is there some real
> time capability that Linux has for processing audio that Mac does not?

I don't know.  I can run Linux on commodity hardware but a Mac costs bank.  A recent 
email thread on the ffado-users list (or was it this list?) discussed why Apple and 
Microsoft wouldn't devote the resources to making an RT version of their OS because 
the proaudio community is too small to bother supporting, or perhaps they just can't 
do it.  Again... I'm not a kernel hacker, I'm just good at following directions.

> I really want to be convinced that Linux is the way to go - cheaper machine and
> free SW - can't beat that with a stick.  But I'm very skeptical - you get what you
> pay for and all that... 

You can always contribute to the cause.  Donate buttons are on the right side of the 
page at http://ardour.org.

> ld

BTW, I loved Curb Your Enthusiasm. :^)