[ubuntu-studio-users] Questions about production

[Shubham Mishra]

Hello People. After a long time I finally got around to try and record 
something. I have a fresh install of Ubuntu Studio 14.04 up and running 
and I have fiddled around with some of the programs and tried to do some 
stuff but I'm running into some problems. Note I am not only new to 
linux audio but new to audio recording in general so please bear with me 
if some of the questions sound stupid. At the moment I'm using my midi 
keyboard which is hooked up with a USB cable and I'm only going to do 
midi stuff right now although I'm planning to get a microphone later for 
vocals. So here we go

1. I seem to be running into xruns a lot (one every 2-3 minutes) and the 
settings which I have to bring jack so I don't get any dropouts at all 
brings the latency up to 40ms which is too high. I'm running this on my 
relatively old laptop using the built in sound card, which has a first 
gen i3 and 3 GB RAM. Now I have absolutely no idea about what kind of 
hardware is recommended for audio recording, so is this much enough? 
Because if it is, then I'm probably doing something wrong. I do have a 
desktop with a much better processor which I may have to use then, but 
no dedicated sound card.

I have Realtime enabled in JACK and enabled memlock in Ubuntu Studio 
controls. What else can I do reduce the latency? I have left the 
priority setting in qjackctl at default. Should I change that to something?

2. Is it ok to use rakarrack effects while recording or should I monitor 
just a clean signal and then apply effects later? I mean, does the extra 
processing add significant load to the CPU or are we talking on 
completely different scales here? Same with zynaddsubfx; should I use 
that while recording? I read somewhere that apparently it is not real 
time safe.

3.  For monitoring while recording, is it better to route the midi 
signal through qtractor to the synth or to connect the keyboard directly 
to the synth?

4. On an unrelated note, how do sfz files work? Are they sort of like 
sf2 files, which I can just load up on Qsynth or something?

5. For the microphone, is it ok get a USB microphone? I heard that it's 
messy handling multiple sound cards with jack. If yes, then what is the 
best way to connect a microphone?

Thanks
Mish