Here are my experiences with Linux and music:
A few years back, I was mixing band demos with ecasound. It was… well interesting. The learnig curve was rather steep, as there was no GUI. And the old Pentium 200MMX was rather slow, so I had to adjust the parameters (in a script file) and then render the song, then adjust again… I ended up with a couple of songs and a blown speaker. Apparently, setting the feedback of a phaser (or whatever) to 1000 (or something like that) was a really bad idea. Luckily, I got some insurance money so I could repair the speaker without getting totally depressed.
Having said all that, I still think ecasound is a great pice of software. But it’s nothing you can just start messing around with… don’t know if it has a GUI these days. LADSPA, Jack and control by MIDIl, it does.
n-Track is just so easy to use and it costs peanuts.
But back to Linux. Lately I’ve been wondering if it is feasible to build a stand-alone softsynth or groovebox from an old, cheap computer and some Linux programs. What would the hardware requrements be to get a softsynth running smootly and what would that synth be called?
I’m thinking about stage use. I would not want to drag my main computer to a club: It’s not very stable and as it also has a lot of important files on the hard-drives, so if it got damaged I’d be screwed. Buiying another windows machine would be an option, but I’d rather spend that money on stuff like rent and food…
Bye now.
Interesting to see how many Linux users there are here! 
| Quote (chutz @ May 17 2005,13:29) |
| Ardour/Jack is one of the best combinations I’ve seen (other than N), I’ve been using it for about 1.5 years - It does really work well, but you’ll need to compile your own kernel (2.4.x) but I believe that the low latency code is available in the 2.6.x kernels. |
That’s one reason I like the PlanetCCRMA distro–you can easily install a low-latency 2.4.x kernel using apt-get, as well as the huge selection of music software which is updated frequently. I’ve acquired a distaste for compiling kernels, myself.
Be forewarned, though: it’s for RedHat 9 and Fedora Core 1, 2, and 3 only.Oh well, don’t like to be the one to keep an off-topic discussion rolling, so I’ll stop now. I just get a kick out of the things going on in the Linux world is all…
Tony