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64Studio

Professional audio? Don't even bother. ESounD, ARTS, JACKD, now PulseAudio seems to be the big name in useless sound daemons...but that doesn't mean everyone will standardize on it. As if we needed yet another sound daemon anyway. If the Linux kernel is supposedly so "flexible" that it can be used in any range of devices from computers to cell phones, then why is it that 18 years or more later after the first release, there -still- isn't an easy way to do very low-latency, high quality audio recording on Linux? Linux distributions could _EASILY_ supplant a lot of the Windows based environments for professional audio if the kernel was up to the task. And for those out there who think that Audacity and Ardour are adequate replacements for ProTools...wake up.

I don't know about the rest of your points, but I can definitely argue this one.

If you're looking for "easy" low latency audio recording, I'd think Ubuntu Studio or 64Studio or a host of other alternatives would give you easy access to a preinstalled low-latency kernel and all the audio/video tools you need to make your own high-grade recordings.

Just because Pro-Tools is the piece of software which is handed out with most pieces of pro audio equipment doesn't mean there's no support for them.... My studio has been powered by ardour and JACK for the last few years, and I've been watching more and more people pick up this software. (See the forums and donations flooding into PBD on the ardour page for evidence of this.) Whereas I may have agreed with you a few years ago, saying that "ardour isn't a replacement for protools", I don't think that really holds water anymore. If you really have knowledge of some feature that you want in ardour so badly, go and put your money where your mouth is. I'm sure Paul would appreciate the support, and you'd get the features you want. </shameless plug>

(As an additional anecdote, one of my friends was going to school for audio engineering and mixing in Florida, and mentioned that the school he was going to actually *encouraged* use of Ardour and friends down there ... )

Also, please don't bring audacity into a pro audio discussion. There are plenty of better tools for handling audio than audacity unless you're doing cutting or other simple tasks -- it's more of a "Cool Edit Pro" replacement than anything.

Musicians write and perform music and the apps themselves are designed to let them do that with a minimum of hassle. Do you really think that any pro musician wants to spend any time whatsoever setting up the OS audio, let alone even having to choose which audio code to run, when OSX requires nothing of the sort and outperforms Linux anyways?

First of all ARTS and ESD are being deprecated and OSS has been deprecrated already so take them out of the picture. Linux can do low latency scheduling and in combination with PulseAudio, JACK, and ALSA it is a pretty powerful audio workstation. Thrown in Ardour and the whole thing is hard to beat for the grand price of FREE. In fact I would love to know what CoreAudio does so much better than these technologies. Do you have specific features in mind or are you just stating your opinion? I don't know anything about CoreAudio so I would love to know.

As for musicians' ability to install a Linux audio workstation...they don't have to worry about any of that. That's what distro's are for. There are even distro's geared towards audio and others towards video and graphics. It doesn't seem like you have been paying attention to Linux development for the past few years.

Check out 64 Studio

The next day, after he had had a chance to listen to the master on a few different decks (we mixed through my crappy Edirol monitors and referenced through my JBL PA mains occasionally) he called me up and said he wanted it "louder". Of course I had normalized, so the only thing to do now is to compress it. I was having a bitch of a time getting my Mackie Onyx 1640 to play nice with 64Studio (since jack and the board have wildly different ideas of where zero is :P) so I skipped my normal 1.5:1 main mix compression during mixdown.

As for good EQ'ing, I've always preferred good mic placement to EQ, never have met a digital EQ I liked... And I haven't made enough money to buy a good outboard EQ yet ;)

Couldn't agree more!

Have you done it ?

Because I discovered that pleny of OS apps wouldn't compile. libdv is one iirc. Kino is another, not the most important apps in the universe but enough to make me waver.

That said, some fine people have stepped up and done some of the dirty work and done a 64bit multi-media distro : http://64studio.com/

wget is patient... :)

Linux: It's Not Just For Computer Geeks Anymore

By Carl Lumma | May 2007

You might think there's no way a free operating system written by volunteers could compete when it comes to music production. But in the past couple of years, all the tools you need to make music have arrived on Linux.

For years, Linux has enjoyed market leadership as a server operating system -- Google's servers run it, for starters -- while struggling with the stigma that it isn't polished enough for desktop use. Those days are over, and word is getting out. Linux is quickly becoming the OS you'd set up for your grandmother, with no fuss over activation, software updates, or viruses. Unlike any version of Windows or Mac OS, Linux is open-source. What does this mean to musicians? For starters, there are no company secrets to keep or non-disclosure agreements to sign, so software developers and users alike can get on the same page very quickly, speeding the flow of bug fixes and feature additions.

Linux demands more nuts-and-bolts computer knowledge for pro audio than for web browsing, but if you've ever tried to troubleshoot a latency or driver issue on a store-bought laptop, you're probably still listening. If you upgrade your hard drive, you won't have to reactivate all your apps due to the hardware change, and when you discover a cool tool or workflow, you can share it with friends without them shelling out hundreds of dollars or resorting to piracy. With the exception of Linux versions that include commercial tech support, most everything in the Linux world is free for the asking, Many developers accept voluntary donations, which we encourage you to make.

HOW IS IT DONE?

Let's look over the shoulder of Aaron Krister-Johnson, the keyboardist and choir director at Temple Sholom in Chicago. He also composes incidental music for local theater, and is half of the electronica duo Divide by Pi, Keyboard's June '04 unsigned artist of the month. The core of his home studio is a PC running Linux (see Figure 1).

To obtain Linux, you download a particular distribution or "distro," which is a particular version of Linux someone put together, for free or a donation. Some distros are available boxed at very low cost. Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) is popular for home-computer tasks, but Aaron uses Zenwalk (www.zenwalk.org). Software compiled for a particular distro will only run on that distro, so most come with several free applications that you can install along with the basic OS. We recommend Fedora (www.fedoraproject.org), because you can then install the Planet CCRMA package (ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software), which includes just about every Linux audio application in existence.

Speaking of music applications, the most popular DAW for Linux is Ardour, and Aaron also uses JACK (see "You Don't Know JACK?" below), a soft synth called ZynSubAddFx, and an arpeggiator he wrote called Pymidichaos. Some distros come with binaries -- apps that have been compiled, i.e. converted from the programming language the developers used to the ones and zeroes computers understand at their innermost level. Three such distros are meant to provide install-and-go solutions for Linux-curious musicians: Studio to Go (www.ferventsoftware.com), Musix (www.musix.org.ar/en) and 64Studio (www.64studio.com).

But sooner or later (most likely sooner), you're going to have to take some groovy, free program you've downloaded and compile it yourself. This is where musicians used to commercial software might get scared off. Fear not, and remember that all the actual pr

I've been trying out 64Studio v1.0 over the last couple of months. Debian-based, with a core set of audio apps that fit on a single CD, and JACK to glue them all together. Ardour and Rosegarden work well, and it wasn't hard to get my USB audio & MIDI gear working with standard modules. Includes some decent graphics / video programs too, Blender3D, CinePaint & more. If I have one wish, though, it's for more synthesisers in the base package, and even a general-purpose sampler. (QSampler only supports GigaSampler files so far, not building your own sample sets, as supplied.)

64studio might be nice. I haven't tried it myself, but I got handed a leaflet at an audio expo and the screenshots look pretty :P

A nice distro is http://64studio.com/ for 64 bit cpus but also available for 32 bit. I get at least as low as 2ms latency which I never got either on Windows nor OS 9/ OSX, maybe less is possible but I didnt dare so far.
Further sequencing: Muse
http://www.muse-sequencer.org/

wired looks promising but seems a bit hard to get it running
http://wired.epitech.net/

Linux can do professional grade audio and is often used by academic musicians. The Jack audiosystem adds an flexibility which is missing on other platforms (except its now available for OSX and soon Windows).

For mastering Jamin do incredible things:
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html

Cheers, Malte

I am a musican who switched from Windows via OSX to Linux because Linux got some advanced audio features way beyond, its the Jack audiosystem http://jackaudio.org/ which is recently ported to OSX too and soon on Windows, or maybe not because of the Vista protection scheme. It let me easily connect audiosoftware on the same computer like a modular synthesizer/ studio, easier then ReWire or Soundflower ever could do. With http://64studio.com/ I run now a lowlatency 64bit system which is incredible for live performance and recording, feeling like my hardwaresynthesizers regarding timing and snappyness. In the last years a lot of advances happend in the Linux media scene and a whole parallel universum is alive there, which is suppressed by the gatekeepers but alive and growing anyway.

Check out 64Studio http://64studio.com/. I've been running it for a while on an AMD64 3200, 2G RAM. Works great. Considering that I upgraded from an 800 MHz Duron, my opinion re: speed doesn't count for much. Obviously this machine *smokes* the Duron. Recently I've been having some problems with video going all shakey (side to side) which I suspect is coming from my cheap video card (low-profile nVidia gForce 7300, 128 MB RAM, PCI Express bus), but otherwise I'm pleased with the box's performance. Btw, the base system is Debian pure 64-bit.

Maybe there could be different flavours of Linux distributions - media, or development - that are more suited to each task.

There are media-tailored Linux distributions - StudioToGo and 64Studio. Also there are things like PlanetCCRMA, AudioSlack and the Gentoo Pro-Audio overlay that can tailor a vanilla distribution to the needs of an audio workstation.