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On the other hand, there are a number of differences in what they install. Get both, and dual-boot.

Debian-Junior
Debian-Med
Debian-Edu
DeMuDi
Debian-Desktop
Debian-Lex
Debian-NP
Debian-Accessibility

Mandrake found my sound card and auto configured it. I run GomeCD or XMMS for sound. I just recently got an MP3 player for my car. I'm currently reading my CDs, converting them to MP3, and cutting disks for my car.

So, I pop a CD into the drive. Run cdparanoia to generate .wav files on disk. A script runs notlame to convert these to MP3. Since my CD drive can read CDs faster than my CPU can convert them, I background the notlame script runs, and I may have several running at the same time. I don't bother to nice them. While all this is going on, I use xmms (which was in the Mandrake distrib) and play directories of sounds. I might be looking for all-instrumental tracks for inclusion on a disk, so I copy those tracks to some destination. xmms seems to consume about .3% (1/300th) of the CPU. It never skips, even when the load average is ten, even when I'm copiing megabytes of data from one disk to another. And when I'm burning a CD, I don't even bother to stop running SETI@Home.

My point here is that if your Linux sound system skips, it isn't the CPU speed. My old 386/33 running Linux could play sound files without skipping (until it died).

In the mean time, my friends with Windoze running on GHz+ P4's have to stop everything when cutting CDs because buffer underruns mess up everything.

PC hardware is complicated. For every component, there are order of magnitude price ranges. Driver issues are often unknown until it's too late. Some of these are more important than others. Many systems are misconfigured. This may not be a Windoz/Linux issue. It may be more of a PC thing.

For example, I bought a sound card for $12 (5 years ago). It claimed that it could do CD quality sound. Maybe they meant 16 bit per channel 44 KHz (more or less) stereo. But the sound quality was terrible. Who knows, maybe the A/D was bad. Maybe it wasn't very compatible with the driver I used. Whatever. I replaced it.

I've never seen a Mac that does sound poorly. Maybe having a single hardware vendor isn't such a bad thing. The sound (22 KHz, 8 bit stereo) on my 16 year old Mac II is still great. How's the sound on your 286?

You might check out DeMudi, which is a Linux distrib devoted to sound.

Debian Multimedia Distribution. If you don't run Mandrake.

I'm a musician. I manipulate samples. My favorite tool is CoolEdit Pro [syntrillium.com], but Sound Forge [sonicfoundry.com]is pretty popular, too.

These are Windows-only tools. There is a project to develop a distro for musicians (DeMuDi [demudi.org]), but the best Linux can do is Audacity [audacity.sourceforge.net], which is kind of like My Audio Editor by Fisher Price.

Until there are serious OSS audio engineering tools, I'm fucked.

Yes -

"Re-H-Mu-Di" and "De-Mu-Di" are both audio oriented. They are hacks of the words "Red Hat Multimeia Distribution" and "Debian Multimedia Distribution."

I was going to recommend that you went to talk to the folks over at demudi who are building a distro variant of Debian tailored to audio applications, and therefore will probably have plenty of information about multi-channel IO, but on visiting their site I found that they have merged with agnula which is news to me and looks quite interesting. Am off to go and read up on what is going on...

They're both part of the AGNULA (A GNU/Linux Audio distribution) project. (DeMuDi's home page mentions the AGNULA project as well.)

This distribution looks alot like Demudi. I've never seen a little friendly competition hurt anything, especially in the Linux world. I hope companies like Steinberg and Protools start releasing apps for it.

this seems awful similar to the Debian Multimedia Distribution slashdot covered a awhile ago?

Ok for the sake of full disclosure I run Debian everywhere and have done for about 2-3 years and I used to work in Corel Linux International Technical Support (check THAT acronym hehe). There is a serious justification for debian based meta-distributions because while Debian will always be a horse for nearly all courses it's flexibility means that it is not targetted to most users. Corel Linux was/is a desktop OS and by making that choice Corel could configure a Debian box for an intended use. For 90% of computer users Corel Linux kicked Debian's ass simply because they would never have been able to work on a Debian system (what do you mean "edit /etc/samba/smb.conf to suit my windows network", "what do you mean man 5 smb.conf"?). Similarly we now have demudi which is another targetted Debian distro, but this time for an entirely different market (multimedia production). Debian could never really try to catch niches, all it does is produce a stably packaged distribution which can be configured and adapted easily. Corel and demudi could never really try to produce a quality OS from scratch nor keep it up to date. Instead of both sides giving up, the work, aims and ideas of Free software which Debian embodies so well (they want meta-distros) leads to a two tiered system where Debian brings the pieces together and the distros tweak it. Both sides push their knowledge at each other (though either side can ignore the other) and the base system which all are using is strengthened. The alternative is just Debian, and while I would continue to use it, I think it's "market share" would be much lower that way. Never forget that everyone using a non-Debian Debian-based distro is that much closer to just changing their apt sources and leaving the commercial (or redistributor) behind and becoming a member of the Debian community.

It alway's seemed to me that the proposed changes aren't really for any release, they are changes which will evolve the way the project exists! Think of it this way, since testing has existed it has slowly filled up to reasonable proportions. Soon it will become a full new distro by going through a final freeze. Throughout the entire freeze process (less time than testing has existed) new packages will appear in unstable, and some will make it into testing. After woody is released, their will be three complete Debian distros. Stable will be the current woody (which will be a freeze length out of date). Testing will be those nearly bleeding edge packages which appear to be ok, and unstable will still be bang up to date. The key is that the testing process is about ensuring that a stable release from now on will be only a freeze length out of date, and that the freeze cycle can become a continuous process (instead of an arbitrary affair). After woody (the next stable release) new stable releases will form nearly instantly and be frozen out leading to a great development AND user environment for both guru's and grannies. Testing is about evolution, and I for one cannot wait to see how the Debian devlopment process will benefit from it (I think projects like DeMuDi will find it helps them to fork and freeze out trees for specific applications).

The fact that there's almost no development community addressing this potentially enormous market amazes me to no end.

http://www.demudi.org/

There are a lot of pieces that need putting together. I think Demudi is working on it.

One of... no... The most powerful, flexible, and extensible sound synthesis programs is Csound.

And are you a Linux user? If so PLEASE go and get demudi up and running on that box and see what latencies you get there for comparable tasks and then come back and tell us! Demudi is spawned from the Hammerfall's ability to offer (Semi-)Professional audio capabilities to Linux. I have a Hammerfall about 5 metres from me at the moment, but it's not mine and I would be beaten severly if I touched it :-(

Great post! If I had any moderator points left I'd mod it up that last little bit so more people could read it, but I don't think you'll have that problem anyway.

You outlined a number of things that have been on my mind in recent months. For one, if I can hear it, see it, feel it, etc., I can copy it. Finding clever ways to stop that will only delay the inevitable, you are building sand walls against the tide.

Also, the current music industry is not the way it has always been. It was only practical to make recordings of singers after microphone and recording technology was able to make a reasonable copy of the way it sounded originally.

At this point, it is still necessary to have a few thousand dollars to make a quality home studio, but I think even that price will continue to plummet in coming years. Look at Demudi [demudi.org]. It is obvious that at this point the whole Linux side of the recording/editing/sequencing field is fairly weak. It will not stay that way. Also, look at the extrememly low cost of programs like Acid Music, right off the shelf. These give Pro Tools type functionality without Pro Tools cost.

I think soon we will be living William Gibson's vision of the Garage Kubrick. Very soon the line in quality between talented amateur and seasoned pro will be very much blurrier. I can't wait to see that day.

What software do you use? It would be cool to see it implemented with DeMuDi, assuming it's for Linux.