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Dave Phillips' Linux Sound Updated
f-matic writes "Dave Phillips' Linux Sound website has been updated (for the first time in a while) with lots of new software links and news from the recent BYOL conference, plus links to some interesting Linux multimedia articles. Seems like things are getting pretty interesting in the linux audio world, with a Supercollider port in the works, not to mention February's Linux article in the prestigious Sound on Sound magazine."
I use linux as an audio recorder myself. I just use OSS/Free with my CMI8738 sound card to get great quality audio and pipe it directly into oggenc or flac. It works wonderfully, and doesn't crash. The best part with doing it with Linux - it runs only what I want it to. There's no windows interface that may crash if pushing it too hard.
Well, i'm sorry but i found sound drivers is the one thing that can't be matched in linux.
Sure older cards such as the Creative AWE32 can be easily matched, but newer cards are much more complex.
My Live 5.1 has about 50 mixer controls with alsa drivers (most of them dont do anything), so it can be very inconvenient at times. The routing to the ac97/i2s output is very messy in linux. In windows i can easily select 'microphone' as recording input, and it will route it to ac97 and mute i2s. In linux i must set it as recording device, set the microphone volume to 0 (to mute i2s) and then raise the 'igain' volume, if that isn't logical i don't know what is. Sometimes the best drivers are the ones created by the manufacturer, unfortunately Creative's work on their drivers have been limited (and only for OSS).
Also such 'extra' features like EAX is not to be even talked about.
I'm not sure of experiences with other modern sound cards, but mine with the live 5.1 is poor.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I had given up doing much with sound under Linux because everytime I tried something that looked interesting I would have to compile from source and it wouldn't compile because I needed some library or other. Then those libraries couldn't compile until I had installed some other library or created some device or something. It was always a huge hassle to even look at a sound program which was of dubious usefulness to me anyway. Then when I upgraded my system and loaded a newer distribution sound wouldn't work at all. Turned out there was a kernel bug that causes USB devices with sound capabilities to pre-empt the soundcard's DSP devices. I couldn't plug in my webcam (w/mic) because it that makes sound stop working on my SB card. I wonder if that bug has been fixed yet. I don't want to have to load a separate distribution just to play with cool sound apps.
For "professional" applications there is JACK (http://jackit.sf.net/) that allows applications to route audio between each other and the soundcard. The majority of the good apps for linux audio support this.
It requires apps to run thier audio thread with SCHED_FIFO scheduling though, so its not really ideal for simple mp3 players.
Very good point. I run a semi-professional studio with a couple of friends - built around a PC running Windows 2000 and a HoonTech DSP24 soundcard along with Emagic Logic Audio. I would love to replace Windows with Linux and Logic with an open alternative (especially as Apple won't be supporting Logic for the PC from now on), but the alternatives are at best like an early beta Windows alternative.
This is not meant as being offensive towards free software developers, but there no open project that can replace or even threaten Logic, Cubase (et al) at this time. Right now (and for quite some time now) my favourite project on Sourceforge is Audacity. It looks like it could be a real competitor, but on the other hand that's what it's been looking like for years. Perhaps I should take that C coding class anyway so I could help out a bit.
L-ViS
So. What's the damn use of having a PCI-X bus backwards compatible in therms of clock frequency if it's volt incompatible?
Probably due to the fact that it's pretty easy to change voltage, but a pain in the ass to generate a host-synchronized, extremely precise different clock signal. So it's easy to wrap an existing 5V system in a 3.3V card. It's a wee bit more difficult to take existing circuitry and redesign it to work at a different clock rate.
It doesn't affect users directly, just engineering firms.
May we never see th