Reacties op: Universal Binary + Linux?

Door: Marco Raaphorst

Marco Raaphorst — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 07:16:50 +0000

I would love to see some tests with Ardour running on both OSX and Linux. But the main point is: wouldn’t it be great if some companies would invest some time into Linux for audio? The first company who would do that might be onto something huge because a lot of users want that.

The main issue about Linux is that people think everything is free as in ‘free beer’ which is not true.

Door: Am

Am — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:48:53 +0000

The article you quote doesn’t say that Linux is faster than OSX, but that some very specific application’s implementation is faster on Linux. It’s caused by different alghorithm’s of standard memory allocation function, but there’s a long road from this fact to saying that Linux is faster than OSX.

Door: Marco Raaphorst

Marco Raaphorst — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 07:49:27 +0000

Thanks Dan. This looks interesting. When I have some time I hope I can check this out.

Door: Dan Easley

Dan Easley — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 01:23:17 +0000

No. ALSA now supports software mixing, negating the abovementioned exclusivity.

However, JACK – at http://jackaudio.org/ – offers low-latency interapplication audio routing beyond anything available on commercial platforms, and has for a few years now. I routinely and arbitrarily route audio and control signals to and from a number of synthesis, sampling, effect and recording programs with a total latency of 5.8ms. We don’t need commercial programs – we need volunteers to write presets for the programs we already have.

See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/packages.html for a listing of programs available on just one of the now numerous audio-centric linux distributions available.

Door: Marco Raaphorst

Marco Raaphorst — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 08:00:15 +0000

Thanks Grackle for your comments. You seem to have more knowledge about this subject. Hopefully Big Brother is watching us :)

Door: Grackle

Grackle — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 01:04:15 +0000

“@ AnEmbodiedMind: not sure about this. If it was just a matter of recompiling why did Propellerhead and Ableton need to put some serious time into this?

I can understand that it might be not that complicated, but I think there are, as always, a few issues which need to be solved.”

Right, it isn’t (always) simply a matter of recompiling. That’s the ideal case, but often there are tweaks required, and a lot of high performance programs use code optimization tricks that don’t port well.

These programs could (in theory) be recompiled for linux, but as AnEmbodiedMind said, there is the problem of API availability..

Another thing to throw in the mix: One place where linux really lacks is sound. Normally having many choices is a good thing, however, in most computers there is only one hardware mixer. Only one device that one program can have exclusive control over. The problem is that there are two sound systems (ALSA, OSS), and on top of those, several sound deamons (esd and aRts being the more popular ones), and even still, there are some programs that wish to access the hardware device DIRECTLY (ie, exclusively). This means that if you want to use more than one audio program at the same time (you do) it has to be able to work with your sound system; either through plugins (ideal) or simply by being native to your system.

Maybe that’s not as big a problem as I think it is, but if it’s not… Then why the hell isn’t it fixed yet? That is probably my only major gripe with linux.

Door: Marco Raaphorst

Marco Raaphorst — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 05:21:11 +0000

Yes, that’s still an issue. Although my soundcard, RME Hammerfall, is ready for Linux :)

Door: Eroick

Eroick — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:49:42 +0000

This would be nice, but lots of hardware is not Linux compatiable. If external firewire devices were also ported to run on Linux, I would be very happy.

Door: Marco Raaphorst

Marco Raaphorst — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 18:59:19 +0000

@ AnEmbodiedMind: not sure about this. If it was just a matter of recompiling why did Propellerhead and Ableton need to put some serious time into this?

I can understand that it might be not that complicated, but I think there are, as always, a few issues which need to be solved.

Door: Create Digital Music » A Coming Flood of Commercial Linux Music Apps?

Create Digital Music » A Coming Flood of Commercial Linux Music Apps? — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 18:31:11 +0000

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