Originally posted by heders
Yeah, for sure! Yesterday I downloaded Team Fortress 2 from Steam, which they had released for free to the public, thinking it would run on my computer without any problems. But it crashes, is slow as hell, and takes hours to connect to a server. That's very strange considering it in fact was made for Mac and playing on a highly expensive computer which runs good in other aspects.
I have luckily been able to find most VST synths I prefer to use for Mac, but some runs with many problems and bugs, which I did not experience at all as a Windows user. My program used for producing (Ableton Live 8) runs like a dream though!
Thanks for your info about latency. I was not aware of the fact that Linux could (after a lot of work) have such low latency numbers that you speak of. Sadly I'm not a big Linux fan though.
I have luckily been able to find most VST synths I prefer to use for Mac, but some runs with many problems and bugs, which I did not experience at all as a Windows user. My program used for producing (Ableton Live 8) runs like a dream though!
Thanks for your info about latency. I was not aware of the fact that Linux could (after a lot of work) have such low latency numbers that you speak of. Sadly I'm not a big Linux fan though.
Now the issue with a real time kernel is of course you would never want one on a server setup, but for a typical single user dekstop instance it is not a big deal. Several linux flavors make it easy to get a real time kernel. For example I use Fedora and use the Planet CCRMA repositories to get that kernel for Fedora. Works like a champ.
The other piece is of course jack, the only choice issue with jack is it doesn't always play well with things like Pulse Audio. That is getting better but I tend to remove Pulse Audio anyway as it does nothing for me typically. Fedora comes with pulse audio.
That is the basic, but there are sites dedicated to the tweaking you need to do to get those low latency figures. Such as file permissions and what not. Also CPU scaling needs to be dealt with. On my laptop I have a small shell script I run that puts both cores into performance mode with one command.
Other things are just best practice stuff like having a hard drive (even if it is external) dedicated to capturing the audio that is not the HD the OS or recording software are running on. But my setup allows me to use an older 2.0 ghz dual core toshiba with 2gigs of ram to record 8 track audio over firewire into ardour at 24 bit, 48 khz with no latency or issues. 8 track simultaneous capture. I record everything onto a 500 gig my passport drive and it works like a champ for mobile multi track recording.
There is a site I am a member of www.linuxmusicians.com that is dedicated to such subjects and has people much smarter than me chiming in on tweaks. Heck most of what I learned on the subject I learned from them.
Ken
Comment