Linux Music Setup Thread

[MrPopinjay]

David, you can say whatever the hell you want and be a big a linux fan as you want (I know I am one) but there is no way in hell that WINE isn't a pain in the ass. Getting anything other than the most basic of programs to work in WINE is the hardest thing I have ever encountered with linux and even after I'm finished it runs no where near as well as it does under windows xp/7. Even with those programs such as "play on linux" that are supposed to take the work out of it I find it doesn't work at all most often than not.

Rare few programs that don't work...? I've not encountered a single program that works in WINE without a few hours of grief. And then it it always performs poorly. And they always break after a few updates.

[rdaletaylor]

What kind of music production software is native to linux?

[MrPopinjay]

Renoise and Ardour.

[rdaletaylor]

Ardour looks appealing. I'm kind of intrigued enough to find a machine to experiment with audio and linux, but when I start to hear talk of WINE I cringe, I always thought of it as patch, when a real application needs to be in place. The lack of quality native software for the creative professional is what kept me from becoming a full convert.

In the way way back, a long time ago, I decided that more *nix skills would be needed as Mac OS X was coming and built on a base of BSD. Being able to use the command line and the tools that come with it seemed like extra power. There was an old PPC machine laying around, I installed Yellow Dog, which took a week and multiple tries to get correct, and started the hair pulling and crying sessions to get over the learning curve. The project was to get a web and mail server hosting multiple domains, six months later, it was achieved. I had in turn for the effort been granted command line skills and the ability to pretty much understand the man pages after reading them a few times.

I hear things are much easier now, that package managers work, chasing down dependencies is less, and much of the crying and hair pulling removed, even the install is pretty clean and easy. I just don't get giddy about having to put in that much work for free beer anymore, when I can buy all the beer I want.

[NPC]

Xwax user here, almost for a year now! I just recently let go of my install of Ubuntu Studio 9.10/w real time(preet) running xwax 0.7beta with multiple custom patches. Besides all the weird grub errors (long story) and spotty Wifi, that compilation was solid as fuck.

Reinstalled with regular Ubuntu 11.10-generic and apt-get'd my way into Xwax 0.9 (yes I know 1.0 exists, yes I'm too lazy to compile it right now) and I'm a bit disappointed. I'm blaming the generic kernel! No one offers the original RT kernel anymore and not even low latency for 11.10 yet... so I'm waiting for the repositories (or US 11.10) and thinking about ways to improve performance right now.

Hmmmm... ideas anyone?

[MrPopinjay]

Holy shit, someone else uses xwax? What are you disappointed with? Latency? How high are you currently setting it?

Too lazy to compile it?

$ tar -zxvf xwax1.0.tar.gz
$ cd ~/xwax1.0/
$ make ALSA=yes

Then just run it directly from there with the command line.

Fuck me that was hard! :P

[Just Friday]

Holy shit, someone else uses xwax? What are you disappointed with? Latency? How high are you currently setting it?

Too lazy to compile it?

$ tar -zxvf xwax1.0.tar.gz
$ cd ~/xwax1.0/
$ make ALSA=yes

Then just run it directly from there with the command line.

Fuck me that was hard! :P

Lool...

BTW, totaly agrying with your statement about Wine...

I started DJying with Mixxx, then goes into production with Ubuntu Studio(I tried Arch, worked pretty well, but I'm a bit lazy and want some user experience and not moder experience for my day to day OS... No offense, I didn't want to troll about distros... ).

I tried to install few of my essentials windows programs under Wine (ableton, Reason,...) but it never was satisfying...

And as Traktor Pro goes far behond what Mixxx can do, it makes me dual boot my laptop(It's the only windows distro installed on our 3 PCs). I still use mixxx for casual mixxxing, but seing an Ableton install... Wooow!!! just Woooow! Congrats David!!!

Any tuto available???

What kind of music production software is native to linux?

You also have LMMS wich is a kind of Fruity Loops... If you like fruity loops... :$

But the real thing that make music production fun on Linux isnot the big daw and the software, but the versatility that Jack enables...

Imagine you could treat differents music softwares (EQs, Fx machine, Sampler, Recorder, Loop player, synth, and so on...), as if it was hardware machines you rack together in a studio... That's basicaly how music production works on Linux...

[NPC]

Holy shit, someone else uses xwax? What are you disappointed with? Latency? How high are you currently setting it?

Not sure about latency, but it will now stutter or pop (and say "ALSA playback" or something like that in the command line) when the CPU is under a bit of activity. Like when synaptic conveniently loads in the background to tell you how many updates you need to download. *shakes fist*
I haven't messed with any latency settings yet, the control vinyl seems responsive enough so I figure it is a CPU load/thread priority issue.

Too lazy to compile it?

$ tar -zxvf xwax1.0.tar.gz
$ cd ~/xwax1.0/
$ make ALSA=yes

Then just run it directly from there with the command line.

Fuck me that was hard! :P

Yeah well mind you when I compiled previous versions pretty much all the libraries were missing (stupid fonts...) and I had to hunt down all the package names with google.

[MrPopinjay]

With ubuntu just do this to get all the dependencies:

# apt-get install build-essential libasound2-dev libsdl-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev
# apt-get install mpg123 ffmpeg (insert whatever other decoders you want here)

By default it's 8ms of latency. If it's stuttering and you're getting xruns increase it a little. Make sure xwax is getting real time priory, you don't need a real time kernel.

[NPC]

nice thanks! I'll give it a shot when I can find the time. How would I ensure xwax gets real time priority and if that doesn't solve my issues any other ideas?