Linux Music Setup Thread

[zestoi]

wouldn't just "nice -20 xwax" be enough? or 'chrt' but i've never messed with that.

[fsck]

How would I ensure xwax gets real time priority and if that doesn't solve my issues any other ideas?

The easiest thing to try is to give xwax a higher "nice" value from the task manager. You should also be able to prevent synaptic from loading - I'm sure it's documented somewhere on the internet.

I'm not sure you need a real-time kernel, but if you want to try then they're out there.

[MrPopinjay]

I dunno, you'd have to look it up for your distro. I had to edit the limits.conf file but honestly I didn't understand it, some guy from the JACK irc thread held my hand through it. You could just run it with sudo.

Nice avatar btw

[fsck]

You could just run it with sudo.

That won't help.

[MrPopinjay]

The official documentation, my own experiences and the people in the JACK + xwax irc channels state otherwise.

[fsck]

The official documentation, my own experiences and the people in the JACK + xwax irc channels state otherwise.

That's interesting. Usually root will only get preference when resources are really low (which is a safety feature to prevent some types of attacks). Last time I checked root got the same nice values as ordinary users.

What Linux distro are you using? Perhaps you have different limits configuration.

For audio usage I recommend a Linux distro targeted at audio usage. They are tuned for this application and are very good.

[MrPopinjay]

I'm running at 5ms with no issues, I don't see the point in diverting from my distro of choice

On a slightly related note, anyone tried the latest unstable version of xwax? The doubles feature is neat but it sucks that there doesn't seem to a way to use the undocumented shift + F# feature of 1.0

[NPC]

Ok so I'm finally getting around with trying out the suggestions for running xwax better. So far I've found priority to be pointless, I still get stuttering and warping on high quality FLAC or when there are a lot (or.. few) of processes going on (as mentioned).

I decided to build 1.0 and came across some errors (see? there's always a catch with compiling this lol) and so I'm downloading the libraries as suggested. Hopefully I can compile 1.0 and it will maybe work better? I have a feeling it might be ALSA related and compiling myself might help.

Also, there is no RT kernel for 11.10 right now, on the PRETT site it's all 10.10 and 11.04 I think. I know US plans to put out a low latency (RT pretty much) in the 11.10 version of US, but they haven't said when they would release it.... until then the only way to get RT is in other versions of the kernel.

Worst come to worst I'll install US 9.10RT and build Xwax there.

[NPC]

When I check the configure (./configure) it says ALSA is disabled despite the fact I'm typing: make ALSA=yes. Also, not really sure what to about prefix but from what I gather I can just go without it so I have.

I decided to install it anyway aaaand yeah it doesn't work at all. halp.

EDIT: Don't you just love it when it all works by accident? I just had to run it as sudo and it works!
Gah it seemed really solid for awhile but it's back to being it's stuttery self. I've noticed the Xwax troubleshooting page calls this "the xruns". lol

[MrPopinjay]

Are you running 1.0? 1.0 is neat since it won't load unless it has real time priority.

Did you first compile it without alsa=yes? I believe you have to delete the folder you unpacked the tar.gz into and then restart. At least I did when I changed my mind about JACK. There might be a more elegant solution, I dunno.

You connecting it to your card via alsa? Have you changed the latency from the default? If so set it back to default (8ms). I'll be really very surprised if you encounter many xruns at 8ms, that's quite a lot for xwax, even on a really shitty machine.