[A6] Re: off-topic: linux audio

[Will Yardley]

[ Meant to send this to the list, but accidentally sent it just to
Chris. That said, this thread is somewhat OT, so we should probably keep
it short before Dave or I have to kill it. ]

Chris Pickett wrote:
 
> Does anybody here use Linux for their audio stuff?
> 
> Can you make some recommendations / comments?
> 
> I'm getting really annoyed with Windows and thinking about putting 
> Gentoo on my laptop.  The Edirol UM-880 and Digigram VXpocket v2 are all 
> I need to worry about at the driver level, but I don't know if audio 
> quality / MIDI support is good enough elsewhere to be usable.

I haven't looked into it a whole lot, but I imagine it's really not
going to be worth the trouble. Save yourself a whole lot of aggravation
and time (that you can spend writing music) and save up for a Mac
running OS X (and this is coming from someone who both works as a Linux
/ UNIX system admin and runs FreeBSD on all of his desktop machines --
even I'm not enough of a masochist to try this).

I think you're going to have a hard time finding drivers for higher end
sound cards, unless they happen to have Linux apps specifically written
for them already (I think there are one or two Linux-based DAW
solutions, but I could be remembering that wrong). Also, getting support
from the card manufacturer will be more difficult, and manufacturers are
unlikely to release Linux drivers for their sound cards (maybe more
likely in the future). And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think
you'll find (m)any pro quality sequencers for *nix platforms.

If you're serious about this, I would do some googling around. I found
some interesting links pretty quickly; this one looks interesting:
http://linuxaudio.org/

You may also want to look at the DeMuDi project (which now seems to be
called AGNULA.
http://www.agnula.org/project/

-- 
Will Yardley
will at code404.com