As the saying goes: "To err is human. But to really f*** up, you need a
computer."
Being a perfectionist, I have always spent a lot of effort to get
everything working perfectly (a futile pursuit, I have discovered).
After years of this, I have had to resolve to the fact that I am using
an incredibly complex system designed by imperfect beings. Realizing
this has helped me to be a lot less pissed off all the time. I consider
it a miracle that any of this actually works at all!
Regarding Linux audio: The KXStudio method of having Jack as the main
audio server (with Pulseaudio as a slave) seems to work quite well.
And on systems that I don't want Jack running all the time, I can do the
following (instructions for Ubuntu):
1. Install the package *pulseaudio-module-jack*
2. In qjackctl, set the following for the post-startup script:
pactl load-module module-jack-sink channels=2; pactl load-module
module-jack-source channels=2; pacmd set-default-sink jack_out
3. In KDE, you will need to change your KDE Phonon device priority so
that the Pulseaudio Jack Sink is chosen by default. If some
applications continue to play through the other source by default
(which will result in no sound), you can reassign it using Kmix by
right-clicking on the sound source and choosing "move to".
Adding this command will make Pulseaudio a slave to Jack while it is
running. This works great on my laptop. I frequently use Rosegarden in
my piano lessons to accompany my students using a USB MIDI keyboard, and
being able to also refer to a song recording simultaneously is a nice
bonus. You might think, "Windows users don't have to deal with this."
However, that's not true... if I use audio software in Windows on my
laptop, I have to use WaveRT exclusive mode to get low latencies, and
when I do that, it is not possible to play sound from any other
application at the same time.
-~Chris
On 08/31/2012 11:23 AM, Louis Gorenfeld wrote:
>> Let's take Linux audio, for example. The first thing we have to do is
>> take ALSA, OSS, JACK, PulseAudio, GStreamer, and everything else you can
>> think off off the top of your head, gather all of that up and shove it
>> right down the garbage disposer. Linux audio is just about the most
>> ludicrous example of design by committee I can think of.
> I think ALSA, as painful as it can be, is a pretty good layer
> performance-wise. As an example, I was able to get a complex PD patch
> I made down to a few milliseconds with ALSA (about 10 or 15?) when
> running on an Atom-based system with on-board audio. On Windows, with
> ASIO4ALL, I was still only able to get down to 40ms buffer size or so
> without breakups.
>
> With JACK on top of it, it's apparently a lot easier to code for and
> still performs very nicely. So, I'd argue that we don't need to throw
> it out as much as adopt JACK as the main sound server.
>
>> I don't know, man. Really, when I think about it fairly, Windows has
>> just about as many problems as we do with audio, and if OS-X doesn't,
>> it's only because the hardware ecosystem OS-X is expected to function
>> with is extremely narrow and limited.
> One thing I would point out here is that low latency audio devices are
> not necessarily tested on Linux. This is a distinct advantage of the
> two commercial platforms (or: no operating system is an island!). In
> this way, OS X is *not* functioning in a limited ecosystem, yet I've
> had few issues with it (aside from with DigiDesign's drivers!).
>
>> I guess the problem ain't just Linux, it's these damned computational
>> machine box things generally. They say they're supposed to do stuff,
>> and there are even books telling you what to expect them to do, but in
>> practice, they fail to perform so often, and year after year, decade
>> after decade, the problems never really go away and stay gone.
>>
>> There are happy moments, little islands of stability where everything
>> works flawlessly, and life is good, but these moments are always temporary.
> It's really just about finding a configuration of hw, os and software
> that works for your purposes. These machines are so complex that I
> don't think there's any one config that'll work for everyone's needs.
>
> -Louis
>
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