Any recent DAW comparisons?

[tavasti]

Rosegarden http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
Radium http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/
ecasound http://nosignal.fi/ecasound/index.php
Frinika http://www.frinika.com/
MusiKernel https://github.com/j3ffhubb/musikernel
SunVox http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
Wired https://sourceforge.net/projects/wired/

Other items such as CabbageHost (http://cabbageaudio.com/) and LNX Studio (http://lnxstudio.sourceforge.net/) could be considered DAWs as well.

Software from the Open Octave project (http://www.openoctave.org/) is apparently the basis for falkTX's Libre Open Octave codebase (https://github.com/falkTX/los), but as far as I know it's a MIDI-only project. The various offspring from seq24 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seq24) might also be considered MIDI-only DAWs (if there be such a beast). Helio (http://www.audiopluginsforfree.com/helio-workstation/) is another MIDI-only workstation.

Don't know them at all, but rosegarden definitely belongs to group. Those 'midi only' things, personally no. Or maybe if they work seamlessly with jack so, that you could use non-daw for audio, and something else for midi?

But since many of them are unknow for me, comments of their usability are welcome. At least I don't have time, intrest or energy to evaluate everything. If tool is such that nobody says 'this is great' why should I look at it? There is many marvellous daw's, more than enough studying on them.

[tavasti]

After my last post, no any recommendations which DAW's should be considered as great, and would be worth learning & testing.

I've been really busy, but my findings this far: http://cargocollective.com/tavasti/Selecting-Linux-DAW

[rncbc]

... my findings this far: http://cargocollective.com/tavasti/Selecting-Linux-DAW

[re. Qtractor findings]
- Focus changes between windows can cause silent moments.

really?!

what kind of silence are you referring to?

can you put on a finite number of steps and make an evidence of that claim?

that's no rhetorical question, i really want to know, please

scnr.
cheers

[bluebell]

Changing windows when CPU load is high (many plugins, small buffer size in jackd) can cause clicks and outages.

But this is no Qtractor problem, it's simply a load problem and will happen with other DAWs, too.

[rhydermike]

I had terrible problems with xruns under load when moving windows on one of my systems (with Intel HDA sound and NVidia 550 graphics). However, this largely cleared itself up when I went from Ubuntu 15.10 to 16.04. Then again, I haven't done many projects that have pushed this (modest) setup to the limit yet.

[tnovelli]

If you have those fancy wobbly window-switching effects, that'll peg your CPU load, especially if your GPU (or driver) isn't up to the task.

[rncbc]

If you have those fancy wobbly window-switching effects, that'll peg your CPU load, especially if your GPU (or driver) isn't up to the task.

we all sort of know that is as certain, as in general, death is to life... however, the OP (@tavasti) made some finding and an argument which i do really wish to clear out: does any window focus change lead to momentary silence? and can it ever be said it's a blame evidence on qtractor alone? ever?

byee

[tnovelli]

we all sort of know that is as certain, as in general, death is to life... however, the OP (@tavasti) made some finding and an argument which i do really wish to clear out: does any window focus change lead to momentary silence? and can it ever be said it's a blame evidence on qtractor alone? ever?

Why worry? @tavasti didn't even say what hardware he's using, or what distro etc. He's obviously new to pro audio, which has a steep learning curve and kinda requires some hardware investment. Some internal soundcards work fine, some are horrible. @rhydermike reported trouble with Intel HDA audio.. I had a similar experience testing the internal HDA audio on my laptop (just for kicks). Crazy xruns, totally unusable until I increased the frames to ~1024. IIRC I needed 2048 or 4096 frames to use the HDMI audio output. That was painful just listening to tracks in qtractor. (EDIT: not just in qtractor, in ANYTHING)

For comparison...
2048+ frames for laptop's HDMI audio
1024 for laptop's analog audio (speakers/headphone jack)
256 for laptop w/ ART USB interface
128 for my good desktop w/ ART USB
32-64 desktop w/ Scarlett interface

[rncbc]

we all sort of know that is as certain, as in general, death is to life... however, the OP (@tavasti) made some finding and an argument which i do really wish to clear out: does any window focus change lead to momentary silence? and can it ever be said it's a blame evidence on qtractor alone? ever?

Why worry? @tavasti didn't even say what hardware he's using, or what distro etc. [...] That was painful just listening to tracks in qtractor [...]

let me tell that i'm not, never was, asking for any kind of trial due to resentment.

my reading is, has been, that the OP claim must have some kind of fundament. there are reasons for it and i (we) just don't know what it is (was), yet. just wishing to know what that is (was), nothing more, nor less!

please, don't take this personally, not even close!

cheers

[asbak]

If you have those fancy wobbly window-switching effects, that'll peg your CPU load, especially if your GPU (or driver) isn't up to the task.

we all sort of know that is as certain, as in general, death is to life... however, the OP (@tavasti) made some finding and an argument which i do really wish to clear out: does any window focus change lead to momentary silence? and can it ever be said it's a blame evidence on qtractor alone? ever?

byee

Such issues, assuming such results can be verified to exist will not be limited to qtractor.

Few people, even amongst more regular Linux Audio users know how to set up their systems to extract good performance. It's sadly just a reality of the Linux audio ecosystem that it isn't very beginner & intermediate level friendly, documentation is chaotic, outdated or unavailable and Linux Audio Workstations don't work very optimally out of the box like a Mac sort of would. It's not a reflection on abilities of the users, just the reality that Linux audio is not trivial to deal with.

"Distros" are hit and miss. Ultimately the most reliable solution is to invest the time to learn how to set everything up yourself so that you don't become dependent on somebody else's system which may or may not work at any given moment, update and break unexpectedly etc. To achieve this level of proficiency that takes a long time and a large investment in learning about system optimization and compiling code. Most dabblers or musicians probably don't have the time or inclination to go this route.

Unless the user has a fortunate or carefully selected combination of hardware, software & configured the OS suitably, lagging and / or xruns will probably result.

It's no fault of qtractor, or Ardour, or Muse or whatever, simply the case that the computer of a typical user is usually configured poorly and performing poorly. There are so many settings and so much tuning to deal with that it becomes near impossible for typical users who then opt to use distros and whose performance mileage will vary depending on their unique combination of hardware & software.

[tnovelli]

please, don't take this personally, not even close!

Yeah, I know. It's more like... if there's a problem with your program, you'd like to know about it so you can fix it.

(It might come as a surprise to non-programmers that most people don't take the time to report bugs, or even complain on twitter or whatever... and those who do, rarely include enough details to reproduce the bug, which is the first step to fixing it.)

[tavasti]

If you have those fancy wobbly window-switching effects, that'll peg your CPU load, especially if your GPU (or driver) isn't up to the task.

we all sort of know that is as certain, as in general, death is to life... however, the OP (@tavasti) made some finding and an argument which i do really wish to clear out: does any window focus change lead to momentary silence? and can it ever be said it's a blame evidence on qtractor alone? ever?

I'm using fvwm as window manager, and with 'focus follow mouse' setting, without 'raise on focus' setting. No animations or any other tricks on raise/focus change. Apparently qtractor does something with window raise on receive focus event, and that is somehow related.

However, since my version was not latest version, I did not bother to report bug yet. At that time I tested, I just wrote down my findings. After it, haven't had time to get more recent version, test more, and record video what happens. Haven't got time to continue more with this after that.

HW is Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2100 CPU @ 3.10GHz, 24G mem. I think problem was not system overloading. OS Ubuntu 14.04

[tnovelli]

What audio device are you using for JACK?

[tavasti]

What audio device are you using for JACK?

Alesis io2

[asbak]

Poor audio performance under Linux is usually down to badly performing drivers, sub-optimal configuration settings, sub-optimal kernels etc.
Throwing high spec hardware at these problems will not overcome or resolve these issues. I learned those lessons the hard way.