BSD for music production?

What other apps and distros do you use to round out your studio?

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lykwydchykyn
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BSD for music production?

Post by lykwydchykyn »

Just curious if anyone has given BSD a run for music production, and how it compares with Linux. I have little BSD experience, but I've been told good things about its sound server (mostly from BSD advocates....).
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English Guy
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by English Guy »

I have been inteterested in this for years but none of my periodic searches have brought up any evidence that bsd has any reasonable pro audio support either now or pending.
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by Luc »

I have installed several BSD systems many times.

I never ever got any sound at all from them except the last time I tried FreeBSD, and everything sounded bad.

Take all the problems we ever have for using an unpopular OS and multiply them by... uh, seven. That's what using a BSD Unix OS is like.

Getting help from their communities can also be very off-putting. DON'T YOU DARE ask anything that is already answered in the 2,970-page manual. If it is not answered in the 2,970-page manual, then you're welcome to answer it and contribute to the documentation. If you can't answer it yourself, don't worry about being inconvenient, all your messages are being ignored so nobody is bothered.

You get a lot of attention though if you have comments and suggestions on some very obscure part of the kernel code that less than twelve people in the entire world understand or even know it exists.

Every time I tried a BSD, it took me under 10 minutes to remember I had completely forgotten what was wrong with Linux anyway and how very, very happy I am using it.
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by bluebell »

LOL! Made my day.

(I was always asking myself if FreeBSD could be an alternative for me when I am sick of that systemd misery)

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English Guy
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by English Guy »

bluebell wrote:LOL! Made my day.

(I was always asking myself if FreeBSD could be an alternative for me when I am sick of that systemd misery)
Sorry if this is OT, but if you are concerned about systemd keep an eye on Devuan which is rapidly approaching a production release.
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by CrocoDuck »

That's something I always wanted to try to setup, just to see how it goes. I tried PCBSD (too slow) and GhostBSD (wifi card didn't work) and couldn't really invest time to troubleshoot. Anyway, to my understanding you will be running on OSS with perhaps no RT kernels. It might work, it might not. There isn't a whole lot of pro audio documentation, I think the BSD community is focusing on other stuff. Also the forum threads about this stuff are sparse and inconclusive (and old). I don't think that FreeBSD would be very interesting for an user coming from Linux. If your system ends up running alright you will be running the same audio software you run on Linux. Actually a subset of it. So... not really sure why to try it if not just for curiosity. I don't think it can outperform Linux audio capabilities. Perhaps, it can get very close if you are lucky. About other operating system, there is some interesting report about Solaris in this paper. You might then check something like OpenIndiana...
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by CrocoDuck »

falkTX wrote:If I ever need to stop using Linux audio for some reason, I'd switch to Haiku. :lol:
I am keeping that too under my radar :lol: . I don't think there are many audio apps for it right now, but the fact that it is the successor of BeOS, one of the few actual multimedia oriented OS, is interesting to say the least. I hope the project will get more interesting in the future.
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by chaocrator »

few years ago BSD systems had horrible audio latencies, absolutely unacceptable for audio production use.
i don't know if anything changed, but i suspect no.
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by neb »

Check out this thread from 2017.
I just replied to it and relinked the original referred post (gone) in Wayback Machine AND his talk on FreeBSD audio.
Apparently there are advantages making some freaks change (like me) ;)
Last edited by neb on Wed Sep 09, 2020 12:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by thetotalchaos »

Do not bother using (something, something)BSD for music production. BSD has some straights, and none of them are related to audio. Its a great server, webhost, samba server. It has the superior file system, compared to any alternative. And none of this will be useful for audio production whatsoever. So unless you are a BSD developer, don't waste your time. :roll:
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by r-pattonii »

I actually got sound in OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8 playing a song from a YouTube video. I would not even attempt to try to record music in OpenBSD. The above comment regarding the uses of BSD is very valid!
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Re: BSD for music production?

Post by Basslint »

I personally am a bit sad that BSD isn't viable for many use cases, such as audio. I prefer copyleft so I am glad GNU/Linux is the OS which got the most work on audio stuff but having alternatives is always good.
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