Fedora/CCRMA | AV-Studio | Musix | 64studio | Puredyne | KXS

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

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Mixx
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Fedora/CCRMA | AV-Studio | Musix | 64studio | Puredyne | KXS

Post by Mixx »

I will adding one or more music recording distros to a 64-bit notebook. I also use an M-Audio Fast Track Pro external USB interface and a Line6 GX (probably to be swapped out later for a Line6 UX-2 or KB37) USB interface.

The main candidates are:

(1) A/V Linux 4.0 (Debian)
(2) Fedora13+CCRMA (Redhat)
(3) Musix 2.0 (Knoppix/Debian)
(4) 64 Studio 3.0 (unclear: Debian Lenny or Ubuntu?)

Other candidates are:

(5) Puredyne [USB resident] (Ubuntu/Debian-Live)
(6) KXStudio (Ubuntu)

For those who have used any of these distros, what do think are the strengths and weaknesses? Which work well with M-audio and Line6 USB interfaces?

For CCRMA, do I need both CCRMA_x86_64 and CCRMA_Core_x86_64?

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all
http://spins.fedoraproject.org/lxde/#downloads
http://spins.fedoraproject.org/xfce/#downloads

For CCRMA, which version of Fedora 13 will work?

(1) x86_64_install_dvd (GNOME)
(2) LXDE 64-bit 500MB
(3) XFCE 64-bit 700MB
(4) KDE 64-bit 500MB
Last edited by Mixx on Tue Aug 03, 2010 2:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fedora/CCRMA | AV-Studio | Musix | 64studio | Puredyne | KXS

Post by StudioDave »

Some observations:

AV-Linux might be your best bet at the moment. Typically I'd also recommend Planet CCRMA, but if you'd like a simple all-in-one package you can't beat AV-Linux.

The others are all fine as far as my experience goes. However, I've not tested KXStudio yet, and I should advise you that 64 Studio 3.0 is (AFAICT) not yet ready for production use. I'm still using 64 Studio 2.1 on my main machine, but it's been showing its age for a while. Time for me to move on too, so I'll be watching your posts for news of your experience(s) with these distros.
Last edited by StudioDave on Tue Aug 03, 2010 10:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fedora/CCRMA | AV-Studio | Musix | 64studio | Puredyne | KXS

Post by GMaq »

Hi,

Just to clarify do you mean "AV Linux" or is there a new distro called "AV Studio" I haven't caught up with yet?
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Post by Mixx »

GMaq wrote:Hi,

Just to clarify do you mean "AV Linux" or is there a new distro called "AV Studio" I haven't caught up with yet?
I made the correction - Thanks.

BTW, from my location A/V Linux has the slowest direct and bittorrent downloads of any Linux distro I have ever encountered and yet it does not seem to have any alternate download or bittorrent mirrors. What's up with that?
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Post by autostatic »

It's being maintained by one single person and the Linux Audio community is small while there are a myriad of multimedia distro's (which are not necessarily bad things of course!)?

I'd suggest a plain Ubuntu with the packages you need. It's stable, has a big community and then there are the PPA's that have a vast number of extra and updated packages available.
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Post by morko »

Hi.

I've only tried AV Linux of those mentioned and it was very good out-of-the-box studio. Everything worked just great. It only has 32bit version but has a custom kernel that allows more than 4Gb RAM. I really liked it but I wanted 64bit.

64 studio is a bit outdated but could work depending what you need to do with it.

Ubuntu is easy to install and has most of the programs packaged for you so you can just clickclick and they are installed. You still have to tweak it if you want to get everything out of it. But there is a big community to help you.

If you aren't scared of command line business, have some free time and interest you could try Arch Linux. It doesn't come with graphical interface but lets you choose everything you want to install. That way you can build also really good studio system and it has good audio community also.

Your soundcard M-audio fast track pro is gonna sample and playback only 16bit, 44.1KHz in every distribution cause ALSA still doesn't support it fully for some weird reason.
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Post by GMaq »

Mixx wrote:
GMaq wrote:Hi,

Just to clarify do you mean "AV Linux" or is there a new distro called "AV Studio" I haven't caught up with yet?
I made the correction - Thanks.

BTW, from my location A/V Linux has the slowest direct and bittorrent downloads of any Linux distro I have ever encountered and yet it does not seem to have any alternate download or bittorrent mirrors. What's up with that?
Hi,

It is true that AV Linux is a small "sole-proprietorship" versus many very large established distros with mirrors and numerous ftp locations, I am not competing with anyone and economies of scale and limited time and resources dictate a much smaller 'infrastructure".

That being said there is a LOT of traffic to my ftp especially since the release of AV 4.0 so unfortunately downloads can occasionally be slow at times, the AV Linux torrent and facilities were kindly and generously donated to me by an AV Linux user and are not maintained by me personally so I don't have an explanation for that.

Re: 64bit, there is not a thing in the world wrong with 64bit, but it is misleading to believe that anything other than increased memory handling (already addressed by AV Linux' PAE Kernel) are going to be actually noticeable to an end user on a Linux desktop. 64bit will not yield more Audio tracks or faster Video encoding times than a 32bit counterpart OS just to be clear. 64bit looks far more impressive on a technical whitepaper than a Linux desktop. That being said it is obviously here to stay. The question should be does the OS allow me to create what I want rather than what the CPU architecture is in my opinion, but that is just an opinion, I have used both 32 and 64bit OS's

If you have your heart set on 64bit I'd suggest KXStudio as an out of the box solution, it has the so-called Ubuntu advantages as well as the most comprehensive PPA of any Ubuntu based distro out there already set up for you and the maintainer seemingly never sleeps!

Of course I'd love to have you evaluate AV Linux as well and believe regardless of size or number of bits it can stand on it's own merits.
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Re: Fedora/CCRMA | AV-Studio | Musix | 64studio | Puredyne | KXS

Post by nealfunkbass »

morko wrote: If you aren't scared of command line business, have some free time and interest you could try Arch Linux. It doesn't come with graphical interface but lets you choose everything you want to install. That way you can build also really good studio system and it has good audio community also.
I have tried Fedora/CCRMA, Ubuntu Studio, Studio 64, AV Linux, and a few others. I was dual booting a normal desktop linux (fedora or ubuntu), and then dual booting to one of the others above when I wanted to use jack and ardour and so on. I rotated between them as new releases came out, so dual booting kept me from having to set up all of my other stuff each time. From your list, I liked AV Linux the best, because it seemed to be the best performing one I tried.

After lurking on this board for a while, I decided to try Arch. I am very glad that I tried it. I believe this is the best my home PC has ever run. Plus, I learned a lot of things in the process of setting it up, and I'm no longer dual booting when I want to do audio work. I'm still learning my way around some, but so far I'm extremely happy with Arch. I can see why people talk about it so lovingly in here :)
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Post by raboof »

Mixx wrote:from my location A/V Linux has the slowest direct and bittorrent downloads of any Linux distro I have ever encountered and yet it does not seem to have any alternate download or bittorrent mirrors. What's up with that?
Doesn't seem too bad now (200-300KB/s), once it's completed I'll keep seeding so it should improve a bit more.

If you find any other open-source torrents that need some love (arrr, avoiding bad puns wrt 'seeding'), drop me a note and i'll be glad to add them, too.
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