Hydrogen, Ardour, and plugins

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telehack
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Hydrogen, Ardour, and plugins

Post by telehack »

Hi,

I'm hoping someone will be able to help me on this:

I've running a Fujitsu Amilo Pro V3505 notebook which is fairly decent spec, although only 500 some odd MB of RAM. OS is Ubuntu Hardy. I have Jack set up so I can use the HDA Intel soundcard to record 16 bit audio at 48,000 with no xruns (finally). My magic Jack settings are 3 buffers and 128 frames. I can also record a stereo drum track from Hydrogen at this setting with no xruns...

The problem is when I attempt to use plug-ins in Hydrogen. For example, I want to use a compressor or eq on the bass drum and snare. This seems to make the xruns start and eventually I need to reboot. I've tried various Jack settings (more buffers, larger frame setting) to no avail. Am I asking too much of my setup? The other things I've tried are recording individual tracks from Hydrogen into individual Ardour tracks, but that was an xrun disaster. It's really only the snare and bass drum I want to work on; the rest of the Hydrogen kit is fine...Thoughts? Thanks in advance,

-Telehack
mauser
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Re: Hydrogen, Ardour, and plugins

Post by mauser »

Hi!

The intel HDA chipset is not a good choice for linux audio.. it was reported often that the performance is quite bad. A nice usb/fw soundcard would be a better choice for audio work. Btw, is jackd running in realtime mode? Are you using a realtime kernel?

Recording invidiual tracks with the "track outputs" feature is cpu intensive, so it is normal that xruns appear on system with lower performance. Whats your hydrogen version??

If everything else fails, you can make a litle "hack".. Mute everything but the bass-drum and export it in hydrogen as wav. Then do the same with the snare. Then mute just bassdrum and snare and export everything else. Now you can import everything in ardour and work with ladspa effects there.

- Sebastian
telehack
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Re: Hydrogen, Ardour, and plugins

Post by telehack »

Ooh, I like that hack. :D

Yes, I'm definitely running Jack in realtime mode and I'm using 2.6.24.22-rt kernel. I'm saving up for an Echo or Focusrite firewire interface, so I'm trying to get by on the cheap for now. I'll try your suggestion for importing the WAV files, though. Thanks,

-telehack
thorgal
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Re: Hydrogen, Ardour, and plugins

Post by thorgal »

you are also more demanding on disk throughput. Don't neglect this aspect.
SR
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Re: Hydrogen, Ardour, and plugins

Post by SR »

Hi Telehack,

I have an HP laptop with the HDA Intel sound. I used to have a lot of problems with xruns, particularly when the laptop was running on battery, but I did a lot of searching for recommended configurations and have managed to clear it up. I remember one of the last things I changed was the "position_fix=3" option for the snd-hda-intel module. I'll have the laptop with me tomorrow and I can post exactly what config I am using.

I can't say that it's completely rock solid. Occassionally sound will become distorted, but a simple jack restart clears that up. This problem might be self inflicted since it seems to happen when I've had a session running for a while and fire up another jack client. No xruns though.

-SR
telehack
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Re: Hydrogen, Ardour, and plugins

Post by telehack »

SR,

Thanks I actually found that in my googling yesterday. I didn't have an entry for snd-hda-intel. :oops: I added this line to the file that loads the modules (I forget the name in Ubuntu):

options snd-hda-intel model=ref position_fix=1 enable=1 index=0

I did some recording with plug-ins running in Hydrogen and it was solid - 0 xruns. That'll do at least until I can get a dedicated interface.

-Tom
telehack
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Re: Hydrogen, Ardour, and plugins

Post by telehack »

thorgal wrote:you are also more demanding on disk throughput. Don't neglect this aspect.
Hi Thorgal,

Any thoughts on disk drive options for laptops? My system disk is 5400 rpm. My interface will eventually be on the firewire port. Would a high-speed (7200rpm?) USB disk be a good investment? ..or more RAM...or both? Unfortunately I can't buy everything at once. 8) Cheers,

--Telehack
mauser
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Re: Hydrogen, Ardour, and plugins

Post by mauser »

I'm recording here with a 8-Channel Firewire Interface (Terratec Phase 88) and a WD2500BEVE 250GB, 5400rpm built in a thinkpad x31 with 2Gb ram. Recording hours of 8channel audio @48 khz is not a great problem (i'm going to try 16channels this weekend), so i suppose it is not so much an issue of the harddrive.
Of course there are faster and slower 5400rpm harddisk.

The most plugins don't access your harddrive ( most operations are made in ram), so please check if your system is swapping.
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