Distro Comparison, Benchmarking, Latency

[i2productions]

btw. "the famous hydrogen test" is a bad one.

Yes, yes it is!
I've wanted to use Arch for over a year now, but I'm not super technical, just an audio engineer. I've tried installing it 3 times in the past, and only once did I get a working desktop, and that didn't last long. I downloaded Cinnarch last night, and I gotta tell ya, I'm kind of liking it. Not quite as easy or intuitive to navigate as a buntu base, but I definitely see the appeal, especially for pro audio. I ran "the famous hydrogen test" last night with a few modifications. So after I figured out what I was doing I installed Ardour3(beta 5), hydrogen, and guitarix. I set my USB Lexicon Omega to 44.1k, 64 samples(won't start any lower than that). I patched hydrogen through guitarix for processing before passing it along to an ardour stereo track. I recorded 2 full minutes or a basic drum beat, constantly changing settings in guitarix during recording. NO, as in 0 xruns! Today I'm going to load up on of my projects with over a dozen tracks and lots processing and see what this does, because in buntu distros I've never been able to work at anything under 256 reliably(by this is mean 0 xruns in LARGE projects like I'm describing above, with several gigs of files, samples, and processing.)

[l0wt3ch]

Wtf is the "famous hydrogen test"?

In my video, Hydrogen was synced with Ardour, and Ardour was recording the output of Hydrogen... a common task in Linux audio.

Second of all, the tests were done on a (deliberately) generic computer, with a generic audio card, not fancy external devices.

You guys are comparing apples and oranges.

[Capoeira]

Wtf is the "famous hydrogen test"?

In my video, Hydrogen was synced with Ardour, and Ardour was recording the output of Hydrogen... a common task in Linux audio.

don't be so nervous my friend

I guess you don't do actualy producing on Linux?
It's a common task but a very simple one not including any DSP. It's not a good benchmark to test jack settings.

[l0wt3ch]

What's in the vid? some drumnotes running in hydrogen?

No. It is Hydrogen synced with Ardour.

I'm not nervous, believe me.

[GraysonPeddie]

In case anyone is here from Google, this is the video that has everybody's panties in such a bunch. And, yes, the software is that good.

That is not a fair test if KXStudio froze. I've never had that happen in my desktop running KXStudio 12.04 in my AMD A10-5700 APU with 8GB of RAM.

[l0wt3ch]

It's totally fair. I didn't know KXStudio would fail when I set out, it just did.

All of the distros were tried on the same computer.

Like I said (in the thread where we should actually be discussing this), if anything I was too fair to KXStudio (in the running-from-hard-drive test, at least) because it was tested using KXStudio's default settings instead of being lowered to 64 frames/period like the others.

Correction: I had an idea that KXStudio wasn't going to run that great off of the DVD, because i2productions said something to that effect. But I didn't really know.

[i2productions]

Correction: I had an idea that KXStudio wasn't going to run that great off of the DVD, because i2productions said something to that effect. But I didn't really know.

Am I actually going to agree with your dumb ass on something? Ya, KXStudio has been a terrible live media up to this point(not just because KDE is my least fav DE), but is the absolute most comprehensive suite of easy to install tools available for any flavor of buntu.

[brummer]

[karm]

Isn't that nice?

It's not nice. It's great!

[Capoeira]

Isn't that nice?

It's not nice. It's great!

yes it is

[i2productions]

Now that we have one less thread in this forum to worry about I thought I'd make an anouncement for l0wt3ch that he failed to share with us, only his buddies over at the puppy forums. He has so generously released his last project into the wild. Thanks l0wt3ch for providing us something to base your work on! I'm posting this from Studio 4 right now!
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=82725

[raboof]

l0wt3ch has so generously released his last project into the wild. Thanks l0wt3ch for providing us something to base your work on! I'm posting this from Studio 4 right now!

I'm not so sure l0wt3ch released it. Might be interesting for historical purposes, I guess, but this is probably all rather outdated as Studio 13.37 is the successor which is being maintained?

[i2productions]

The point I was getting at is that once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far, away...I bought a copy Studio2Go, what was likely the first(now failed) commercial audio distro. I would have never bought it if they had not also released a demo of a live cd to test it out on my system and saw that it did everything I wanted it to. To me, it gives me an idea of what a studio in RAM really can do, and what kind of work l0wt3ch puts into his distros.

[Capoeira]

To me, it gives me an idea of what a studio in RAM

you can have that on your deb based instal: https://github.com/wor/goanysync
or on ArchLinux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/An ... ync-daemon

just sync /usr/bin to ram with the software

EDIT: I guess you have to sync more than just /usr/bin???
anyways, you can sync anything you like with the software


If you try it, you could report the "performance boost" of Jack in this thread: http://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=10039

[Capoeira]

also there is e4rat, a more automated ram loader http://e4rat.sourceforge.net/

if you already use systemd, it also got a preload function to speed up boot.