LinuxMusicians

Hi. I'm Paul, mathematics student and amateur musician, and I'm into all kinds of music, from jazz to metal to dance.
I've been using Linux for years, but I've never really dug into the music production.
Except for Ardour, which has served me very well when I had a rock band.

I run KXStudio with KDE (yes, KDE. I need it for Latex editing, data analyzing and other software).

I've already baptized it last week. I'm from Italy, but I'm currently living in Belgium, and during the Christmas holiday I had a sort of "flashback" concert with my old band. But... my keyboard and my expander were in Belgium! I had two hours to find a playable instrument.
So I borrowed a shitty keyboard from a friend, and found at home an old usb-midi cable (2004, infinite latency). I plugged it into the computer, and hoped for the best.
I found Claudia, and fell in love with its intuitive interface. It immediately recognized the cable, and I used ZynAddSubFX to get nice sounds.
The latency was kinda high (mostly because of the cable), but... It saved my concert!

I have now the last lowlatency kernel (I don't find the rt anymore, has it been depleted?).

Any tips on how to further reduce the latency? (Cadence says 23.2 ms).
(For example, if I installed also xfce, and chose at login which dm to use depending on the work I have to do, would it help?)

It's nice meeting a whole communities of musician who choose the free way.
Any programs that I really can't miss? Synths? Drum machines? Full composers?

ciao!

Paul

Welcome!

Any tips on how to further reduce the latency?

Probably you already know this but just in case: You have to manually decrease the buffer size in the jack settings. Find a good compromise between low latency and low number of xruns. Special kernels (but not only those) help in this regard but they don't automagically set up jack latency.

Pablo wrote: Probably you already know this but just in case: You have to manually decrease the buffer size in the jack settings.

Hi "homonymous", no, I didn't know that. Thanks for the tip! Now I'm around 11 ms, which is good. Using 512 buffer instead of 1024.

Lower gets the sound all crumby. Any way to get to 256, without the breakings?

Hi!

Lower gets the sound all crumby. Any way to get to 256, without the breakings?

Sure, but there isn't a general and magic tweak. It depends a lot on your hardware, and also on your software.

Search for the word "xruns". Also, take a look at the "system configuration" page on the linuxmusicians wiki.

There is the "system tuning and configuration" forum board in case you missed it.

Cheers!

Yeah, I see. That's how much of a noob I am.

Thank you!

Paul

Welcome!

I hope that better documentation and tools for these settings will be included in KXStudio by later this year. I'm a user myself trying to help make this happen.

I am able to get down to 128 pretty cleanly on my system, and with my Alesis io2 express USB interface, I can get down to buffer of 64! The thing is, the more powerful the system, the better, and the amount of stuff you're running matters a lot, and then various system things can make a difference. Depending on setup, turning off networking, turning off desktop effects, adjusting your CPU speed governor (complex, won't get into it here) and potentially other settings can all help. But I find it largely has to do with the best system.

Oh, and yeah, low-latency kernel is all you need, no real-time anymore.

Cheers,
Aaron