LinuxMusicians

I've got a pretty good laptop from work. And I'm using a standard kernel for my everyday work (3.19.0-32-generic on Mint Rosa 17.3). However, when I get home after a day at the office, I want to fire up the same machine optimized for audio work. I've enabled the KXStudio repos and I get close to a ideal system. However, I'm hesitant in installing the lowlatency kernel. I'm experiencing the odd xrun and I want try if a realtime kernel could solve that. But I don't want to break my work computer...

So, my basic question is; can I have a system with two kernels installed, booting into either of them depending on wether I'm doing work stuff or audio stuff? Will I get all the updates (for both kernels) etc. And should I install the lowlatency kernel with the same version number as my current generic one?

Hi.
I've never used Mint, but you can have as many kernels installed as you want in Ubuntu. You can choose which one to use at boot time.

Yes. Why not three kernels? A plain work kernel, a low-latency, and a real-time. They reside next to each other on the disk and don't interfere with one and other.

/Frank

Offtopic. Frank, how about sampling some of that gear in your tag line, and send me the raw flac waveforms so I can make some nice sfz instruments? We really need some slapped and popped electric bass, especially on a fender.

OK, I made the plunge and installed the linux-image-lowlatency kernel and it works fine booting into both of them from the grub menu. However, the xruns is still there. But I guess that's another topic.

stefan wrote:OK, I made the plunge and installed the linux-image-lowlatency kernel and it works fine booting into both of them from the grub menu. However, the xruns is still there. But I guess that's another topic.

Try disabling wifi, or better yet, all network cards.

I always turn off WiFi. Good point! It took me from hundreds of bursting xruns to just the few I have now. I found out per this thread that the Nvidia driver could interfere with audio. So I just activated the Open Source version. And (fingers crossed) not an xrun so far!

If low latency does not get rid of xruns try an RT kernel, especially if you use a USB interface.

stefan wrote:I always turn off WiFi. Good point! It took me from hundreds of bursting xruns to just the few I have now. I found out per this thread that the Nvidia driver could interfere with audio. So I just activated the Open Source version. And (fingers crossed) not an xrun so far!

Yeah, i never use the Nividia driver either. Open source driver is enought

I have experienced that the nouveaux driver produced way more interrupts than the proprietary nvidia one. So I run nvidia.
But xruns must be fought with things like buffer size, process priority, irq management and similar types of system voodoo.

j_e_f_f_g: I promised you mellotron samples, but haven't gotten round to it yet. And as you know, I will have to pitch correct some of the notes.Perhaps the Crumar stringer could be useful to you as well? My only bass is a Rickenbacker, so you will have to source the Fender bass from somewhere else. The Rickenbacker really is not for slapping, but it is the ultimate pick bass. And then, amplification is very important too. Macca or Chris Squire? Pure line bass for Rickenbacker? Naaah!

/Frank

Frank Carvalho wrote:I will have to pitch correct some of the notes.

I'll do that for you.