New guy in CT

[rkwatts]

I am a 57 year old musician and songwriter with 40 years of stuff on 4 track tape that I need to move to the current world to play with or preserve for my grandchildren that may be musically inclined someday. I used Deck II on mac since the 90's and loved it along with the excellent sequencer for mac written by Jeremy Sagan (son of astronomer Carl Sagan). I have also been a Linux enthusiast in my day job of database stuff and webserver stuff as well as mundane IT stuff. Of course I love Linux for the same reasons as everyone else...to shun the shackles of the demon Microsoft and the true antichrist Bill Gates...

So I am experienced with UNIX and Linux but don't know jack about Linux audio but I suspect it is every bit as excellent as php, apache and mysql for linux. I have only used Red Hat and lately the distro Centos(.org) which is excellent. I don't know if I can stick with centos and add the need rpm's or if I need to start over with a new distro (what would be the advantage of that, I ask?). I have several pc's I can put a new drive in and install a new distro if I need to....a couple of Asus Terminator Athlons and a new Asus quad core with 4g and 3t of sata disk that I boot Windoze on.

I am ready to buy an audio interface that will be supported by Linux audio programs, and to hedge my bet, one that will do what I need on Windoze with a commercial software package. But I am confident that the Linux solution is the best one. I know about the supported interface pages and will use them to make a choice. It is not that money doesn't matter, but rather, I have enough time to do this once; transferring all my old stuff and mixing and mastering, so I need to have the best audio interface suited for 4 line level simultaneous inputs. But I also do some recording now so I also need midi. I know that Ardour does not yet support it but there must be ways around this, like using another pc as the "piano roll composer" and sequencer for the keyboard. I am not sure how to pull this off....bass parts on the keyboard on different tracks as the piano parts on the keyboard, unless there is some clever way to sync from Ardour other than midi ??? With Deck II, I could record a "click track" with the midi clock recorded, and then put a guitar and vocal on other tracks, then go back and write a bass part on the sequencer that the playback of Deck II would control while recording the audio generated on the keyboard from the sequencer. I could then write a piano part on the sequencer, again, that the playback of Deck II would control while recording the new piano tracks generated on the keyboard from the sequencer. If I understand correctly, Ardour will not record or send midi signals to control another midi device. I guess that is getting a bit off topic...

So, I am glad this site exists and I look forward to learning lots of new stuff

[spm_gl]

Welcome!
On the interface side of things, there are a lot of suggestions floating around here.
Concerning your Deck II, I'm pretty certain you could sync it via MTC from Ardour. Failing that, there are some very capable sequencers on Linux, and you can definitely sync them to Ardour via MTC or Jack-Transport.

[rkwatts]

Thank you for the reply. I have been looking into the compatibility of audio interfaces especially the ffado list. I know that usb 2.0 is faster than firewire but there seems to be a lot of preference for firewire...I guess maybe bandwidth is larger or perhaps some other reason. Or maybe the sharing of other devices mouse * kbd are the issues...what do you think? I am leaning toward the Eridol FA-101 or the Echo audiofire 8 for an interface. As an audio engineer do you have an opinion? Thanks again.

[roaldz]

Usb actually has more bandwith, but firewire is faster. Usb's latency is a bitch, firewire's latency is nice. I have a Presonus Firepod, and I can achieve less than a millisecond latency!
A friend of mine has an alesis IO|2, nice interface, but it's USB. He can only get like 5 ms latency. His cpu is maxed out quite fast (dual core amd).
And probably all of your usb ports are used (mice, external harddisks, midi controllers), and your firewire bus isn't, because you can link firewire devices in a chain. This way you can chain 3 firepod's together to get 24 in/out ports, or 1 firepod and an external harddisk.
Also, firewire is done by a firewire controller chip, most usb systems are controlled by CPU.

I'd say: do yourself a favor, buy a firewire interface!

Roald

[spm_gl]

USB is not really meant for a continuous data stream, while FW is. Thats why FireWire is a lot better for audio.

[SR]

If you are comfortable running RedHat then you might want to look into Fedora 12. CCRMA also has a package repository that provides audio packages for Fedora.

[autostatic]

Hello rkwatts, welcome!
I'm with SR, Fedora 12 might be a good choice coming from a Red Hat background. I use F12 intensively at work and I like it. I'm still considering switching to F12 for audio production too but for the moment I'm happy with Ubuntu.

[studio32]

Welcome! We can use some non-debian-based-distro-users here

Check out http://apps.linuxaudio.org/apps/all/pla ... ma_at_home

It's really good stuff for Fedora and CentOS. Even Paul Davis author of Ardour uses those packages on Fedora

BTW. There are some good midi sequencers out there, which you can route into Ardour via JACK.

for example, qtractor, rosegarden, openoctave.org midi, non-sequencer, muse etc...

http://apps.linuxaudio.org/apps/categor ... i_software

[rkwatts]

CentOS is RH Enterprise Server monster and Fedora is based upon that I think. I am totally excited to jump into this and I am going to run with Centos 5.4 and see how it goes. If I need to change distro's no big deal...I have installed Linux dozens of times and it is so much more a pleasant experience than Windoze. Thank you for for the info.

[SR]

CentOS is RH Enterprise Server monster and Fedora is based upon that I think.

Sort of. CentOS is basically the src rpms from RHEL that have had the trademarked parts removed and then recompiled. Fedora is more like the beta test platform for what may or may not go into the next RHEL release. I run RHEL at work because it's stable and the major vendors support it. I run Fedora at home because I'm prepared to handle a few crippling bugs every now and then in order to run more bleeding edge stuff.

[Chipfryer]

Hi RK. Warm welcomes.