Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

What other apps and distros do you use to round out your studio?

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Death
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Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Death »

Update: I know what to do now ;) Thanks for the help.


Original post below:

Hey.

I've been a user of Arch based distros for a while now and was a user of Ubuntu based distros before that. I like Arch stuff a hell of a lot more than Ubuntu based stuff so I won't be going back to that. However, I think the perfect place would be somewhere inbetween. I like very up to date software and drivers but would like a bit more reliability & less breakages (although Arch is really actually not that bad to be honest). Long story short; Fedora is looking very appealing to me!

I've been meaning to try it out for months but am really struggling to find the time. I'm thinking I might just go for it one night and write over my current distro with it. That's the only way I've ever gotten to know if a distro is right for me.. But before I decide to do that I just wanted to ask any Fedora users here a few things:

  1. Do you find Fedora has a lot of the packages that music creators would typically use? For example, there's one on Arch called 'realtime-privileges' which makes it really helps to set up audio with less manual configuration; Something I really appreciate these days with little time to spare for messing about.

  2. Is it easy to set the 'schedutil' cpu governer to run permanently so I don't have to set it after each reboot? I like to use that normally and then use 'gamemode' to switch it to performance when I run music software or games.

  3. How's SELinux; Does it interfere with making music or playing games in your experience? I actually make music with proprietary Windows software rather than Linux native software..

  4. Considering I'm someone who typically prefers general use distros than music orientated distros (simply because they always seem to be Debian/Ubuntu based), would you recommend it? If so or if not, why?

Thanks for your help!

Last edited by Death on Tue Dec 20, 2022 4:58 pm, edited 10 times in total.
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Largos
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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Largos »

Fedora has a version with music packages installed called Jam you might want to look at https://labs.fedoraproject.org/en/jam/ Not used it myself though.

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by wjl »

Last time I've looked into it (with some RC of 37 or so) I've found it a bit messy. They include the good stuff like Carla, Cadence, and everything - but then run on Pipewire by default?
I've had good experiences with Pipewire on Arch, like with Carla, Cadence et al on Debian, so I decided to stay away from Fedora. Tried to love it often enough, never worked for me. Plus updating is a nightmare - you basically reinstall after a while, and that is what I wouldn't like at all.
Try Debian testing if you'd like a kind of rolling release with apt...

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Death
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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Death »

Largos wrote: Sun Oct 30, 2022 12:44 pm

Fedora has a version with music packages installed called Jam you might want to look at https://labs.fedoraproject.org/en/jam/ Not used it myself though.

Oh cool. I had no idea that existed! I'll check it out, thanks :)

wjl wrote: Sun Oct 30, 2022 2:31 pm

Last time I've looked into it (with some RC of 37 or so) I've found it a bit messy. They include the good stuff like Carla, Cadence, and everything - but then run on Pipewire by default?
I've had good experiences with Pipewire on Arch, like with Carla, Cadence et al on Debian, so I decided to stay away from Fedora. Tried to love it often enough, never worked for me. Plus updating is a nightmare - you basically reinstall after a while, and that is what I wouldn't like at all.
Try Debian testing if you'd like a kind of rolling release with apt...

Well I do like Pipewire. I'm running it at the moment and it seems to work well. Maybe it's problematic on Fedora though..

As for the updates; That's what I hated about Ubuntu. Upgrades never worked properly and always ended up in me just doing a fresh install. I hated that.. I thought Fedora was essentially supposed to be a rolling release but with the option to not have to upgrade some components & to also be able to easily downgrade them..?

As I said; I'm not really a fan of Debian & Ubuntu. I'd rather stay on Arch stuff. Thanks for the suggestion though!

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by ycollette »

I use Fedora for music.
I added this repository (which I maintain):
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs ... t/audinux/
The small website related to this repo:
https://audinux.github.io/
I made some music using this repo.
Mostly with LMMS:
https://www.jamendo.com/artist/471813/j ... wen/albums
And mostly with VCVRack:
https://www.jamendo.com/artist/537917/u ... ing/albums
The 37 release to come will be available for x86_64 and aarch64 too.

Best regards,

Yann

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Death »

ycollette wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 7:00 am

I use Fedora for music.
I added this repository (which I maintain):
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs ... t/audinux/
The small website related to this repo:
https://audinux.github.io/
I made some music using this repo.
Mostly with LMMS:
https://www.jamendo.com/artist/471813/j ... wen/albums
And mostly with VCVRack:
https://www.jamendo.com/artist/537917/u ... ing/albums
The 37 release to come will be available for x86_64 and aarch64 too.

Best regards,

Yann

I will keep that in mind if I use Fedora. Thanks!

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Death wrote: Sun Oct 30, 2022 12:36 pm

[...]I've been a user of [...] Ubuntu based distros[...]. I like Arch stuff a hell of a lot more than Ubuntu based stuff so I won't be going back to that. However, I think the perfect place would be somewhere in between. I like very up to date software and drivers but would like a bit more reliability & less breakages (although Arch is really actually not that bad to be honest). Long story short; Fedora is looking very appealing to me!

Interesting to read that Fedora is considered more stable than Ubuntu. Have you thought of Debian Stable? At the moment is reasonably up to date. But like all Debian distro's: that's not he case for long...

Death wrote: Sun Oct 30, 2022 12:36 pm

I've been meaning to try it out for months but am really struggling to find the time. I'm thinking I might just go for it one night and write over my current distro with it.

I have an extra partition on my hard drive for that. Might it be an option for you too? Then you do not have to delete your old distro from HDD.

Death wrote: Sun Oct 30, 2022 12:36 pm

That's the only way I've ever gotten to know if a distro is right for me.. But before I decide to do that I just wanted to ask any Fedora users here a few things:

  1. Do you find Fedora has a lot of the packages that music creators would typically use? For example, there's one on Arch called 'realtime-privileges' which makes it really helps to set up audio with less manual configuration; Something I really appreciate these days with little time to spare for messing about.

Do we still need such special configs for music these days? I remember power users say that that realtime kernels etc. aren't as important as they used to be...

Good luck choosing. :)

P.S. PipeWire on Debian 11 'Bulseye' isn't really ready yet for serious music production. So that's out of the question I fear. I admit: we all must switch to PW some day.

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Baggypants »

I use Fedora with pipewire and ycolletts copr and it's pretty flawless. I mostly record audio into ardour, though I do use some synth plugins like ob-xd, Helm and Surge. Then again, I never really had issues with pulseaudio and jack-dbus on Fedora either. It just worked for me.

Ain't I a stinker? :lol:

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Death »

@Linuxmusician01

As I say; I'm not interested in anything Debian/Ubuntu based.

I like Arch because it's very up to date on everything. To be fair, I've had a good experience with it over all. It doesn't break often. However, there's always some update that will eventually cause an issue and it's just awkward to work around when it does. I like a rolling release apart from when this happens. It'd be nice to have the option to keep some things on an older version without breaking the system and without being on a point release because I'm not really a fan of those. I'd gotten the impression that Fedora was a hybrid of rolling and point release which is one of the main things that interested me in it.

I don't really want to partition my drive. I need to just install a distro and use it 100%. That's just how I do it :lol: It doesn't hurt to play around with a live version on a USB stick first though..

I don't really need that much of special config to be honest! I'm already using Pipewire and it seems fine on my system. I've never enjoyed the audio side of Linux with Pulse, ALSA, Jack etc and I feel like things have just been more simple with Pipewire.

Thanks for the advice ;)

@Baggypants

That's good to hear!

Are you using the default Fedora with stock Gnome? I'd probably use the KDE version as I really don't like stock Gnome and I'm not a fan of having to download all those addons for it. I've been using KDE on Arch based distros for years and I always find that eventually the Meta key will stop working as a way of bringing up the KDE menu (whatever you call it) and I can never make it work again once this happens. I've never been sure if this is an Arch thing or a KDE thing..

Cheers.


Also, as a side note, I think Nobara Project is interesting. It's a version of Fedora modified for gaming by Glorious Eggroll. Anyone tried it? I'm really into distros that require minimal config out of the box and it looks like it would have all the gaming tweaks and software already installed for me so it'd just be a few music tweaks and I'm basically done.

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Baggypants »

Death wrote: Tue Nov 01, 2022 1:36 am

Are you using the default Fedora with stock Gnome?

Yes. Although I sometimes use Enlightenment. I haven't used KDE on a desktop since 2002.

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by miuzik »

I'm looking the audinux repo and it's very complete. I don't use Fedora in past but with this resources maybe I have it an opportunity.

@ycollette Do you make music with pipewire? or Do you use JACK? Is possible install Jack audio server (I suppose with pulseaudio for another tasks) instead pipewire in the last Fedora?

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by ycollette »

For some release now, I try pipewire / jack just after the update of Fedora, then I struggle to make it works and quickly decided to swtich to pure jack. For Fedora 36, it was better but I still had xruns when using jack in low latency.
The new Fedora 37 will be released by mid november, so; I will test pipewire jack after the update.
I will try also pipecontrol to set up some pipewire parameters easily too :)

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Death »

Ok. So I've installed 'Nobara' which is essentially a modified version of Fedora aimed at gamers.

Anyway, I'm quite far through getting things setup up now and I'm at the stage of setting up realtime privileges for audio.

I've added myself to the audio group & created/added myself to the realtime group.

Now I need to setup realtime privileges... I've done this before on Ubuntu so have notes on that and on Arch I would just install a package called 'realtime-privileges' which would create a file in /etc/security/limits.d/ called ‘99-realtime-privileges.conf' that had content something along the lines of, but not exactly:

Code: Select all

# audio group
@audio  - rtprio  95
@audio  - memlock  unlimited

After that I could then run another package called 'realtimeconfigquickscan' to check it had worked.

Anyway, does anyone know what I'm supposed to do on Fedora!?

I found two packages in the repos:

'realtime-setup'

Code: Select all

Configure details useful for low-latency environments.

Installation of this package results in:
  - creation of a realtime group
  - adds realtime limits configuration for PAM
  - adds udev specific rules for threaded irqs and /dev/rtc access
  - adds /usr/bin/slub_cpu_partial_off to turn off cpu_partials in SLUB
  - adds net-socket timestamp static key daemon (realtime-entsk)

The slub_cpu_partial_off script is used to turn off the SLUB slab allocator's
use of cpu-partials, which has been known to create latency-spikes.

The realtime-entsk program is a workaround for latency spikes caused when the
network stack enables hardware timestamping and activates a static key. The
realtime-entsk progam is activated by the systemd service included and merely
enables the timestamp static key and pauses, effectively activating the static
key and never exiting, so no deactivation/activation sequences will be seen.

Neither the slub script or realtime-entsk are active by default.

Links: 
  https://gitlab.com/rt-linux-tools/realtime-setup.git 
  https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/realtime-setup 

and 'realtime-tests'

Code: Select all

realtime-tests is a set of programs that test and measure various components of
real-time kernel behavior. This package measures timer, signal, and hardware
latency. It also tests the functioning of priority-inheritance mutexes.

Links: 
  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/rt-tests/rt-tests.git 
  https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/realtime-tests 

Those packages look as though they might do the same thing as those two Arch packages I mentioned. I don't want to install them without knowing though as I'm not sure if they take any further steps and will hurt my gaming performance. I don't have any kind of scientific, accuracy critical workloads going or anything like that; I just want to improve audio latency & xruns/underruns without completely dedicating my machine's power to the cause!

Hopefully I've made sense there. Please help me out if you know!

Thanks :wink:

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by Death »

...anyone know?

I still haven't sorted out the stuff mentioned in my above post. That's all I really need help with now!

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Re: Fedora - Anyone use it for music?

Post by ycollette »

The only things I think is missing is, as a root user:
$ usermod -a -G audio <username>
Logout and login to apply group change.

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