Greetings from Brisbane Australia

[Chipfryer]

Wotcha mate.
Well I shall be following this with some serious interest. There are a few tutorials I read from time to time on this subject but like you say its about getting the build right. I'm looking for throw away shells that pop up from time to time. Folks don't know what to do with the odd spare drum here and there. One chap cut toms in half making two drums which I thought was a superb idea.
Anywho nice to meet you and good luck.

Thanks mate. I'll try put up some posts showing progress, but thus far I've only purchased the Alesis Trigger I|O, a couple of piezos for testing, and some misc parts. I'm close to the point of building the first drum head/shell, as a tester to validate my design - frankly they'll look ugly but so long as they don't break when I thwack them with a 7 weight, or have huge crosstalk, I'll be happy...

The Alesis Trigger I|O works fine in Linux - it will be dead easy to get it working with Hydrogen, and I've already created a monster hydrogen kit from some excellent DW drum samples. It will also be a big kit - 6 toms (incl 2 floor toms), 2 crashes, 1 ride, 1 splash, hi-hat, 1 snare, 2 kick pedals. There will not be any dual-zone stuff on this, just single-zone.

Regards,

Chris W, Brisbane Australia.

[studio32]

Telling a 9 year Linux veteran he's better off in Windows could be viewed as insulting...

I use openSUSE 80% of the time, Windows running in a VM under Linux 10% of the time, and Windows running natively in the remaining 10% of time. So Windows is definitely not my primary, nor my preferred OS.

I will do. I apologize if you consider my posts to be an attack - they are not. It is more of a vent of my frustration at not figuring this out myself - in 9 years it is the only Linux issue ever I have not been able to figure out.

Hmm it might have been just a matter of misunderstanding and miscommunication here and there.
I see you in the other parts on the forum boards.

[looplog]

I'm running openSUSE 11.2 64-bit, with the default alsa 1.0.21, and jack 0.118.0 - all as packaged by the openSUSE distro guys. All my audio apps come prepackaged from packman or opensuse, most of which are quite recent versions.

openSUSE 10.3, 11.1 and 11.2 on different systems here, though not 64-bit. The 11.2 box I'm typing from worked with jack fairly painlessly, though I quickly upgraded to a jack2 package, out of personal preference. I agree that openSUSE is a great desktop, but it's just not tailored to audio production. That's just not their priority, and I respect that. I don't expect the distros to provide every niche needed.

That being said, are you aware of JAD/JackLab? Unfortunately the JackLab docs are a bit out of date, mostly because JackLab is more or less defunct, but the docs available are still a good intro to the kind of setup you seem to want on openSUSE. I'll look into doing something about updating those docs over the next few days, but I can't promise anything, mostly because they're not mine to update really. Check them out here anyway: http://en.opensuse.org/JackLab and http://en.opensuse.org/JackLab/3_Steps_ ... eginners_2

Anyway, as has been said, I'd say you're best off to deal with your issues one at a time in the forum sections, starting with your Jack issues. Oh and welcome, though given this is my second post, I'm probably not the one to be doing much welcoming.

-michael, another Australian, living in Korea

[lotusleaf]

Hey - I used to run jack as root! Nothing wrong with it. Chris - try Musix 2.0 this distribution is for musicians not coders and it just freaking works - it comes as a live CD so you will not have to uninstall your machine to test it. By the way when you like it and install it you can create a user to run jack under - just to take the stress out (I also used to live in brisvegas - nothing wrong with that either.)

[StudioDave]

Hi Chris,

Dave Phillips here. Welcome to LM !

Yes, seasoned Linux audio users can get a little prickly when they read posts that indicate an opposite experience (which doesn't invalidate your experience, btw). Typically I advise two things to Linux audio newcomers :

1. If you're happy with Windows or Mac software, then keep using it. Unless you have a specific *musical* reason to switch there seems to me to be little gain in doing so.

2. If you insist on making the switch for audio/MIDI purposes, PLEASE use a distribution that is optimized for multimedia work. Otherwise you're going to have to attend to a variety of customizations that may or may not be familiar to you. Regarding distros: AVLinux is excellent, but other fine systems include KXStudio, ArtistX, MusiX, PureDyne, Ubuntu Studio, and the great Planet CCRMA.

A short list of media-optimized distros:

http://linux-sound.org/distro.html

Btw, with 9 years Linux experience under your belt I doubt you need told that running normal apps as root is not an especially Good Idea.

On Windows ASIO takes care of most of your end-runs around the OS. On Linux, it's JACK, but you'll likely have to a do a bit more work before you get the best out of JACK. Fortunately some of the new distros are getting better at providing a pro-audio template during installation/configuration stages. Ubuntu 10.04 was a very nice surprise for me.

For best results in Linux you'll need a kernel compiled for realtime operation, some changes in the limits.conf file in /etc/security (or wherever it's located on your system), and a proper configuration for your sound device and JACK.

Btw, if you'd like a little background reading:

http://labs.daylife.com/journalist/dave_phillips

http://linux-sound.org/dp-lj-articles.html

Some overlap there, and not all of my articles are listed. Sorry, I'm still gathering them, I've been doing this Linux audio thing since 1995 and writing about it since 1998.

Please feel free to ask here about anything related to Linux audio. A lot of resourceful folks are here.

Best,

dp

Edit: Also btw, I wasn't at all insulted by your OP. Your experience isn't unusual, even for seasoned Linux users, and I didn't take any of it personally nor did I think you were rude. Linux audio is complicated, but not impossible, and there are various efforts to make it less complicated for normal users who want in on the action (low-latency, neat apps & plugins, stable OS, etc).