Greetings!

[Derek]

My name is Derek and I currently hail from Kalispell, MT. A friend, Don directed me to this site and I'm quite excited to see all the other musicians using Linux to record. At the moment I'm not running Linux as my previous attempts to record have fallen short. I've only attempted using Fedora up to this point but I'm hoping to find out what's worked best for others before I set up again.

I'm running XP at the moment and I refuse to "upgrade" to Vista. And no matter what is being said I'm not real keen on Windows 7. Recording and gaming are the only things keeping me from switching to Linux. I think it's time to try a different distro. I like Fedora, but it's the only distro I've tried.

The main things in recording that have kept me from using Linux exclusively is that I get some background noise that I can't figure out. It's not detrimental as the noise gets lost in the recording but it bugs me that it's there nonetheless. The other thing is I have used Rhythm Rascal for drum programming which hasn't run under WINE as of yet. And I haven't found another like it thus far. I'm hoping a different distro will yield better results.

I am a bass player by trade and play a decent rhythm guitar. Which is enough to get my ideas arranged and recorded. I've only been doing home recording using my computer for about 2 years now. I've learned a lot but have only scratched the surface.

I'm glad to have been directed to this site. The amount of info to weed through is overwhelming! Thanks and kudos to the creators and admins for a great place to come and learn more!

[thorgal]

Welcome here.
I had a look at Rhythm Rascal (did not know about it). You will very much like Hydrogen www.hydrogen-music.org (see screenshots here http://www.hydrogen-music.org/?p=screenshots).

What are your PC specs ? (board, soundcard, etc)

[Derek]

Thanks for the welcome and for showing me Hydrogen. I'll definitely be trying that out!

My Machine:

AMD Sempron 2800+ (1.6GHz)
2 Gigs RAM
Foxconn MB (cheapy)
Using Onboard Audio AC97 - Was using a SoundBlaster LIVE but ran into hardware issues. Pulled the LIVE out and everything started working fine.
nVidia 6600 GT vid card
Microsoft Mouse - It's blue and gray. Don't like it.
Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard - Like anybody really is interested (c:
Seagate 80 Gig HD

[khz]

welcome Derek,
google better http://www.scroogle.org/scrapen8.html maybe 4 "dual boot xp linux".
hf && rock

[Arpee Ong]

hydrogen + death metal kit = kicks ass, and will range between blues to metal or anything within rock.. oddly one of the reasons I got stuck with linux aside from work is the music software/tools i cannot let go of that runs only on Linux like rakkarack and ardour..

I have been using Fedora since version 4/5, but you might want to give Ubuntu a shot, its *arguably more user friendly (according to people i know) and covers alot of hardware. (Although I never had problems with Fedora 9 and 10 either where my PocketPod is operational and is detected by the OS as midi device with no problems at all)

good luck with your quest..