Re: Audio and MIDI
On Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 08:09:39PM +0000, Antony Gelberg wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm looking to get back into music recording. Audio and MIDI on Linux
> has moved on a lot in the last couple of years, and I'm ready to ditch
> my investment in Cubase as the Linux tools look very much the part now
> and of course, upgrades are free. :) Apps like jack, ardour, hydrogen
> and muse, are just the ticket.
Yes, these apps are great. But on my powerpc I've still had to patch
jack, ardour and muse to do proper byte-swapping because I bought a
little endian piece of outboard (Edirol UA-25). I hope these patches will
make it into the official version of those apps.
> I was thinking how it might be cool to build my new DAW on e.g. an Ultra
> 10. I used one of these running Solaris in an old programming job for
> two years, and it was great. They are now on ebay quite cheap.
This may seem cool, but I'd advice against it. First, you may remember
how noisy the machine it. It would probably have to be in another room
away from any microphones.
The other thing is that I've never seen any latency test on a running
system with sparc hardware. No doubt the kernel in general has gotten a
lot better in the last couple of loads in this aspect, but that is a
side-effect of the x86 work going on in that area. Bottom line is that
you'd have to do the latency testing yourself, and be prepared to fix
the kernel for them.
For example: on my powerpc the DRM driver would cause high latency and
the 'beep' command would cause a race condition hanging the kernel. I'm
living with dirty fixes for these, fixes that will never make the mainline
kernel. Some other patches have been applied in mainline.
> My basic needs are:
> USB 2.0 PCI interface with hard disk for audio data (SCSI disks of the
> capacity I need cost too much) and alsa-compliant audio/MIDI interface.
My advice is to choose one that uses the same endian-ness than your CPU.
i.e. big endian for sparcs.
> (Possible) 802.11b PCI card
> (Possible) PCI video card to run xinerama
> (Possible) SATA PCI card. Can an Ultra 10 boot from such?
>
> I have scanned the archives of this list, and haven't been put off yet.
> Is anyone doing this? Anything I should know? ;)
Does the U10 have a dedicated RTC chip? How accurate is the hardware
clock on sparcs, and at what frequency does it run? And is it used by
Linux?
I love the sparc hardware, but basically trying to do Linux Audio with
it has never been properly tested AFAIK.
Maybe someone on the list is running real-time apps and can comment on
the latency/performance?
--
Martin
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