sound cards, real time kernels and 64studio.......
Dear Debianists,
I have been nosing into the world of recording music on a PC i.e turning it
into an 8 track tape recorder with its own on board synthesiser, drum
machine and other goodies...
Apparently there is a Debian based distribution called 64studio that runs on
64 bit machines (I am using an AMD 3200 64 bit PC running AMD 64 Debian
Etch) that contains a suite of software for doing sound recordings.....
Apparently the kernel in this distribution has been modified with some
patches that make it able to run in what is termed hard real-time
priority....
There also some commands that you can issue at the terminal that can
optimise this real time feature when you are running the OS.....
Apparently they started with the 2.6.12 kernel and added patches to it made
by a Red Hat programmer by the name of Ingo Molnar.
Apparently these patches were very successful and an updated 2.6.13 kernel
was produced with these patches and some other code not found in standard
Debian kernels....
I guess this is what is at the heart of the 64studio distro......
As far as I am aware I am using the 2.6.17 kernel in the AMD64 Etch distro I
am using.
I noticed that most of the software featured in the 64studio distro is
present in the standard Etch 4.0 r0 release... e.g. Rosegarden, Ardour,
Jamin, Audacity, Hydrogen etc...
I thought at first I might as well just install them in Etch and try doing
sound recording with it instead of 64studio....
BUt now I am wondering that the kernel I am using Etch will not work
properly because it is either not real time or cannot be easily modified to
be as cleanly real time as the 64studio kernel...
Is this true or is the 2.6.17 kernel in Etch OK for sound recording?
You also need to optimise the hard disk to keep up with real time audio
streams. You need to use hdparm to do this.
If you want to recording eight channels of audio simultaneously a SATA drive
is probably a good idea apparently....
I have a guitar synthesiser and I thought it would be useful to lay down a
bass track with it on top of a drum track made using e.g. hydrogen.
I would need to add a midi interface to do this if I wanted to drive a
software synthesiser on the computer and not just mic up the guitar
synthesiser audio output....
Apparently you need a special sound card to handle multi channel recording.
There is a device made by some people called m-audio that can handle the
midi interfacing and also 8 recording channels....
I think it is a Delta 1010.
There are some open source drivers for it apparently.
I would appreciate any comments on the practicalities of recording sounds on
computers and also kernel optimisation concerns....
Regards
Michael Fothergill
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