Linux...anybody using it?

[seismic1]

I used to work for a top 100 US website in Alexa rankings that used Java... We constantly had to recycle JVMs and reboot entire clusters just because Java is such a turd. I actually turned down the opportunity to be converted from contractor to full time just because I didn't want anything to do with Java after that

I spent about 30 hours writing a bash script that would exercise and monitor the JVM performance/memory(heap and stack) utilisation. Once it was working reliably, I was able to predict 5 days ahead that the JVM was going to barf. That got the developer's attention

A few years ago I managed to get EnergyXT running on Centos/Fedora using ALSA (and I think I managed to get it "working" with Jack running on Fedora too). I went back to Windows after that. Too much like work

[urlwolf]

Ok, I'm waiting 2 weeks before doing anything else.
I only have a powerful box, and I don't want to install stuff that would make it buggy.

I have high hopes on pydaw I'm your target user.

You saved me a lot of pain installing kxstudio on a different partition.

On the other hand... on a vanilla ubuntu 12.10 box, is there a 'minimum pain' path to try pydaw? if I start jack, which seems to be installed, would I have it 'just work' or do I need to spend hrs with the jack manual?

[arkmabat]

Anyone with Linux should certainly check this out! Its a great "demo" song to showcase the synth and some of LMMS's features. http://shovon.github.com/proghousepluck/

[glokraw]

If Pydaw 'alsa-only' output will be available to a2jmidid input,
that would allow those with some established workflows
to integrate Pydaw, with plugin chains and workflow
they are famiar with. Using Pydaw on an alsa_in device
would be another way, while also having a jack setup running
on a separate device, Hydrogen drums on jackd, with a guitar on Pydaw.
etc. Hopefully that will be possible.
Cheers

[jeffh]

A few years ago I managed to get EnergyXT running on Centos/Fedora using ALSA (and I think I managed to get it "working" with Jack running on Fedora too). I went back to Windows after that. Too much like work

+1. I dislike Jack for the same reason I dislike Arch Linux... While I might be part of the top 1% of nerds who could get it working, that doesn't mean that getting it working is an effective use of my time when other things work straight out of the box

Java as a concept fails. The idea behind Java is that developers are too stupid to manage memory on their own, but that the people developing Java itself are so smart that they can developing and overbearing behemoth of a runtime that will keep the normal developer's stupidity in check, while simultaneously managing memory perfectly without any bugs because the people writing Java are so smart...

I think Java was actually a trick to get Microsoft to copy it right off a cliff, and it seems to have worked... .NET(Microsoft's complete rip-off of Java) is like 5% better than Java in every way, but it still sucks for anything remotely complex, and don't even get me started on ASP.NET.FAIL.ORG... Hell, the way that companies are dumping ASP.NET has left a vast pool of unemployed C# developers in my area, ASP.NET developers now only get $60to70k/yr around here, like the same pay as people doing very basic system admin stuff are getting...

[jeffh]

Ok, I'm waiting 2 weeks before doing anything else.
I only have a powerful box, and I don't want to install stuff that would make it buggy.

I have high hopes on pydaw I'm your target user.

You saved me a lot of pain installing kxstudio on a different partition.

On the other hand... on a vanilla ubuntu 12.10 box, is there a 'minimum pain' path to try pydaw? if I start jack, which seems to be installed, would I have it 'just work' or do I need to spend hrs with the jack manual?

At most, you might have to open QJackCtl (which I currently have as a dependency in the .deb package, but that will go away when ALSA comes), and then in QJackCtl select your soundcard, but that should be it... or it might just work if your desired soundcard happened to be the default.

...but if you just want to try it, I still think the PyDAW-OS live USB image is the safest and easiest way to go, it's based on Ubuntu 12.04... Like Dave was saying earlier, it actually runs shockingly well and at 100% full speed from a USB flash drive because of some design decisions I made early on... The .ISO image and the recommended instructions are here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmods ... /pydaw_os/

...and there's also a README.txt file on the live user's desktop with instructions for how to configure your soundcard if it's not already configured by default.

Oh, and BTW: Ubuntu 12.10 has a lot of problems, I think literally all audio apps are having a rough time with it, including KX Studio... I'd highly recommend 12.04 for now, which was rock-solid from day one.

[urlwolf]

Heh, got it running on my main machine
Just using the onboard audio for now for jack, so there are no pa conflicts.
Still, knowing zero Jack I cannot get it to make sounds or take midi. But I'm sure it's because I didn't patch it at all...

[jeffh]

Heh, got it running on my main machine
Just using the onboard audio for now for jack, so there are no pa conflicts.
Still, knowing zero Jack I cannot get it to make sounds or take midi. But I'm sure it's because I didn't patch it at all...

IIRC, that's possibly because of some Ubuntu 12.10 goofy-ness... I recall one person making a similar claim, and "downgrading" to 12.04 fixed it... My attempts at making 12.10 the base for PyDAW-OS failed miserably, I considered 12.10 a total loss and am waiting for 13.04 to hopefully make it all right...

If not, I may stop basing PyDAW-OS on Ubuntu, but I don't know what other distro I would go with, the other ~10 I tried didn't work so well either, not well enough to recommend them for Windows users anyways

[urlwolf]

I can boot into a 12.04 partition I keep around for emergencies.
But, even there, how will I know that midi is reaching pydaw? energyxt has a little icon blinking when it receives midi.

Overall, I like the interface.

Is the idea to never use anything but the built-in synths? I have yet to hear them, architecture on the wavetable one looks great, but doing away with any other softsynth known to man seems... excessive?

Is this similar in scope to what reason does?

[jeffh]

I can boot into a 12.04 partition I keep around for emergencies.
But, even there, how will I know that midi is reaching pydaw? energyxt has a little icon blinking when it receives midi.

That drop down on the transport allows you to select your MIDI device, but at the moment the interface offers little in the way of visual feedback (like blinking MIDI in lights and VU meters for audio). It will get stuff like that eventually, but being only 6 months into development, I still have bigger fish to fry...

Is the idea to never use anything but the built-in synths? I have yet to hear them, architecture on the wavetable one looks great, but doing away with any other softsynth known to man seems... excessive?

Is this similar in scope to what reason does?

That is the idea, to be all-in-one, but IMHO Reason fails on the fact that nothing in it is as good as it should be... In the beginning, I just set out to write some plugins for Linux, but I eventually realized that:

1. LV2 is a complete joke of a plugin format
2. No existing Linux host is capable of hosting a remotely complex DSSI plugin without crashing
3. Everything in Linux is standalone Jack instead of a plugin because of items #1 and #2, because being standalone is the only way to guarantee stability, but then the many disadvantages of Jack come into play

So, after being blamed by various Linux host developers for my plugins crashing in their DAW, I write my own DAW, and everything magically just works. Now, I may very well open the format up to 3rd-party developers later, but I'm in no rush to do so until PyDAW gains critical mass, I'd rather keep everything locked up tight for now so that I can guarantee stability until PyDAW is quite mature and not changing so rapidly...

...but having said that, I don't think you'll find anything lacking in the sound quality or flexibility of the plugins as they are today... Plugins are my speciality, and once PyDAW is more complete, I intend to shift my focus back to making some epic plugins like Linux has never seen before... Euphoria is already the only game in town for anybody looking for something resembling the Kontakt experience on Linux, and the synths do cover a lot of ground, it's not as if you're missing out on anything by not being able to use Zyn or TAL Noisemaker...

BTW: I have some moderately working-ish ALSA back-end going on right now, but I think that I may be forced to go through PulseAudio if I actually want it to work reliably for Joe User... decisions, decisions...

[urlwolf]

What's wrong with reason? I haven't demo'ed in say 5 years, no idea how it sounds now...
There's something I don't see. If I stick to a linux DAW, I'll have pydaw eventually becoming solid and independent of jack. But then I have a whooping 2 synths. None of the existing synths would be useful.

If I compare that to a mac or win daw, where VST etc works (I'm guessing; I don't have 1st hand experience)... I'd have thoushands of synths, effects etc. If I wanted something more constrained, there's reason...

I don't see the appeal of a linux daw, no matter how good the two synths in pydaw turn out being... I'm sure I'm missing something?

[kmatheussen]

1. LV2 is a complete joke of a plugin format
2. No existing Linux host is capable of hosting a remotely complex DSSI plugin without crashing
3. Everything in Linux is standalone Jack instead of a plugin because of items #1 and #2, because being standalone is the only way to guarantee stability, but then the many disadvantages of Jack come into play

Why not just use VST? It's even been reverse-engineered.

[jeffh]

What's wrong with reason? I haven't demo'ed in say 5 years, no idea how it sounds now...

It's been about as long since I tried it, but from what I see, everybody is saying that it isn't that much better now. It's a decent package, but the synths+sampler+sequencer were never as good as some of the ones available in VST form.

There's something I don't see. If I stick to a linux DAW, I'll have pydaw eventually becoming solid and independent of jack. But then I have a whooping 2 synths. None of the existing synths would be useful.

If I compare that to a mac or win daw, where VST etc works (I'm guessing; I don't have 1st hand experience)... I'd have thoushands of synths, effects etc. If I wanted something more constrained, there's reason...

I don't see the appeal of a linux daw, no matter how good the two synths in pydaw turn out being... I'm sure I'm missing something?

Why do you need 30 different VSTs that all do the exact same thing? Plenty of big name producers only use 1 synth and 1 sampler, I was the same way. I owned NI Komplete, but I pretty much just used Kontakt and Massive, and rarely ever used FM8 or Absynth or the millions of Reaktor ensembles available, because Kontakt and Massive were always better tools for the job... I'm a proponent of "less is more", and "quality over quantity".

[jeffh]

Why not just use VST?

Because it's not open source and I don't want Steinberg to sue me when PyDAW takes off.

It's even been reverse-engineered.

It wasn't "reverse engineered", obviously somebody took the publicly avaiable VST headers and made them into a "look, it's not technically VST" header, but **for the record**, they didn't download the SDK first and look at it**wink, wink, nudge, nudge**...

Nobody would've sat there and did clean-room reverse-engineering on a binary when the header is readily available..

[urlwolf]

So I actually resigned and used the live CD.
I got it to work for about 5 mins. I got to make sounds, and I quite like what I heard.
But I got a crash.
Restarting worked. Then I was tweaking a knob, and another crash. This time, jack started throwing xruns. And no audio anymore.

Midi, I couldn't get to work.

I guess I'll wait for the alsa version. All in all, behavior not far from what Jeff describes on *other* linux apps