Again, as a player I am attracted to linux in general because of performance and for one particular reason - you can hack the kernel. The size and contents of the other platform kernels are offlimits to customization. Linux, can be used in embedded devices like the Korg Oasys and Muse Receptor. The kernels in those devices only contain drivers and code to support the task at hand. OSX, XP, and Vista have enormous kernels that include everything you don’t want on a musical instrument.

For example, if you could create your own distro to just run guitar rig, that boots off a 128mb usb key, you could cut everything out and leave so much more of the system resources available for realtime throughput and processing.

This is really an issue for instrumentation, much more so than airconditioned studio PDC 1024 track count pop music DAWS.

Artifacts in live digital audio are statistical. RME finally included some hint of this in their latest HDSP driver text. This relates to the relationship between cpu load, and the number of dropouts or artifacts that occur. Most equipment manufacturers or solution providers simply say, raise your buffer size, without providing any of their own data or testing for real operating boundaries. The result is actually a surface - buffer size vs cpu load vs artifacts. Each driver will have its own signature surface that would probably reveal its design and suitability for recording or live use. In other words, RME has stated in their text where to expect artifacts with buffer size constant, over a range of load. Most of us know that yeah, more load, more artifacts; and that some drivers are much more robust than others. But few companies acknowledge the behaviour of their drivers and equipment over load range.

All of this is to suggest that Linux should succeed as a platform for live instrumentation because it is so open to modification, and offers the most potential for performance.

I am now of the opinion that microsoft and apple operating systems have simply become advertizing platforms for garbage. The quality of communications are so poor, and the lack of progress so aggregious that hardcore engineering just isn’t possible anymore.

Science is progessive, technology is persuasive.

And you can quote me on that!

Thanks for the update Peter!

-jonathan

I’ll be interested to see how this last. Most other audio specific distros apart from PlanetCCRMA have disappeared (demudi, agnula, audioslack etc.) fairly quickly.

this ubuntu studio release was kind of weird. ive seen people talking about it for years, but apparently there was no alpha/beta downloads. just some mythical release date (Which thankfully arrived..)