#32

Yup that article seems spot on! My chromebook built-in hardware hits 256 sample buffer & totally agree that 256 is ‘difficult but not impossible’!

Also curious what people who make their music ‘in-the-box’ on macbook/OSX are hitting. Almost didn’t want to open this can of worms, it hits on the topic of “computers they’re not so bad”!

But indulge me for a minute… Is music laptop with 64-sample latency & enough juice to simultaneously run ardour, some sequencer & a couple of softsynths just a pipe dream in 2017, or a matter of knowing which cheapo laptop to get?

#33

I happen to be running at 512 samples on my mid-2014 MBP with a 2.8Ghz i7. I could probably get away with lowering that most of the time, but leaving it there means I rarely have glitches. But we’ve already established that I’m not overly fussy with these things.

On my 4th gen iPad, I need at least 1024 samples, if not considerably more. Looking forward to upgrading the iPad in the next year or so.

1 Like
#34

Is it a hardware issue? Or a hardware/driver/os/software issue, as I suspect? I guess I’d look at drivers and OS kernels first, as they are going to be the hardest things to change down the road. So, for Linux, I’d be interested in Xenomai distros (are there other musically oriented Xenomai distros besides Bela?) and I’d be looking for ways of avoiding driver problems. Would class-compliant USB interfaces work? You don’t need graphics performance, so I assume the solution to crappy Nvidia drivers is “don’t use Nvidia”.

Is “laptop” a strict requirement? Or could a very compact desktop do the trick?

Possibly helpful?

Hmm a bit belatedly realizing your app has to be compiled to take advantage of the Xenomai kernel, so it’s not exactly general purpose, I suppose.

#35

Interesting point! I can get 32 samples latency with focusrite usb interface on the same machine. That’s my only data point suggesting this is a ‘hardware issue’! Hadn’t even thought it could be a driver issue. Don’t really see how I could expect to fix this, though. Running a pretty bleeding-edge RT-patched kernel…

laptops are appealing for the portability, especially the indestructible, long-battery-life c720 chomebook. focusrite interface requires an external psu & jack explodes causing weird crashes if you, for example, hotplug the usb while sound server runs. All-in-one setup would be an improvement! Quneo controller fits in a pouch with my laptop - I could chuck the whole thing in a drybag, charge up the batteries and take it camping, for example. I mean, just driving hydrogen drum machine from the chiclet keyboard & 32 samples latency is nice (fingerdrumming practice is starting to pay off), but increase the buffer to 256 I’m tearing my hair out…

little tangent - if you want to use a powerful graphics card to combine opengl music visualisation in a low-latency linux setup then a radeon card can get the job done very nicely. Don’t remember off the top of my head which card I used…

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#36

…based on my experience yesterday trying to put arch on my old macbook pro I’d say nvidia drivers dash any hope of even using the machine!

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#37

Since I have a hard time giving up I gave it another try. and tried Ubuntu Studio. Not a big fan of Ubuntu for some of the reasons that have been mentioned in this thread already, but it was the only one I hadn’t tried… so to say, my option except a almost-from-scratch install with Arch (which I haven’t got the time for right now).
So a couple of coffee breaks later I have it running on my netbook, and after nuking Pulseaudio (what’s that doing in an audio-oriented distro anyway?) it now runs quite nicely. Ubuntu Studio uses xfce so it’s not too resource hungry and while I have it when you get your system already filled up with software I couldn’t care less, it still spared me a bit of time… and I do have most of what I need for now.
Since it was mentioned here, I did a quick recording and tried to use 256samples but that gave me lots of underrruns, so I went back to 512. I guess that’s the max I can get with this system and the Zoom H5.
Anyway… I think we can consider this solved for now, thanks everybody for your help!

5 Likes
#38

@rick_monster: Can you elaborate a bit more on your chromebook set up? My music set up is a 2011 MacBook Air - it runs just dandy and all is well for now… but I realize it’s life time is coming up (I’m begining to push it’s abilities when I’ve got too many M4L instruments…) - and it isn’t clear if Apple is going to be making anything I’d want to buy in a year or so.

At work I have a Chromebook Pixel which is just a delightfully solid piece of hardware: Boots “bam” fast, hardware seems built like a rock, etc… While I’m an Ableton user… switching to Linux on Chromebook HW, running Bitwig seems like a potential future replacement.

#39

it’s a c720 chromebook, the Celeron 2955U cpu, 32Gb hard drive & 2G ram. They’re cheap & hardy. Has built-in SD card slot which is pretty handy for extra storage. One of those low-profile SDcards nearly fits in the slot…

You have to enter some insane terminal spell or other from inside chromeOS to enable booting linux. Then there’s some further crap, opening up the laptop with a credit card to remove a BIOS protection screw. This allows to disable a ten-second countdown on boot, and more importantly a handy message, iirc something like:

‘foreign OS detected, please press space to nuke your linux install (or delete to actually boot the horrid nasty foreign OS)’

Arch install should work pretty peachy once you endure the above torture, only trackpad drivers were a faff when I set this up, maybe better documented now - happy to dig out my config obviously. Only other catch is there’s no ‘windows key’ on the chiclet - I remap capslock-position to ‘windows key’, which kind of sucks when you want to shout at people on the comments section of youtube (actually hang on, possibly no remapping required, just missing capslock)…

1 Like
#40

Thanks for reporting your struggles @papernoise, this was very useful. I guess Ubuntu is still the no-hassle (well, relatively…) alternative, especially with more exotic hardware. Btw I think there’s still some speed gains to be had, if you ditch Xfce and install a more minimalist WM. Also, I suppose installing a RT kernel allows you to drop the sample buffer too.

It just popped into my mind last night that perhaps posing this question at https://linuxmusicians.com/ would’ve been useful, I think that’s the best concentration of Linux & audio knowledge in the internet.

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#41

Doesn’t Ubuntu Studio come with the RT kernel by default? Or maybe I have to enable it…
And yes you are right abut linuxmusicians… but then I do have a hard time keeping track of the 3 forums I’m on and I don’t like to post on forums just once, i.e. if I get on a community platform I like to actually engage with the community and not just ask a question and then disappear again.

1 Like
#42

Yeah Apple is not giving much hope as of lately. Which is a bit of a pity, and a chance at the same time.
Linux is nice, and there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with it. It really makes sense if you’re purely into things like C-Sound or PD, or if you need it for specific things, as an additional tool like in my case with the netbook. I think It can also work well with DAWs like Bitwig that run natively on linux. I had tested v1 some time ago, and it was totally great. Of course you’ll loose M4L though and it will not work well if you rely heavily on commercial plugins, since most won’t have a linux version.
This whole netbook project of mine is also a way to see if switching to linux in the future might be an option, since I’ve had to repurpose my music laptop for work and am now trying to figure out how to deal with the lack of it. Also… I’m not really going to buy any of the new macbook pros…
To me the biggest hurdle so far is that, if you’re not getting some commercial product like Bitwig or Renoise (and the choice there is a bit limited) then you’re stuck with mostly unfinished, buggy software with hideous UIs.
But BTW. this could be really interesting:

1 Like
#43

Sort of related, figured I’d post this here:

https://litebook.store

#44

So this is a laptop that comes with a highly customized flavour of linux? It’s interesting that they kind of avoid saying “linux” on the website, and they also give almost no info on what the OS on these is like. The price sure seems interesting, but the specs on the website are hard to interpret…

#45

Yeah, it’s a little vague, but the build is designed to look like the Mac OS, called Elemental. Not sure why there aren’t more pictures of the actual hardware

#46

You mean Elementary maybe? http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=elementary

#47

Yes you are right - my mistake - didn’t double check the name. :slight_smile:

#48

Here’s another interesting thingy that relates to linux: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pisound-audio-midi-interface-for-raspberry-pi/#/
It’s the first proper audio/midi board for the RaspberryPI (as far as I know). Seems pretty cool!

3 Likes
#49

yeah, kind of cool! Subtly different from bela - the pi3 is a beast even compared to beaglebone black & this should run fine with linux RT rather than xenomai. Looks like it would definitely be possible to run ardour, as well as a couple of softsynths.

Maybe a good form factor for portable in-the-box linux studio could be an mpk-mini or similar with this+pi3 screwed on the side, a small hinged lcd that flops over the percussion pads for transport & a thinkpad keyboard to squint away at some tidal code in emacs. For bonus points bolt on a couple of contact/dynamic mic preamps!

Wonder if anyone’s done something similar with their bela…

2 Likes
#50

Ive backed one… to add to a Pi3
I thought initially it was expensive, compared to say hifi-berry (which Ive got on a Pi2) … but I liked the fact you get full size midi DIN and 1/4" audio jacks.

I view it differently to Bela, which is more about building instruments… so low latency is critical, and I’ll keep using bela for this kind of stuff.

this is more general purpose, Ive used a Pi2 with Raspbian/Linaro, and generally, latency is not too bad… if your careful with load and IO -, so this should be fine for a mini DAW (as Traktor have discussed) or things like SC/SonicPI etc.

#51

It seems to be also focusing a lot on being a portable PD device… though it get’s in a similar territory to Bela and Axoloti there.

I thought initially it was expensive, compared to say hifi-berry (which Ive got on a Pi2) … but I liked the fact you get full size midi DIN and 1/4" audio jacks.

Also this one has an audio input, which the Hifi-berry doesn’t afaik.