Ardour on Linux

@ peiman

The great thing about linux is that people help. The bad is that setting it up for pro audio is a bit tricky. But I don’t think it’s worse than dealing with windows…

I usually record live or on location gigs with a Dell Inspiron 8200 (which is about 7-8 years old) through the built in firewire port with my FP10 and other rack gear. I get better latencies using a that old comp and AV Linux 3, ardour 2.8.9, and FFADO drivers than I get with an Intel Mac and OS X 10.4 (using Logic 9 and the same FP10 and rack gear). Linux pro audio FTW!!!

AVLinux is good.

However, I have installed Debian testing (squeeze) net install version with LXDE. If you just want Ardour or a few apps that are easily available in the repository then this is a good way to go. For realtime it is not bad even without tweaks but I have used AVLinux kernel already kindly sorted out by GMaq and downloadable from the AVLinux site. I have modified this system to literally boot and open Ardour without anything else being seen. I stripped it right down. I have put it in a rack box as totally dedicated DAW. Believe it or not it’s a PIV 3.0 GHz HT machine but performance is amazingly good. I even added an SSD because this motherboard has SATA I and the SSD made a huge difference. SATA II is beyond what SSD can do anyway.

I keep thinking these old PIVs will die but I have two Abit IC7-G motherboards which are excellent. I also have a Macbook 2.4 GHz Core Duo and the PIV keeps up if not surpasses. Amazing.

I will post about this system soon, after a few more tests and tweaks.

@efflux and mrufino,

Truth be told what you guys are talking about is what my own version of AV Linux would be like if I didn’t distribute it to others, not that I’m complaining. I only personally use Ardour, Hydrogen and Qsynth. As far as stripping down things AV Linux has very few daemons and stuff loading at startup so even if there are a few apps there you don’t use they are not using any resources other than their program files eating up a bit of Hard Drive space. AV Linux 4.0 is ready to release in the next day or so and it’s new user manual has detailed info about uninstalling unwanted programs that are not within the package management system if you want to strip it down.

I guess it is not as popular for some reason, but I have great luck with “Ubuntu Studio”, 10.4. This installs nearly all the apps you need, including Ardour, with a single click at time of setup. Plus, the real-time kernel option (actually better than -rt) is standard at setup (if you choose the install option). Hope this helps.

I use fedora, used to use FC12 now i have moved to Fedora 13 (best release yet!)

I used it for a long time no hassles. Usually CCRMA’s packaging is pretty good. the only thing i don’t use is thier rt-kernel,
and instead build my own, with only the features and modules i need…

On installation of Fedora, i remove everything pulseaudio + any software / drivers / libraries that i don’t plan on using. Anaconda (redhat installer) gives you the option to “Customize” what is installed. You can Add 3rd party REPOs too. i add RPMfusion, and CCRMA.

Ardour works 100% of the time, never causes issues. I don’t know if it makes a difference on how everything was installed,
but it might make a difference as far as 32bit vs. 64bit. I personally am using 32bit.

Once everything is tweaked: harddisk, IRQs, the kernel, CPU scheduler, IO scheduler, and then optimizing software through compiling it (for my CPU) i get a really stable setup, that is fast. I think it is really important to fine-tune your system beyond just installing an rt-kernel or going with a particular Linux distribution…

The truth of it is no current distro specialized for multimedia really fine-tune’s itself to your hardware.
The Kernel’s are often bloated (having hundreds of drivers built into them, that you do not need). Features that you may not need enabled, including things sometimes that may happen to hinder performance in some cases. Scheduling is important too, not just
priorites for software and interrupts, but also how IO scheduling is handled, with things like you harddisk. fine tuning these
will help a lot.

i just thought i would mention some of these things, becuase often people are “looking for the best pro-audio distro”, when in fact preety much any linux distro can be tuned for audio, and often the defaults in a specialized distro, although maybe good, could always use improvement…

sometimes it can go along way!

cheerz

ninez