if you have your computer connected to internet and you decide to use AVLinux: you don't automatically get security updates.
There is a body of opinion amongst professional DAW users that your studio computer is a pure appliance that shouldn’t be connected to any networks.
Having said that - my AV Linux system is on the home network and I regularly do internet stuff on it. Haven’t had any problems yet…
Yes I agree 
For this very reason if have disconnected my DAW computer from the internet. I use a local wired ethernet when I need to transfer files to or from it. The ethernet cable is only connected while I use it
I may be paranoid, but the threat nowadays is that one day that you turn on your DAW computer, you might see a message telling that all your audio is encrypted and a payment of 300 - 400 euros needs to be made to decrypt them.
The days of “innocent” viruses that announced their presence on your system is over. Now viruses are made to squeeze money out of you or commit crimes using your computer and you don’t see any sign of the infection.
So yes, when security updates are off, your computer might be crawling with all sorts of unwanted stuff, and you wouldn’t know anything about it. These things today are very good at hiding, you can’t see the files on your filesystem and you can’t see the processes they are running. I’m not trying to scare anybody here, but the situation took a worse turn about 5 years ago and now the internet is a very hostile place. Viruses are now made by the mafia and it is a very profitable business.
one day that you turn on your DAW computer, you might see a message telling that all your audio is encrypted and a payment of 300 - 400 euros needs to be made to decrypt them.....or you stop paying your "subscription" to a proprietary "cloud based" (audio) software provider and you can't open / edit your projects anymore, especially if they are stored in a proprietary format - similar "marketing" strategy.. :)
Security threats are serious (and real) but its important not to be too paranoid - sure it makes sense to have all the latest updates from a security point of view, but on more than one occasion an automated “security” patch has rendered my (linux) system either unbootable, or magically incompatible with sofwtare I depend upon to work - very secure, in that neither I or anyone else can access anything, but also totally useless. A bad patch can be just as disruptive as intentional malware.
Its also important to appreciate that, there have always been vulnerabilities, and there always will be, but, especially in the last few years, there has been exponential growth in the number of companies whose core business is to identify these problems (and very often publicise them). Not necessarily a bad thing, and I’m not advocating “security by obscurity” but there is the argument that by making these (often very obscure) exploits more public - it might - temporarily - make the situation worse by handing that knowledge to those who might exploit it for bad reasons. It might be said that it’s also in the interests of those who have created a business out of finding such issues, to amplify the potential severity in the minds of users - its the classic advertising strategy, shown to work for almost every other product - which goes something like:
“here’s the problem you didn’t know you had…”
which plants an idea - and now you’re worried that you need to do something…
“and here’s our solution…”
Yep, that’s why I did not upgrade my Pro Tools 8, but instead decided to learn Ardour The industry holds clients data “hostige” in a proprietary format that can’t be edited with anything other than the companys products. The customer can’t change products because doing so he loses access to his old data.
It’s also true that the security industry tries to scare people in to buying their products.
It is quite easy to diff files before and after security update. This tells you what part of the code has been patched and after that it is quite easy to understand what the vulnerability was. Secrecy won’t help much in the end
I did not mean to hijack this thread, so I will stop now
Just one more thing. I do some coding myself so I can understand what monumental effort making all these big changes to Ardour 4 has been. And the results are amazing, thank you very much guys, I really like what you have done
If your getting kernel pannicks either somethings wrong with your system, or your particulular hardware is exposing a bug in the kernel.
When you get kernel panicks you should try another kernel, iether new or older. Ive been using kx studio on my desktop machine for years its been solid and i mess with it quite a bit.
On my laptop for 6 months using lubuntu with kx studio repos and again few issues. Ive never had a kernel panick except for the newer kernels on my desktop machine (anything past 3.11 on desktop)
Yes. But since Linux is not a microkernel, there can be all kinds of reasons for kernelpanics, and they don’t have to be outstanding. In my case the less than perfect driver for my audio-interface seems to be involved, even though I seem to have got more troubles on some systems than on others. But they are rare enough to live with them.
Have any of the distro authors/creators begun including Ardour4 yet? I’m seeing nothing out there.
AV Linux has been on hold for a number of reasons: waiting for Ardour 4 was just one of them.
But I’ve installed Ardour 4 (downloaded from here) on my AV Linux system and it works just fine, and it should work fine on the other music distros too, so while I’m sure it will be part of the next release of AV Linux, KX Studio, Dream Studio and [anything else] Studio, there’s no great hurry to get that next release out just because of A4.
Hi,
Regarding AV Linux and Ardour4…
While it is true that AV Linux is on hiatus right now due to several factors as far as Ardour4 is concerned I strongly feel I “shouldn’t” be packaging it any more. It is now commonly known ardour.org is providing it’s own binaries that run very well on AV Linux (and pretty much all other Linux distributions). Paul and the developers only officially support their own binaries and even though I have a pretty good track record of packaging Ardour properly they have made it quite clear that outside packages are not officially supported… Further to that Ardour as a project requires (and very much deserves) funding and support and since I myself am a user and supporter of the project and personally interested in it’s success I think it is counterproductive (for me) to continue packaging Ardour for free in between AV Linux releases… Lastly the availability of nightly builds has made pretty much all of the interim bugfix packaging of Ardour now unnecessary… Side note: To be honest there have been very few AV Linux releases with a regular Ardour release included, most have been custom GIT builds to provide the best functionality available at the time…
In the future AV Linux ‘8’ LiveDVDs will feature only the most recent Ardour4 version and the Mixbus demos exclusively as the only DAWs. I will still encourage people to update by using the official binary builds purchased from here but since future AV Linux versions will feature the KXStudio repositories falkTX’s Ardour builds will also happen be available as well.
To clarify I will still provide custom builds of Ardour with WinVST support (32bit only) since they are not provided through any other channels and not available elsewhere and I actually use them regularly myself… these special builds are most definitely NOT supported by the development team…
To any AV Linux users still reading I have unfortunately been delayed in getting back to maintaining and providing updates for AV Linux 6.X…BUT… You can expect a brand new 4.x RT kernel as soon as a reliable patch is provided and tested and also a huge heap of updated plugins is on the way which should keep Ardour users productive with state-of-the-art goodies until AV Linux 8 is released in the late summer/early autumn of 2015…
I have been using Fedora 21 for many months now for audio production, using mainly Harrison’s Mixbus version of Ardour (but occasionally I will use a self built Ardour for testing/comparison purposes). I have had the most satisfying results. It was not hard to set up. I did a minimal installation, added the deemed necessary repositories (rpmfusion, CCRMA) and did the jack setup FAQ manually. Some things were already in place, some weren’t. It never hurts to double check using the FAQ anyway, regardless of the distribution. I have found that many things that were once exclusive to CCRMA are now part of the RPMFusion or Fedora repositories, such as Ardour itself. I was rather surprised to discover this.
I am NOT using the CCRMA RT kernel, but the stock (4.1.3) kernel, and with very good results. I don’t ever have issues with pops, clicks or dropouts.
Yes indeed, Fedora does have a short life cycle (roughly 2 years) They only support 3 concurrent versions. Presently that would be Fedora 20, 21 and 22. However, there is a tool called FedUp that will upgrade you to the latest version automatically. I have NOT TRIED THIS, and it works great for some people, and not so great for others. I will try it eventually, but as long as I am still getting updates, I am not too worried about it for now.
I am just throwing my 2 cents in here saying to please not disregard Fedora as a viable audio platform. It does a pretty damn good job of it!
Another huge benefit to Manjaro and Arch is they are rolling release, so there’s no more problems with total OS upgrades like almost all other distros. It just keeps on going!
What works for you is just that.
After experiments I tried to work with the elegant if not the simple solution(s). I do not have to run multiple plugins and in fact I don’t need them at all. Mostly I record my own voiceovers and then perhaps flesh that out to a finished product. So for me synths and plugins that create music is overkill. I have only a few ideas of what I would do if I had different requirements, but I think it would be roughly the same.
There are a few sites like Penguin Producer that give even rookies and idea of how to set up any distro to be optimized for sound and/or video. If you can bring a stable distribution into that mix and can satisfy the requirements of a mouse monkey like me, then your on to something.
I have modified Mint 17.2 to be that distribution. I spend a lot of time evangelizing my work probably more than actual work itself so being connected and having great tools is a requirement as much as the audio/video production part of it.
So in short no sacrifice can be had at the desktop level.
I used Ubuntustudio and found way too many synths and plug ins. The same for KXStudio and AVLinux. AVLinux had some buffering problems with the hard disk I didn’t like. Great people, I communicated with them for a while, but again the paradigm wasn’t close to a single performer/producer. All the them pretty much wanted plugins on the plugins.
So Mint 17.2 and soon 17.3 is what I use given that its stable, you can deal with repositories like the KXStudio repos that are used to bring in Cadence to handle desktop audio and jack. It makes the whole thing plug and play once its up and running you can use the patch bay paradigm or in some cases just run the software, like recording a skype interview for audio.
If I was to go to the pub and record the local talent I don’t think it needs to be more complex as there are fireware and usb sound cards that can at least capture performance via mics or possibly drift into direct boxes and an external board. Its a matter of channels and a little forethought.
On the rare occasion I will play live using Mixxx and that is simple using an internal card for pre-monitoring and usb for the mains. I haven’t been at the level where visuals would be a part of it, but its not hard to put that into it if you really need it.
I consider my use to be more project studio than studio. Considering that Eddie Van Halen according to most accounts records in a dump which is more cigarette ashes than anything else. Anything is possible and if your open enough to happy accidents, anything will do.
We are far beyond some of the studios I recorded in with 20 year old analogue equipment. I don’t think a debate over which distro matters that much. I decided to concentrate on simply making it work.
My choice has been using Debian stable for everything. Ardour is in the stable repositories an old version, but it works for me. I have no need for MIDI or the latest VST-plugins. Installing a rock solid rt-kernel is one Synaptic search away nowadays - I’ve compiled rt-kernels before, now there’s no need. Unless I want to.
What I like in Debian is updates that don’t break your system. I’ve had enough of those in a regular Ubuntu. Pulseaudio is, though, an increasing pain in the butt. Yap, it’s good for regular “office” desktops - with jackd it just makes me want to pull my scalp out ( no hair, I’m bald ).
I am in a 2 worlds kind of place…
I have been using KXStudio since the start of this year… I lost the plot, wiped my hard drive and installed KX…
It is a fantastic distro with everything I need…
However, I used to work on a gentoo OS with the pro-audio overlay… In the early days I could get it all mucked up and require a lot of work to fix.
I am enjoying the lack of requirement for much administration other than file management… However, I really miss the performance, with Gentoo I was able to squeeze more out of it and run at lower latency settings… (64 periods as opposed to 128, doesn’t sound like much but when tapping in rhythms on a controller, that delay can be noticeable, not so important for mixing functions). Don’t give me the “Gentoo is a ricer” link, I’ve been using top end CPU’s for a while now…
So I’m tempted to install Gentoo again as Gentoo studio… let’s see how it goes…
Pulseaudio is, though, an increasing pain in the buttSo far I've had success with removing Pulseaudio from any Debian distribution. On one system, simply removing Pulseaudio was all I had to do to make sound work on a new installation (not an Ardour/studio system that needed Jack, just an ordinary office/desktop machine)
Pulseaudio is, though, an increasing pain in the butt.This is probably more to do with choice of window manager than choice of distro. I've been using Debian on DAW systems for years now and never had pulseaudio install itself, but I've never installed Gnome or KDE on a DAW (I use WindowMaker but I'm sure the same situation applies to other lightweight WMs).
I am a producer/musician/broadcaster. After over 10 years of working/playing with Linux to attempt to produce audio, I am thrilled to have a fully functional production studio based on KX Studio. I have Zero Latency midi audio using a M-Audio USB Midi Controller Keyboard, fully functional in/outs with a PCI Delta 44 and am looking forward to producing a full album on an open source platform. The realtime plugins are amazing and I love Ardour. I have tried USB (Tascam) and Firewire (Focusrite Saphire) interfaces but I always have problems with latency. I have also tried Ubuntu Studio and AVLinux as well as a handful of others, but KXStudio is the first distro I have had this much success with. I am running on a core 2 duo 3ghz with 6 gigs of ram and an SSD. This is going to be fun.
If you would like to hear some of my previous work you can see http://www.soundclick.com/valdavis.
I am recording songs with Ardour for three years now. I have to take up the cudgels on behalf of UbuntuStudio. I was always using it and I recently upgraded my system to 15.10. To be honest, I have nothing to complain. I do admit, I am compiling Ardour from GIT frequently so I am always at the newest version and have all features I wish.
I do not have any issues with pulseaudio. UbuntuStudio is configured to nicely integrate pulseaudio with jack. I am using a Terratec DMX 6Fire USB audio interface which is powered on and off manually (as I want to save some power) and the loading/unloading of the drivers and jack just works fine.
For virtual instruments I mainly use linuxsampler (plugged in as a plugin) and the Calf plugins for effects.
Linuxsampler is my biggest PITA as they do not provide debian packages due to their weird licence.
Other than that, I am a happy fellow.