Ahhh, sorry. I confused Guitarix and Rakarrak, now as you mentioned it… 
What effects do you need?
Lol thats ok. I used to use Rakarrak but when I found Guitarix I really never looked back. As far as effects the usual guitar effects, overdrive, distortion, a little reverb, maybe some wah. I’m still learning and tinkering around with it. I love the tuner on Guitarix.
Hi,
One very maddening thing about hardware is how the same Kernel will wildly vary with different chipsets and audio hardware, I have a Mackie ONYX (FireWire) that will happily run at 128fpp however the Intel HDA chip on the same computer will Xrun like crazy at anything less than 512fpp with 3 buffers and that is set up for playback only. I have a Tascam US-122 USB device that works great with a laptop and crashes and burns after aboout 2 minutes when used with a netbook… same OS/Kernel/JACK version on all systems. For a Live guitar setup you may (or may not) find the onboard sound chip works better than a FireWire device, the point is the performance of any Distro will vary as much as the different hardware.
As an example in my band our keyboard player uses a USB keyboard and a laptop with a bunch of different sample libraries, after much experimentation with USB and FireWire what ended up working best is the onboard Intel HDA which seems ridiculous especially with having to use that feeble 1/8" mini-jack however with an isolated D.I box providing a balanced XLR input into the mixing board this works and sounds great, the latency is low and this setup runs at gigs for 4 hours plus with no reliability issues.
The point I’m getting at is regardless of how good the applications and OS are sometimes the hardware requires workarounds to get what we want in the end.
BTW Mixbus 2.3 is in the testing stage right now so I think it won’t be too much longer…
Alright cool!!! And yea I would use the onboard hardware except it’s a little noisy from what I remember. I will give it a try and see what happens. I would really like to see at least 256 at 2 buffers. Keep you posted.
Maybe you could switch to 44,1 kHz. This saves some CPU-cycles. If you want to produce for CD this will also be the native sample-rate.
I did try and I still get xruns. My best setup so far is with the Behringer FCA202 at 512 with three periods.
Update: Guys I installed the latest Linux Mint 15 RC and installed some audio apps with the lowlatency kernel version of the OS and I’m steady at 256 with 3 periods as I write this to you!!! NO XRUNS!!! I did have to add myuser to audio to get my firewire to work but that’s all I did and now running better.
But when playing guitar with real-time-effects even that latency sucks. Try to get lower…
Try to get lower... :)Or just stand closer to the speakers :)
I tried it at 128 with 3 periods and I get xruns… 
lol Not sure what else to check for.
Try the page I posted above…
Be aware that you can enable the testing kernel repository in AV Linux 6.0 and install newer optional -rt patched kernels etc. You do not have to just stick with the default Kernel if it doesn’t suit your needs, as I said above the variety of Kernels and differing hardware make a one-size-fits-all Kernel difficult to please everyone, that’s why we have the optional testing kernels as well.
I’ll be sure to try it and see if that gets me lower frames. I was able to squeeze 128 but had to disable the wireless on Linux Mint 15 with maybe one xrun. I’ll keep experimenting to see which fits best.
Always deactivate your WLAN oder UMTS! This is a neverending source of XRUNs. It has been said on the linked page I posted. Please read it again.
Yes, I’m running AV Linux 6.0 with a newer kernel, in my case not because of xruns but because of a new motherboard/chipset that was not well supported by the stock kernel. Changing the kernel was simple - sudo apt-get install… reboot.
I have the LAN enabled while I use Ardour. It doesn’t cause problems, but it might be a good idea to make sure the LAN interrupts are lower priority than the sound card interrupts.
Hey Gmaq… how do I install a testing kernel. Sorry for the noob question. I’m trying to find it under synaptic.
The testing Kernel repository is not enabled by defaullt so you need to enable it before the testing Kernel packages will appear in Synaptic
In the menu go to ‘Preferences’–>‘Software Sources’–>‘Third-Party-Software’ then scroll down and check off the line that says this:
http://www.bandshed.net/kernels/apt testing main.
When you close the ‘Software Sources’ it will automatically rescan the repositories and when you open Synaptic the new Kernel packages should appear.
Ok yea I figured it out last night. Thanks GMaq. It seems that I can only get as low as 256 without xruns most of the time. I’m leaning toward hardware issues.
Guys I think I found something. When I was running the live OS from usb I was able to use it at 64 with very few xruns. Once I installed the OS I couldn’t go lower than 256. I’m leaning on a tired HDD. I won’t find out til I get the new SSD in and test it on that. I found one on the cheap just to see if it’s the problem.
@dsreyes1014: Replacing your HDD with an SSD might improve some aspects of system performance (boot time etc) but is almost certainly not the real cause of x-runs (even if it does happen to make the audio performance more stable by chance). The real reasons for x-runs are varied and complex (although the root causes are often to be found in a few fundamentally simple mechanisms). The google android audio devs recently explained a little of what they found when trying to address similar issues (none of which was a surprise to anyone with technical / engineering experience in this industry I would expect…) but its instructive to understand the reasons, and get an idea of the different factors involved, even if not all of them are as relevant for desktop linux: