Looking for opinions on which Linux for Ardour install into a VM running Linux.
New PC booting Linux, was using Win8 with most activity in Linux VMs. Will probably install Ardour into a VM: reliability of Desktop is supreme, surfing, compiling etc all happen in in VMs. Hey, it worked for the design of the Titanic.
But seriously, if I’ll be running in a VM (KVM/Qemu) under a Debian Linux does it make a difference if I choose Studio over regular Ubuntu Desktop? Latency reduction is not an important goal. Have USB external soundcard, though internal was fine for my use, which is not production or optimal recording.
Yes, it would be simpler and more straightforward to install Ardour directly on the bare metal. Don’t want to clog this thread with reasons for this decision, no offense taken for contrary advice.
Understood, if my expectation was an optimal Audio PC / DAW I’d run Ardour on the PC. In fact, if this particular hobby grows into something more than exploration, I’ll get a separate PC for it.
To be sure, KVM will limit Ardour. But I’ll learn Ardour while I get something much better than nothing.
Not looking for advice on tinkering with KVM, which can pass through exclusive use of things like USB devices, GPU and even explicit CPUs.
Just wondering if like minded edge case users have suggestions. And for the Guest OS, particularly with Ubuntu Studio vs other desktop flavors.
The guest OS is not going to make much difference to anythng other than the ease of setting things up for optimal peformance. Since you’re not going to get optimal performance, that doesn’t matter very much.
Ubuntu Studio is packed with a lot of applications you probably never gonna use. Ubuntu Studio switched from xfce to plasma as the desktop environment. All together not really mean and lean.
I left Ubuntu Studio in favor of Xubuntu. But everyone on this forum will have their own favourite os, flavor, de, etc and the reasons to use specifically that.
I do have a VM with Windows 8 with Sonar. It works but not to good. It’s mainly for the option to revisit (very) old projects. For me that’s the use-case scenario for a DAW/VM. Not for seriously recording music.
I think some VM setups (Virtualbox maybe…?) can handle USB Audio devices with passthrough and potentially come closer to bare metal throughput…? Note I haven’t tried this… I also think Qemu/KVM gives better performance than Virtualbox and if it also does USB passthrough then it may be (barely) usable…
I use Debian on a proxmox server for rendering some of my larger Ardour projects, because Ardour is slow to render and I want to get on with other stuff on my main system. I haven’t ran into any issues, but I haven’t been doing any proper work on the VM.
Have read about proxmox. Believe it can pass USB and GPU through to VMs. Rendering is another good use case, like for Blender. If my kids head in that direction, I’ll set up a GPU on the home net for them to render on.
