Ubuntu Studio on 9.04 is unreliable, I’ve delayed tutorials because I’ve been having all sorts of problems trying to get Ubuntu Studio on 9.04 to behave.. I am reverting to 8.04 cause it’s LTS, and I read that SMP support was not included in 8.10.. Also 9.04 is dog slow and nothing seems to help..

Here is a URL that explains what people are experiencing:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1145880

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Well this is just the tip of the Ubuntu Studio Ice Berg for me,
but I got ZynAddSubFx working on my laptop then was compelled
to get Ubuntu Studio installed once I found out it had it, and it had
Jack integration. I had Compiled Zyn, beforehand, it was integral to me finding
a way to get Ubuntu Studio installed. Fortunately, anyone with an working install of
Ubuntu can upgrade to Ubuntu Studio with a simple apt-get line:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-desktop ubuntustudio-audio ubuntustudio-audio-plugins ubuntustudio-graphics ubuntustudio-video linux-rt

(note, I found out the hard way that you need to create a group called “audio”, if you don’t have one already, and you need to add everyone who will be using jack to that group. Also what you need to do is add some lines to
/etc/security/limits.conf , mainly

@audio – rtprio 95

There is a article here that talks about what this means and why it has to be done.. It doesn’t come into play until you execute a program. So it’s probably not a good thing to add root to that group, because what it does is give the audio software uninterrupted access to resources. There is also a way to force the CPU to allow audio software to lock memory within a range, I don’t know if it is per program or all programs together. Also if you really want to force priority of the audio process, there is an article at ALSA (below) on what to do under thread priorities.. This, as it says in the article, can’t be done in a script unless you are really good at regular expressions to extract the soft irq process id’s and the IRQ’s id to give them high priority, the whole purpose of this I think is to give the realtime kernel’s clock interrupt priority over hardware interrupts, which means that you can guarantee audio processes accurate timing, but I’m just guessing..)

http://tapas.affenbande.org/wordpress/?page_id=73

http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Low_latency_howto#PAM

I got that from this website:
http://www.ubustu.com/globe/2007/05/23/add-ubuntu-studio-to-an-existing-ubuntu-install/

It still works too!! This video is proof.. I also am going to upload a video with the 16-bit stereo
audio, 160kbps mpeg 2 audio, about 33 minutes of me tinkering with ZynAddSubFx, but a separate session where I was recording directly to Audacity. A key part to getting this all to work is using the real-time kernel that Ubuntu Studio uses. Without that, this whole thing would be as unresponsive as an Internet connection going halfway around the world (laggy).. As you can tell from the video there is zero lag. I’m able to play the computer like it was a real synthesizer, It (the synth simulator) crashes a few times but not a big deal if you are merely using it for audio production or to twiddle around with. Definitely not something for live performance unless your confident. Zyn is not bug free (actually, no application ever is), but maybe this video will up the ante and encourage more developers to contribute to improving it’s integrity.

BTW in the Audacity session, it didn’t crash during the whole session. I think it crashes more when firefox is running (probably has something to do with the competition for CPU cycles). If this computer was a dual core, I doubt it have any time finding cycles, as one CPU tends to handle all the OS stuff, leaving the other free to devote itself to an application in dire need. A Quad would be nice for the same reason. ! cpu for the OS and 3 for apps.

Anyhow, enjoy, I sure did.. This was the most fun I’ve had since I got access to a Roland audio workstation once when I was 16. BTW, The synth patch I made in the video is the first I’ve screwed around with this synth. All I’ve done before was just play with the voices and add reverb and chorus effects to the synth output. It’s truly amazing and fun to play..

And now that I know how to work Jack, it will be fun to see if I can do things like multitrack recording to the hard drive, and custom arranging synth patches for midi song files. Imagine all the ABBA Midi song files I could improve with this program.. Ha!

Duration : 0:18:44

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