Linux Audio the way to go!?

[soundcheck]

Originally posted by peufeu
I repeat : Ethernet is transformer isolated at both ends. All you need is a $2 UTP cable (not STP).

It would NEVER work up to 100 meters without transformers...

For ecasound, you can chroot it into your ramdisk.

I somehow must have missed your ethernet isolation statement done earlier out.

I'll try the chroot. THX.

Cheers SC

[rossco_50]

If you want everything in RAM disk, you should perhaps look at puppy linux again. The whole os is only 80mb and loads into ram by default. It also has graphical frontends for installing the system to either a usb pen or flash card in ide adaptor - very easy. The application packages are called dotpups and someone has already compiled ecasound as a dotpup, which can be installed using a similar manager to ubuntu etc. There are a lot of other audio applications already packaged.

There is atleast one member of the forum who has patched the kernel for low latency, I tried once but is was the first time I had done anything like this and I messed up. Will try again when I have time (not too quick on a 700mhz cyrix). The forum is very active and forgiving of those new to linux; the community is like those of larger distributions.

You could have both ecasound and the patched kernel running from RAM with enough space to hold a good few tracks in there as well.

[rossco_50]

P.s. the only thing some people might not like is that it is intended as a single user system and you are always logged in as root - but guess this also means that there will be no messing security configs to give real-time access to audio apps.

[soundcheck]

Originally posted by rossco_50
P.s. the only thing some people might not like is that it is intended as a single user system and you are always logged in as root - but guess this also means that there will be no messing security configs to give real-time access to audio apps.

Hi Ross.

THX for the hint.
I'd also need to install brutefir.
Perhaps it's worth a try! (Though It'll end up in a lot of work I guess.)

I am currently booting up in single-user mode (recovery mode) as root anyhow and don't even start X any longer.

Somebody around who can give me hint on following:

Even though I don't have the X-environment up'n running a
screensaver jumps in on the alpha-numeric display.
What kind of daemon is in charge for that behavior?
Does somebody (peufeu!?) have a clue how to switch off the alpha-numeric display with a command.
XSET dpms ... just works under X of course!

Cheers
Klaus

[rossco_50]

Klaus,

I was really thinking given that you are able to patch kernels, and most of the applications you will need are already packaged, using puppy would be the easy way to get a usb pen drive boot, with applications and kernel in ram.

Unless brutefir has particular issues, it should be relatively easy to make it into a dotpup. see below for a guide.

http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/DotPupHowToMake

Dont know anything about screensavers, but sounds like something that could be turned off once located.

Ross

[johantolo]

Originally posted by soundcheck


Hi Ross.

THX for the hint.
I'd also need to install brutefir.
Perhaps it's worth a try! (Though It'll end up in a lot of work I guess.)

I am currently booting up in single-user mode (recovery mode) as root anyhow and don't even start X any longer.

Somebody around who can give me hint on following:

Even though I don't have the X-environment up'n running a
screensaver jumps in on the alpha-numeric display.
What kind of daemon is in charge for that behavior?
Does somebody (peufeu!?) have a clue how to switch off the alpha-numeric display with a command.
XSET dpms ... just works under X of course!

Cheers
Klaus

Hi (this is my first post on this forum),


Try "setterm -blank 0" to turn off the "screensaver" on the console.



Johan

[soundcheck]

Originally posted by johantolo



Hi (this is my first post on this forum),


Try "setterm -blank 0" to turn off the "screensaver" on the console.



Johan

Hi Johan.

Welcome to the club! It's good to get some more Linux freaks in here!

setterm works fine. THX.

I also stepped over "vbetool dpms off|on" today. I can use it instead of "xset dpms ...." on the console. It turns the monitor completely off.

Cheers

[dunndatt]

Seagate has a DFT on both floppy and CDROM. I use that from time to time when the floppy version fails for one reason or the other.

Usually what I'll do is download the floppy versions and set them up in grub so I don't have to keep track of floppies laying around. So long as the hard disk works enough to boot the gzip floppy image, this isn't a problem. I also do this with memtest and a few other config disks.

Unfortunately I had to use this on my old laptop the other day...and it was very convenient.

-----

Kernel recompiling: when eating an elephant, do so one byte at a time.

When stripping down kernels, be careful and do one major piece at a time. The extra code really doesn't hurt a lot, it just takes up extra RAM. This method may seem slow...and it rightfully is...but it is faster than trying to cut everything out and not knowing what all that is.

Before compiling, you can copy out the ".config" file to somewhere safe and rename it accordingly. If something screws up, it's real easy to copy it back to a known working condition.

Trust me on this one. I've done it a lot.

-----

If someone just wants to goof off, knoppix has an insane amount of custom versions:
http://knoppix.net/wiki/Knoppix_Customizations

Some are better than others depending on original design requirements.

To get knoppix into RAM, use the "toram" keyword on the boot prompt.

There are also other keywords that can be used to disable unwanted hardware features.

-----

Ethernet playback: Since SoundCheck likes small buffers, this probably wouldn't work well for him. Those of us with 0.5s buffers or larger won't care (this is how I do most of my playing scattered across various servers).

Since linux is multi-tasking, it would be possible with some moderate effort to have another script watching the available disk size and current file being played and then transparently transferring the next file in the background to the RAM disk.

The main draw back of this is that the computer isn't solely focusing on playback and may start skipping a little depending on how good the motherboard is and how old the system is. My dual P3 500 Xeon 2m box would probably start choking on this because the sound chip is actually ISA soldered on the motherboard. My dual P2 450 Xeon 1m would probably do ok as the sound chip is PCI soldered on the motherboard. (aren't old linux systems fun?) I'm not sure how a USB DAC would handle it.

A good PCI ethernet card (name brand) would also help. Cheaper cards tend to skimp where they shouldn't forcing the processor to do more work.

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[soundcheck]

Originally posted by dunndatt

Since linux is multi-tasking, it would be possible with some moderate effort to have another script watching the available disk size and current file being played and then transparently transferring the next file in the background to the RAM disk.

The main draw back of this is that the computer isn't solely focusing on playback and may start skipping a little depending on how good the motherboard is and how old the system is. My dual P3 500 Xeon 2m box would probably start choking on this because the sound chip is actually ISA soldered on the motherboard. My dual P2 450 Xeon 1m would probably do ok as the sound chip is PCI soldered on the motherboard. (aren't old linux systems fun?) I'm not sure how a USB DAC would handle it.

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-=D=-
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Hi Dundatt.

I was also thinking about that parallel loading of tracks while playing back.

Loading the whole CD into RAM seemed to me the best and easiest solution, since this allows also to spindown the harddisk.
That of course can't cover long playlists or ethernet streaming from a server.

Fading smoothly over from one song to another would require , as you say, the second song to be in RAM. I think this can only be managed by the player application itself.
Some kind of watchdog process or timer would have to load the new track at a certain point in time.

Parallel processes will jeopardize my 1sample buffer size that's for sure.

Cheers

[Werner Rem]

Hi Soundcheck,

I'm still very happy with the script that plays a tracklist in ecasound.('')
I tried some figures for -b and found out sound is even getting better with lower figures

with 2 things I'm less happy though.('')
since my amps have a volume control, i'd better use a fixed volume. Now I have to type "100" each time. (did you know more than 100 is also possible! I woke up all my family typing 1100 in stead of 100).('')
And than I bought a tft screen for my computer. I has the nasty habbit showing testcolors (al screen black, red, blue, green etc) as long as is sees no computer. Since your scrips disconnects the computer from the screen once playing, my listening room more or less looks (and feels) like a disco. ('')I did not manage to switch that off, so maybe the script (optional?) should tell the screen to be black.

Should this be easy changes I can do myself ??

regards
Werner