Linux Audio the way to go!?

[jkeny]

Hi Soundcheck,
You wondered how this would sound with a full digital amp like the SAXR57 that I'm tweaking on the other thread!

Well, I'm running the standard Wubi installation of Ubuntu & playing through a USB DAC kit (AWD3) which uses PCM2707 chip & it sounds very good - nearly as good as my best transport.

This is without a RT kernal or any tweaking of the OS (probably isn't feasible with Wubi?) SO there is a bit of improvement to be had yet I would imagine?

This is also without any tweaking of the USB DAC - self powred,etc. I would have liked to try I2S out from USB DAC feeding amp but I don't feel that this is possible - see my last post on other thread.

My sonic benchmark at the moment is HDMI (stereo from Oppo 980H) feeding the SAXR57 = stunningly real! Let's see if it can approach this level?

[ssmith]

Originally posted by jkeny

Well, I'm running the standard Wubi installation of Ubuntu & playing through a USB DAC kit (AWD3) which uses PCM2707 chip & it sounds very good - nearly as good as my best transport.

This is without a RT kernal or any tweaking of the OS (probably isn't feasible with Wubi?) SO there is a bit of improvement to be had yet I would imagine?

With the same USB Dac input chip, I've also found standard a bog standard Ubuntu installation to be very good (and, for some reason, much better than Win XP no matter what XP tweaks I apply). I now dislike booting into Windows, even though the media player/organiser I use on it (J River Media Center) is far more user friendly than anything I've seen in Linux.

I've never tried the Wubi install, but imagine a clean and true install would be an improvement (I assume a Wubi install runs on top of Windows, no?). I also found the improvement from moving from a standard to an RT kernel to be very, very worthwhile, even without then getting into the more extreme tweaks Soundcheck and others here have suggested.

BTW Soundcheck, how's the new Ubuntu Studio 8.04 LTS wiki coming along?

[phofman]

Linux is no voodoo. Wubi does a very simple thing - it installs the linux partition into a file located on windows filesystem. It is no magic, linux can use the loopback device for mounting filesystems stored as files for many years.

It does not run on top of windows, only one more layer of filesystem driver is involved. It will hit disk performance a little bit. You can handle it basically as a regular ubuntu installation. However, it looks the ubuntu rt kernel does not like the NTFS/FAT filesystem driver as a loopback device http://ubuntu-utah.ubuntuforums.org/...d.php?t=772539 I am having problems with other drivers on rt kernel too, it seems quite a few lines of kernel code are not ready for the pre-emption and raised HZ http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipe...ay/007624.html

[maxlorenz]

Hi again,
Just an update of my own troubles...

Wifi problem: on "search" part of "Synaptic package administrator" I searched with "wifi" as search term and it allowed me to install "wifi-radar" and "linux-restricted-modules-rt", and problem solved

Audacious: tried various settings of buffers and always got nasty noises like lack of signal...maybe because I did not got the RAMDISK mod?

XMMS: XMMX did not play. Tried to install XMMS2 but failed
(now running Amarok)

RAMDISK: every try on the X-Term showed something like:
" "tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,size=512m 0 0" >> /etc/fstab is not a valid directory " message It must be me that don't know how to tap well these instructions...Soundcheck, never thought about a holiday in Chile? We have fishing, skiing, extreme sports...etc

One out of four (1/4), not bad!

Cheers,
M

[TBM]

Hi Max

XMMS: did you use ctrl-P (preferences) and select 'output plugin' to ALSA, and 'configure' ALSA; select hw:1,0 (or whatever your dac has as id), not default. Under 'options' tab, tick off 'use realtime...' and then 'ok'. Press 'apply' and close preferences. Play you wav file...

Regarding RAM disk, just follow Soundchecks commands to the letter, like open terminal in root mode (sudo). It should work ok if you type it all correct (and don't miss important stuff like 'echo' )

Cheers,
Tom

[ackcheng]

Seems like a good distro

http://www.earos.dk/

[phofman]

Do I understand correctly they are charging 200EUR for the firewire driver to their HW? I am wondering how much of GPL code of other developers is in their driver.

http://www.acoustic-reality.com/news/headlines.htm

I could not find a detailed list of differences between the free and paid-for version.

[maxlorenz]

Hi Tom. Thanks and sorry for the very late reply: was out of town.

I will try your advices soon.
Cheers,
M

[fb]

What are the lowest latencies people are achieving for room convolution with brutefir?

I'm wanting to set up a small linux box to process incoming audio from spdif.

Ta

[breez]

I think 512 samples was possible with my dedicated P4 2.8GHz running 2ch convolution (65k taps) in BruteFIR. CPU usage was very high though and I don't need so low latency.