Linux Audio the way to go!?

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Originally posted by soundcheck

Even I keep my fingers away from it. ;)

that's funny, :) as what you are doing and suggesting to do in the wiki is basically a lot LFS style... :cannotbe:

IMHO, quite likely your goals would be much better accomplished building "from the ground up" using something like LFS rather than starting from some complex, structured distribution like Ubuntu and "disassembling" it piece by piece, "transplanting" alien pieces, etc.

I'm afraid you'd gonna have much more problems and difficulties that way rather than building what you want from the ground up in a simple, clean, fully known and controlled environment.

So in the end it may be even simpler... :cannotbe:

Of course I'm talking about a stripped-down "audio-only" dedicated machine... obviously building a complete, fully functional and secure general purpose system is a whole different story.
 
UnixMan said:



Of course I'm talking about a stripped-down "audio-only" dedicated machine... obviously building a complete, fully functional and secure general purpose system is a whole different story.

Paolo.

That's the point. 99.9% of the readers, including me, will have an Ubuntu or similar well maintained and stable distribution installed. You can't expect them to put together a Linux from scratch.

By showing how to compile a MPD from sources, what will be a 10 minute exercise, I am not contradicting myself.

Everything else I describe is configuration work and other advise.
 
Originally posted by soundcheck

That's the point. 99.9% of the readers, including me, will have an Ubuntu or similar well maintained and stable distribution installed. You can't expect them to put together a Linux from scratch.


sorry, but what you suggest to do eventually is to eliminate just about everything from the original distribution and end up with a minimal, "appliance" (embedded) like system.

So we're not talking about what the 99.9% of the people would/should use for different everyday task. We're talking about building a dedicated appliance. Building such a minimal system from the ground up is not that hard. With little directions it's no more difficult than building ALSA, MPD, brutefir, etc.

If you need/want a complete, complex desktop system with graphical desktop environment(s), etc. than you (I'd say anyone) would be better off with a "cooked", finished, proved distribution.

But for a dedicated audio player "appliance" like system, for which you need just a kernel, the libc, the shell and very little else other than the applications you're building anyway, you should try LFS. ;)

(in case you also need a "normal" system on the same hardware, then make it dual-boot. ;)


BTW: for your network problem, should your modem/router internal DHCP server not support static MAC/IP pairing, one possible solution is to disable that service there and install one on a Linux machine that you keep up all time (or as needed).

Another possibility is to set the range of the DHCP "pool" addresses to only a subset of the chosen network (often this is already so by default) and give your "static machines" addresses outside that range.

Nevertheless the simpler, easiest solution is just to disable DHCP altogether and use just static addresses everywhere (including for the modem/router, of course).
 
UnixMan said:


sorry, but what you suggest to do eventually is to eliminate just about everything from the original distribution and end up with a minimal, "appliance" (embedded) like system.

.

Ah, now I got you.

My earlier statement was a bit misleading, I guess: I did not intend to say that I'd only need the a rt-kernel,alsa,mpd,brutefir,ecasound,sox . I am using quite a lot of other stuff on top of these.
 
I'm a bit surprised no one has suggested just running strait debian yet.

I find it a nice happy medium between gentoo and ubuntu. Do a basic install (I just get the ~150meg net install image) and all you'll get is a shell, kernel and some libraries and then you can build up from there. Plus it's as stable as can be :)
 
RHKratos said:
I'm a bit surprised no one has suggested just running strait debian yet.


well, that's what I personally use for just about anything, including my own audio+HTPC system... ;)

Though I would not recommend it to a novice, at least not for "regular" (general purpose / desktop) use. :cannotbe:

But yes, I agree with you... for building "stripped-down" dedicated systems it may be quite a good option. IMHO definitely better than Ubuntu at it.
 
ackcheng said:
I am sure if someone can build a distro specifically for audio, a lot more people will jump in to Linux. I have tried to follow this thread but it is getting out of touch for my little brain!


I would rephrase your statement: "build a distro for a specific audio-use-case"

I think you need to define pretty straight forward a use-case, including HW spec.

E.g. Paolos HTPC project will look pretty different then a small headless audio streaming client.
 
Hi there,
Klaus, I re-compiled mpd after I updated alsa with the aid of your script (worked like a charm, thanks a lot!) and this time 'make' worked with './autogen'. I have no clue what went wrong before.

The only failure seems to be the mms-subsystem. I have libmms (according to apt), but make couldn't find it (libmms/mmsx.h: no such file or directory).

Streaming radio works now with some stations!

Rüdiger
 
soundcheck said:


You are right. No pulseaudio installed.

Pulseaudio is like a parasite. It aims for infecting the whole organism.
Meanwhile every single piece of audio related software plus operating system
and windows manager is infected. It is getting worse from release to release.

At a certain stage you have to enter into symbiosis with the parasite, otherwise if you try
to get rid of it you'll kill the whole organism.

Honestly - no idea what went wrong on your setup. ( I havn't updated my Linux yet. I am still on Intrepid resp. Felicia and waiting for Gloria)

The important things I really need (kernel, alsa, sox, ecasound, brutefir, mpd) are all compiled from git/cvs sources anyhow. That's why I am not in hurry to upgrade to the next OS release.

Cheers

I managed to solve it by disabling all system sounds (clicks when menus open etc). Which worked because in uninstalling pulse I removed any form of sound daemon, so there is nothing running to mix different apps audio streams together... which raises an interesting issue, do you have a sound daemon running (such as Esound)...? As surely anything 'mixing' streams together has to be detrimental to quality.... you'd have thought it would probably resample things in order to mix them etc....

(I'm still running intrepid as well btw)
 
Onvinyl said:
Hi there,
Klaus, I re-compiled mpd after I updated alsa with the aid of your script (worked like a charm, thanks a lot!) and this time 'make' worked with './autogen'. I have no clue what went wrong before.

The only failure seems to be the mms-subsystem. I have libmms (according to apt), but make couldn't find it (libmms/mmsx.h: no such file or directory).

Streaming radio works now with some stations!

Rüdiger


Good to see that everything finally worked out for you!! I hope you'll enjoy it. ;)

Try to install libmms-dev.

Perhaps you can get us some feedback about the proposed Sox upsampling configurations and my proposed ecasound sertup.

Cheers
 
Klaus,
the strange thing is, libmms-dev is installed in the latest version acording to apt-get, but still...

Currently, I don't use ecasound. I just made a quick check when trying pipe output when I first installed mpd 0.15-git, which went well. I will soon examine further, when setting my system up for audio capturing, eventually trying out sox-riaaa well. But that will take some time.

Rüdiger
 
Hi folks.

For hackers only!

I am wondering if you heard of Tiny Core Linux. http://www.tinycorelinux.com/

It's available as Release 2.0 now. It comes with 2.6.29 kernel.

I don't know if there is a smaller Linux distro on the planet.

Including Windows manager the basic core installation measures 10 MB (MegaByte)! :D
The text version counts just 7MB.

The idea behind is to just install what you actually need and run it on a RAMDISK.
Additional applications you just install from the TCL repository.

I spent some hours on it during the last two days. And guess what. I managed to get it working.

Even my M-Audio Transit with firmware-load I managed to get working.

I think this distro is a great base for a very nice (headless) audio machine and also network server.

Beside that: My sound is already very good - even with aplay.

I'll keep you posted.

Cheers
 
jkeny said:

Did you ever manage to establish if the Transit truly works in asynch mode? If I had the Transit I'd use one of the USB sniffer tools to analyse the traffic: http://www.linux-usb.org/

The mail ping-pong takes a hell lot of time at the alsa-mailing list. ;)

I'll get there. Sooner or later.

One thing I've seen. You can slave the Transit via SPDIF to an external clock. Doing this you'll make it for sure independent from the PC clock. You might call this asynchronous operation.
 
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