Having Trouble with Protools and Linux. 1067

After takin' a swig o' grog, flatfish+++ belched out this bit o' wisdom:

I called your statem bullpoo for two reasons:

1. Latency on linux can be pared pretty well

2. You present a rather amorphous claim (even the latency claim is subject to questions such as "latency in what context") saying that Linux is essentially useful for audio work, when lots of stuff is out there (even if there are indeed lacks and problems with Linux audio.)

What I would prefer to see is a giant matrix of scenarios-tasks-constraints by audio adapter. I'd expect the Windows one to be fairly full of checkmarks, but I would not expect the Linux one to be nearly empty.

And that's the problem with your statement above. The latency you're talking about here is basically a buffer size.

What's the smallest buffer size an OS can reliably play back under various load conditions?

Look, I don't think Linux is perfect. And, to be frank, the last time I did any serious audio work was in a lab, with Win 98 in control of a DSP card and a rack of audio-related modules, on a P-II 400 MHz machine. There was no way Win98 could handle what we needed -- timing accurate to a millisecond. So we had to depend on the (expensive) hardware to do it.

Today's machines can handle the loads better.

Another example: I used to play MIDI using timidity (MIDI-to-wave conversion on the fly) on a P-II 400. It worked. I tried it recently on a P-Pro 200. It would not work. Continual gaps in playback. With todays P-IV 3000's, things should go a lot better.

X also brings in problems. At least in my configuration, you can freeze up audio by holding onto a window long enough. So it sounds like I would indeed have work to do to use my systme for live playback.

Win 2000 improved the situation, and XP even more so.

I don't know. It's party marketing, partly support, and partly just the plain ubiquity of Windows.

I remember well the day when Atari ST was the machine. Linux is making strides. Eventually it will have vendors laboring hard to make sure their drivers work well with Linux and the low-latency kernel.

-- Kreegah! Bundolo Microsoft bolgani!