Advice: USE LINUX

[skweeks]

I've been into homerecording now for a couple of months and i've been using my comp to mix down onto in windows with various programs that were either demo's, shareware, or (on a RARE occasion) freeware. I've also been using linux & freebsd for a couple years and i just made the connection of all this audio software for linux, and like 90% of all linux stuff is free and open source... ecasound is a hella good multitrack program for linux (well, i only have a basic shitty soundblaster16 card so i can't test all that well) it's laid out nice, has lot's of options, and has all the nice features you'd expect for something free plus a lot more... i don't have KDE installed but the KDE harddisk recorder is supposed to be good (it's free), multitrack 2.2 for linux keeps crashing on me (then again i have a 100mhz) but works really really well for the 5 minutes it works... also there are lots of other random FREE audio programs like drum machines (xdrum is great), effects, mastering tools, and the like... so, definately, if you are at least somewhat decent with computers and have some time, install linux (www.redhat.com, www.slackware.com, www.linux.org, etc) and do everything free

 

[sonusman]

And get what you pay for.

Dude, I have been playing around with some of the best rated mastering software on the market, and it is still a far cry from a ProTools, or Paris system for audio.

None of the reputable manufactures have developed for Linux yet. You know why? Neither do I, but there is a good bet that Linux might have far too many bugs in it to hold up under the heavy use of multi-track recording, or processor based processing.

Free is a very good price indeed. But at what price? Will people who do stuff for free go to the great pains to assure quality? Where is the incentive for them to develope products that actually work well?

Not trying to bash you here dude. It is just that you admit to using a SB 16 card, and probably have not done any extensive recording on your Linux setup that compares to a ProTool or Paris type system. I have not heard any of your work. Until then, I will hold your opinions of using a un-tried OS and it's Freeware for working with .wav or AIFF files. Also, my software does not crash my system, EVER!!! I use Windows NT, which is the preferred OS for serious music recording.

Peace.

Ed Rei
Echo Star Studio www.echostarstudio.com

 

[skweeks]

well.. to reply... linux, i can garuntee will crash less than any windows based os... i figured out why multitrack 2.2 was crashing on me, just a compatibility glitch, i gotta compile another lib... well the reason, as far as i can tell, that many major corps haven't developed for linux yet is that it is a very personalized os that you build up yourself with what kind of window manager (if you even want xwindows at all) you want, what libs, what sound support etc so it is hard to make software that is compatible with everything if you don't understand linux very well.. however, the fact that it IS a personalized os means that once you do get things working it will work better for ya... i don't know all the stats off hand, but linux is always going to be faster on a pentium than windows 95/98/nt/2000... that's a pretty big boast yes, but it is true... i, on my 100mhz box with 80 megs of ram got 22 tracks going on ecasound.. plus, almost all linux software is opensource, so, if you can program, or even understand programming, you can easily edit programs to your own liking... however, i will admit, that currently (and probably not for much longer with the rate linux software is developing) i have no doubt there are better high end windows or mac apps than the hight end linux apps... no beef there...

 

[skweeks]

okay... you guys are just plain wrong saying that linux sucks linux doesn't have any software, blah blah... sorry to burst your bubble but win isn't better... whoever it was that said that the companies weren't getting into it because of the money you hit the nail on the head, that's pretty much it.. the software industry thrives on money and people who'll pay it, and until they can find weird ways to make money of linux, it'll be for the diehard fans, not the mass amounts of people who have their mind closed to new ideas (no offense)...

corel software has wordperfect for linux
one of the major encyclopedia's has released for linux (compton's or another one, i don't remember)
dell is shipping with linux option
ibm is now going to make all of their software linux compliant
linux was always y2k compliant
linux can run most DOS and windows .exe's with the use of wine (a win emulator basically)

.... reeeeeeeally substandard to win huh?

as far as sound support... http://www.opensound.com/ is all i gotta say, it supports TONS of cards and runs on linux, bsd, solaris, etc... http://www.opensound.com/osshw.html is the list of what oss supports, just scroll down till ya see the list of a few hundres brands and models... OSS even autodetects a bunch of stuff...
check out http://www.alsa-project.org/soundcards.html for what alsa supports... see, the companies who make the cards don't have to make linux device drivers things like OSS and ALSA already support the cards!

for video check out http://heroine.linuxbox.com/ for quicktime for linux, broadcast 2000 (video editing, 24 bit sound...), etc...

effects? check out http://www.epita.fr:8000/~bempel_j/ViaGratt/ a guitar rack simulator for linux... a lot of it's page is in french but that's not a major problem...


(check out http://www.linuxapps.com/?page=category&category=audio for lots but not all of the linux sound programs availalble)

 

[Emeric]

I was looking into this a few weeks ago. There are no decent products available for Linux when it comes to recording. Zero.

Aside from that, very few (almost zero) of the hardware manufactures write drivers for Linux.

I also checked out BeOs. It looks promising, but again like Linux any promises of decent recording software is vapourware.

Maybe someday, but in the meantime I'm stuck using 98.

 

[sonusman]

Emeric, you should really look into NT 4.0. Ask Slackman. He switched for recording purposes and has not regretted doing so. He dual boots which is in his case excessive, but, I can understand why he does. The thing is, if the soundcard and software work on NT, it is probably extremely stable.

skweeks, half the reason that linux works so well is that it doesn't really do anything. The level of safistication at this point does not come close to Windows OS. Emeric is right when he says that their is not really any high quality software for the OS, and there is probably a good reason for it.

Yes, I have read up on Linux. It does appear on the surface to be promising. But at this point, there has not been any real serious recording/mixing/mastering software developed for it to really test that OS is very rigorous environments. If you are getting done what you need to get done with it, well, great! But, I doubt that you are getting done what I can do with my NT workstation. I doubt that the software will keep up with the more simple stuff I am currently using. Hell, I haven't even go into the really cool stuff yet. Too expensive for me right now.

Also, the driver issue is very real. Did you know that a lot of sound cards out there do not have NT drivers? You know why? Because NT requires control of all software to hardware functions. This is the reason that NT is such a stable OS. That is why it don't crash.

Good luck with Linux. Really, I hope that it developes into a more widely used OS and that more products develope fot it. It would be nice to have a viable challenger to MS.

Ed

 

[sonusman]

Also, who the hell has the time to learn programming?!?!?!?!?!? Hell, all my spare time is used up trying to learn all of my app's.

 

[MrLip]

Disappointing to see the lack of support for linux.

"half the reason that linux works so well is that it doesn't really do anything". This is very... well.. let's just say erroneous. With the exceptions of the user interface and compatibility, anything windows can do linux can do better, and in fact, linux can do alot of things that windows has never dreamed of.

At the same time, what IS DEFINATELY true is that there is that there isn't much software for linux. Although, this is NOT the OS's fault. I'm no expert but I'd bet that it has something to do with everything linux related being 'free'. Why would a big software company invest when they're pricing may be limited by the market competition?

LINUX is much more stable, more powerful, and more resource efficient than windows.

Too bad there's no software for it.

Despite all my praise to linux, I'm a windows user. HA.

We are SLAVES to microsoft because all the big companies write their software for shitty OSes like WINDOWS. They have the money so they control the market.

I guess the only way to break free would be to WRITE YOUR OWN SOFTWARE

YEAH RIGHT


Cheers.

PS: after reading the posts about NT, i'm thinking about switching from win98. I never thought about using winNT but now that it has been brought to my attention it sounds like a good idea.

Will cakewalk9 run on NT?

 

[sonusman]

It sure will, and so will any other self respecting app. I think that your whole windows experience will change drastically after you use NT. I used 95 with all the service packs and upgrades, and it still crashed hard from the variety of software I was using.

NT limitations. You can use Direct X plugins, but that is it. Well, you can get that VST skin to use VST's as Direct X.

Anyway, you should check your sound card to make sure that it has a NT drive. You would be surprised how many don't!!! What a shame that a lot of hardware cannot be made compliant to run on a really good OS like this.

This whole Linux thing. Well, when I see some really intense app's that run on it, complete with hardware that is worth a shit, I will believe it. It is so easy to make claims, as many do with Linux, but the proof is in the pudding. If it is such a wonderful OS I would think that at least ONE of the software companies that deal with the high end stuff would have written for it. Especially in the case of open code. You see, the legal issues of getting MS code is enormous. It is quite expensive to do.

Music recording is a very specialized field. The broad base of users is not their like in word processors. So my point is that anybody doing music production could care less what OS they are using if it runs well. In fact, the day that someone can prove to me that another OS is going to be a lot better than NT (aside from Mac stuff... ) I will be switching. Of course, drivers and killer apps need to be available. But you see, none of the software/hardware companies have stepped up to write for Linux. Do you really think that they haven't looked at it? Do you really think that if it was superior to Windows that at least one of them would have jumped on the bandwagon and started writing for it? Come on!!! Every company is looking for the edge. If Linux provides that edge for music production, and it is so much easier to use, one of them would have been on it by now. Like I say, professionals would jump all over a app/sound card duo that was superior on a PC than what is available for for Windows.

So we will see. I am sure that eventually, Linux will make it's way into our little obscure corner of PC use. And when it does, we will see just how much better it actually is.

Ed

 

[Emeric]

sonusman: There are no NT drivers for my card, that I'm aware of. (aark 20/20). But, I am running win98 lite, which is a stripped down 98, No I.E. integration and a ton less crap (install down to <70MB).

This setup is very stable, and I honestly do not crash. I explored the NT option, but no hardware driver for my setup. I triple boot Win98 for 3D shoot-em-up's and internet crap, Win98 stripped down for Cubase and other audio apps, and another boot for Vegas if I ever get it working.

skweeks: I don't think anyone said Linux sucks (although Corel Linux does, I loaded that bloated peice of shit up the other night, as usual everything Corel touches turns to dust like the rest of their second rate MS reverse-engineered products). It's just that there are no quality multitrackers available. Quality being something like Cakewalk or Cubase, Vegas etc.. I did look at some of the Linux multitrackers, but they just do not offer anywhere near the features that the previously mentioned do.

I hope to hell that someday BeOs and/or Linux become a viable OS for a recording enviroment. I have no allegiance to MS Win9X, in fact I hate it - it sucks!. But this is the reality for my situation.

 

[Layth]

Emeric, sounds like a lot of the card and software manufactures are getting on the BeOS's bandwagon. Boy would that be great!

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Yeah, Linux is pretty nice. And no it's not nice because nothing runs on it. Many companies are turning to Linux over other flavors of Unix because of price & performance. However, I was reading about some security issues a year or two ago, not sure if that's still a concern...and it certainly doesn't apply to this discussion.

The funny thing is that most people who love linux don't really know why they love linux. I've run Solaris 2.6 (anyone else snag that while it was free to developers?), OSF/2, Linux, WinNT, Win95, DOS, a wee bit of MacOS, etc, etc. Each has its own little benefits, but reliability and performance are not the issue when it comes to home computing.

Linux, or any unix flavor, is a nice development platform. Lots of great tools and some really nice window managers. Free software galore too which is always nice. But then you really do spend most of your time setting it up...even with the latest offerings from Redhat and similar companies. You play with it, screw with it, feel all important...but in the end you find that you didn't really NEED it. Honestly, if you needed it you'd know it. (and that's NOT saying that it's useless by ANY means. I am a fan of linux)

On the flipside, Windows95 really sucks! Or does it? Sure I can write a few lines of code that'll pretty much take it out, but overall it's not that bad. You use it to browse the web...IE crashes and you blame windows...you use it to play a game...the game crashes and you blame windows....you use it to write a letter...word crashes and you blame windows. But by the end of the day you've pretty much accomplished what you wanted to, and fairly quickly. And if you really knew what the hell you were doing, you could find out why you had those problems and you could fix them....just like you'd fix a problem in Linux...but you don't want to take the time. Few do.

So you need something a little bit more robust? Can't handle the faults of Windows95? Me neither. So do you run out and buy linux and try to learn a whole new OS and a whole new set of applications? Hell no, you go out and you buy NT4. Same interface...same applications (for the most part)...less rebooting....less reinstalling...great performance...

This is where things get funny. People will claim that Linux is better than NT but most have no clue why. Performance? Well, let's see your benchmarks that will interest ME...or let's see HOW you benchmarked two completely different OS's. And performance in what? Running your word processor? Playing one of the few games available to Linux? Recording music in some little-used application that may or may not have the features of the big applications? And reliablility? What the hell are you doing that you need such high standards of reliability? I've had NT Server (with a full load) up for so long that I WANTED it to crash just so I'd have a reason to take it down for maintenance. I've had NT Workstation run for months without having to reboot it a single damn day. I've seen OSF/2 crash and my work disappear. I've seen Linux applications crash a plenty. I've seen a macintosh machine that made a Win3.1 box look good. Point being that most of the time it boils right down to the user and what they're capable of (both CON and DE structively).

So what are the biggest benefits of using Linux to the average PC user? a) it's a challenge b) it looks and handles like a dream and c) people might think you know something extra special. Really. It has nothing to do with performance and reliability. If people in here were using linux because they NEEDED it, then they wouldn't be arguing. The fact that Linux fanatics bash windows so often is just evidence of the reason they love linux so much. Feels pretty good to fight the good fight eh? regardless of how silly it may be.

Let's face it. We're in here talking about recording applications. We might be "trapped" in the big "Windows Conspiracy", but who cares. What's really important is that capitolism drives productivity. We are interested in application and hardware developement and that's going to happen on the Windows and Macintosh (to some extent) platforms whether you like it or not. If you're a computer whiz testing advanced distributed algorithms for your university...you'll be using Unix. If you're some dude who just graduated from a typewriter and wants to use the latest greatest software and hardware you just read about in magazine X...you'll be using Windows. No need gettin all stinky about it.

The good news? Windows 2000. Solid NT core with better options. Hell, they're even trying to straighten out DLL HELL. (FINALLY) It'll be nice...even though it'll totally suck.

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Ranger]

I think y'all should be ashamed!!!!! Quit bashing poor Linux. He always plays a mean piano in those Charlie Brown specials!
Ranger

 

[MrLip]

yeah man
Linus got all the chicks too.

Musicians Rock.