Anyone tried Studio To Go?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Somnium7
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Somnium7

Somnium7

Noise Criminal
For quite some time now I have been really itching to try Linux for audio work. However it seems like I can never manage to find the time for the involved setup process.
I just came across this suite which claims to run right off the CD with no setup at all.
http://www.ferventsoftware.com/

Has anybody here tried this out?
 
I have installed Agnula, 64Studio, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Dynebolic, and all of them had a similar, easy to understand setup procedure. Ubuntustudio is coming soon as well (I hope.. It should come this month, but has been delayed).

As for the software, I can tell you that Rosegarden is a good midi/audio sequencer, and Ardour is a great one for audio. The sound is very good, some says its better than asio thru windows.

Alsa Modular Synth is just wonderful if your into parameter tweaking. Just dont expect easy ways to load Akai samples, VST plugins or any other proprietary stuff. If you are just recording audio and processing it, my bet is that all the distros which contains Ardour and JackRack will do the trick, and that your results should be very good.

Best Regards
Rødrev
 
No luck getting the Studio to go demo to run on my machine at all. It goes through all the paces and appears to be alright till it says launching single-user desktop. Then the screen goes blank and no more activity on any of the drives. Pretty disapointing after all the work getting the CD burned properly - not to mention the long DL.

Thanks for the info Rødrev. I've read good things about Ubuntu and Rosegarden makes me drool when I see the screenies. I'm curious what setup are you using now (hardware + distro)?

Also, how much mileage could I expect from a dual PIII system with a gig of RAM?
 
I recommend that you try the Live-CD version of Agnula if its still available. If both distros dont load, you probably have some hardware that needs work. Best supported cards are RME and Maudio. (And soundblaster Live/EMU10K1-cards).

A great place for info is http://www.linux-sound.org/

At the moment im stuck with windows, as I am working on old projects utilizing Reason (I do not make Reason-music, I just used the samples for sketching Ideas). Ive tried many distros, but used Agnula the most. When Im done in windows, I hope that Ubuntustudio is out. If not, Ill go for 64Studio.

Ive also used Cubase ALOT, and have recorded and mixed with Protools in what is considered good quality studios around here. I cant speak much for stability in the various Linux distros, but the sounds seems to me just as professional, and the graphical interface invites to a more open, flexible and intuitive way of working digital.

My setup is a Athlon64 3000+, 1.5Gb Ram, Maudio Delta 1010Lt. Ive run Protools, Cubase and Ardour smoothly on it. Ive been going over to tracking analog lately, so the DAW becomes more and more a sketching pad. When my (small) studio is done, I will be offering "clients" a DAW with Free Software.

As for performance, much of it is up to your Audio Interface. Maudio and RME is recommended, and PCI is generally more "plug and play" (so Ive heard.) I have run several effects in JackRack, made samples in Specimen, singletracked in Ardour and recorded midi in Rosegarden with a P3 500Mhz, 380Mb Ram and a crappy Soundblaster "Vibra" PCI 128.
 
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Thanks again for the helpful info Rødrev.

From poking around I see that I certainly have missed the bus with agnula. There is mention of the Debian multimedia project but no real info available at this time.
Ubuntustudio does sound enticing but it's a little disturbing that the wiki you're sent to from the main page has no working links.

I guess I'll just have to roll my own. I've been building and working with command line Linux webservers for years now so I guess i shouldn't worry so much.

btw: how do you like that Maudio Delta 1010Lt? I've had my eye on it's bigger brother for some time now.
 
Somnium7 said:
Thanks again for the helpful info Rødrev.
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You are welcome. Im kind of new to Linux DAW myself, but one has to share what one has found out.
Somnium7 said:
Ubuntustudio does sound enticing but it's a little disturbing that the wiki you're sent to from the main page has no working links.
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I have seen so, it wasnt like that some time ago. But they give a good excuse for it, and promise to have it working soon. I bet they are working to hard on the dist to have the time to update the wiki :)
Somnium7 said:
btw: how do you like that Maudio Delta 1010Lt? I've had my eye on it's bigger brother for some time now.
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I like it very much. Have been using it for three years now, and never had ANY kind of problem because of the interface or the software.

I have spent hours recording both 8 and 10 tracks at the same time, sync seems very good, preamps are ok as well. I couldnt hear any difference between my 1010Lt and a RME Fireface. (Many will disagree to this I bet).

I wish I had more basic skills in Linux like you. If you succeed in rolling up your own distro, please keep us updated about it :) Good Luck with it!
 
I'd really recommend staying away from Linux as a DAW OS for now. There are too many issues to work out. Only a few realtime/low-latency kernels have been made, some of which prove to be unstable. Ardour/JACK can be tedious to set up if you're working with a ton of tracks. Ardour is still extremely unstable (it corrupted my project within 2 hours of tracking. Totally refused to load anything on the project, even the backups). Maybe Ubuntu Studio will fix some of these issues but I think it's going to be a bit of time before Linux for DAW work is practical.
 
timthetortoise said:
I'd really recommend staying away from Linux as a DAW OS for now. There are too many issues to work out. Only a few realtime/low-latency kernels have been made, some of which prove to be unstable. Ardour/JACK can be tedious to set up if you're working with a ton of tracks. Ardour is still extremely unstable (it corrupted my project within 2 hours of tracking. Totally refused to load anything on the project, even the backups). Maybe Ubuntu Studio will fix some of these issues but I think it's going to be a bit of time before Linux for DAW work is practical.
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My experience is that with a little patience and TLC it works stable and well. There are several studios that runs only on Linux. Why recommend someone staying away from progress?

There are many reasons Linux DAW could be unstable. Altho it runs "out of the box" one must make sure that the system has discovered your hardware correctly, and that the distro has the best driver for it (Sounds like any other, familiar OS?). My point being is that the distros certainly needs some aligning to your system, just as windows needs it. If a person has the knowledge to do so, why shouldnt he? :confused:

But you are absolutely right there are issues. One thing one a Linux user must endore is to live with them, and to help out correct them. That is the beauty of Free Software :)
 
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timthetortoise said:
Ardour is still extremely unstable (it corrupted my project within 2 hours of tracking.
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Which distro did you use? Was it "pre set up" with Alsa and Jack, or did you include it yourself?
timthetortoise said:
Maybe Ubuntu Studio will fix some of these issues
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Amen to that!
 
I tried 64studio and then did my own Debian setup with an RT kernel, same thing happened both times. Even if it hadn't corrupted the project(s), the layout was still not by any means user-friendly and I found myself fumbling around for things that should have been right in front of me. I'll probably be sticking with Reaper and TinyXP for awhile (unless Ubuntu Studio is making leaps and bounds above current distros/programs, which I highly doubt). Every single one of my workstations runs Linux or a BSD variant, but for the DAW, it's got to be Windows right now. Too much stuff to get done without having to solve issues in Linux.

EDIT: And I've been an avid *nix user for years. I compile my own kernels, make absolutely sure there are no compatibility issues, all that jazz. My DAW system was, in theory, set up as perfect as it could get. I guess the weak link was Ardour and the LADSPA architecture in general (I'm a VST aficionado). I'm curious as to why I can do 96khz/24bit audio in Windows with barely 2% CPU usage and no xruns, and with JACK I get around 2 xruns per hour and close to 20% CPU usage. Even with a kernel stripped of unnecessaries and optimized for my architecture, this stuff was still happening. Maybe I should be looking into writing a patch for my system alone? Who knows. Seems like too much work to support open-source on a system that can do everything I need already.
 
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