Low latency kernel for sound editing

Hi all...

I'm an amateur drummer and have been investigating a low-cost settup for recording music in my basement. Nothing fancy, but I want to be able to record practice sessions and email tracks to friends so they can lay down guitar, bass and vocal tracks over it. (or just play along)

I have a P-III 800 MHz HP-Pavillion from about 4 years ago that will probably become the guinea pig for this experiment... I also have not gone as far as picking up a midi interface or mixer yet...

I've read about running a "low latency" kernel with audacity and a few other apps but I know very little about this...

Is there a precompiled distro out there that is already set up to do what I want? Or a good tutorial about how to do this?

Keep in mind that I'm a computer newbie... and have only dabbled in Linux for about a year (SuSE, Mandrake, Vector, Lindows, Debian, etc)

I'd prefer to stick with Debian because I really dig apt... but I suppose any direction would work.

I'm not afraid of the command line, but I tend to sit with a book open and copy commands from it...

If anybody has any insight it would be greatly appreciated...

Thx
nube

Debian is probably the easiest one to compile your own kernel for. They have the low latency patchs for 2.4.x kernels.

"They have the low latency patchs for 2.4.x"

- I'm off to Google...

Thanks

I also managed to find this...

http://www.agnula.org/

In a couple hours I'll have ISO's to play with...

That link look's pretty good, but......

Just grab Slackware 9.1 and the 2.6.4 kernel. Then grab :

Ardour - http://ardour.org/

RoseGarden - http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

and finally

Audicity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ You don't even need low latency for this one.

And for the fun of it, a nice page with links to linux music....
http://www.zicweb.com/scripts/get.php?i=31&lg=us&t=2

I too am a drummer and also messed around with Linux audio. The setup above worked amazing and the quality rocked! Literally! :-)

Nice!

Slackware huh? I could live with that

What hardware did you use? I have microphones and what-not, but I'm just starting to look into a mixer, etc...

I was thinking a simple midi mixer and then drop that into the PC via Soundblaster Audigy 2. Tho I haven't checked ASLSA to find out if the midi interface there is supported.

The local music shops carry all kinds of goodies for Windows machines and Mac... but nothing for Linux.

Dynebolic might be worth looking at. Dunno what it's latency is like though.

http://www.dynebolic.org/

Check out planet CCRMA. It might give you some good ideas on how to set up an audio workstation.

I looked into Dyne:bolic, but it has a lot of other multimedia stuff that I don't need...

I'll check out the link to CCRMA, thanks!

CCRMA looks nifty, but I'm not a big Red Hat fan... or Fedora for that matter.

Never could get core 1 to work right...

i've been using the low latency patches for 2.4.XX for over a year, and they work well.
search for Con Kolivas patches i think.

nube, i was using an on board CMedia 8738 sound chip. Nothing really fancy. I know i could do a lot more with all of the hardware out there (and yes i mean for linux) but obviously money and space come into play. I used all my coin for my current box. My other computer (than one i use for music) is a AMD 2000Xp, 512ram, GF MX440 64meg, CMedia sound chip and Slackware 9.1 with a 2.6.4 low latency kenrel. But after looking at all of this stuff again, i started wonder what i could do with my current setup. I want to see my 64bit screaming with 64 tracks - all at once! :-))

Oh one more program you might want to check out, it's for drumming and i found it kind of cool for just laying in a beat when i didn't feel like actually getting up and playing it myself. You know what i mean. For a simple guitar track or to get ideas down. The program is called Hydrogen. You might have heard of it, but here it is. http://hydrogen.sourceforge.net/ Very cool program.

Will do...

Since I have time and patience I'm going to try Slack and the AGNULA Debian version and see what happens...

I've also found some easily downloadable patches for Deb similar to CCRMA for Red Hat...

So I have lots of options with the s'ware - hopefully one of them will work on the old P-III box I want to use.

Still not sure about hardware tho... maybe that's for a different forum...?

I added a thread in the hardware forum here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=165376

... regarding mixers, sound cards etc.

Phorem -

I've heard of Hyrdrogen, but haven't checked it out...

I'll get on it now. And a CMedia sound chip, cool.

How are you running the microphones in? Do you use a mixer or are you using an adaptor to your line in?