Incredible mess with Linux multimedia

There is a bunch of computers in our lab which I was tasked with setting up for music production. The original idea was to research site linuxmusician.com and follow their writeups and FAQs.

Initially I had some success but things never were stable. With time machines one after another stopped playing and capturing music one way or the other. I felt like a boy tasked with putting out forest fire with a screwdriver.

Incredible mess with Linux multimedia

There is a bunch of computers in our lab which I was tasked with setting up for music production. The original idea was to research site linuxmusician.com and follow their writeups and FAQs.

Initially I had some success but things never were stable. With time machines one after another stopped playing and capturing music one way or the other. I felt like a boy tasked with putting out forest fire with a screwdriver.

There is one, which has Audigy2 sound card installed into a motherboard with onboard codec, whose optical SPDIF is connected to a home theatre system. One day sound thru SPDIF works, another day it switches to Audigy2 being default.

Another machine is a MIDI station with Yamaha keyboard connected via USB. Initially set up it captured notes into Rosegarden, then suddenly stopped.

All problems were ultimately solved by installing XP on the first machine and you will never guess what onto the second. It was Windows 98SE and it works perfect rock solid until now.

The amount of time spent troubleshooting Linux multimedia - terribly lagging Pulseaudio, incredibly complicated Jack and unstable ALSA - costs much more than price of the Windows OS.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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