Matt/Gordon/All.
(i'm sure gordon knows lots of this stuff, but some people perusing these forums might find it interesting. )
Hmm ... first things first ... I don't go out of my way to to keep up with what's happening in linux audio, or indeed in most of the areas I have worked over the years. Electronics and software just move too fast to try to cover everything. I know lots of stuff about radio systems, but only a little of that is still useful.
i thought that a distro with a low latency kernel is very important…logically…
for music production. but a recent linux post i saw from a linux user/tech suggested that
actually this is not necessarily true…so i'm confused gordon.
I think as things get quicker and quicker, kernel latency becomes less of an issue. No so long ago, a real-time kernel was re-riguer for audio, now it's less often used. Real-time kernels have their own issues. I suspect that a low-latency kernel is still of benefit, but it must be pretty marginal by now. I can get ping times over Ethernet within my home network well below 1ms. That's a low-latency kernel on this machine to my hub and (old) printer. I get sub 2ms over thew WiFi link to my auto-backup machine, which is an old ITX board with an Ethernet/WiFi adaptor. Older class USB interfaces can't do better that 2ms, but newer ones can.
Many years ago I was introduced to "Bernstein's Law":
"It ain't necessarily so". I try to keep it almost constantly in mind, because it applies to so much we read, hear, and think we know.
There's good advice here, though there are many ways to do things. On older laptop I had to turn off WiFi to get consistent performance ... on my newer one (around 2012, I suspect), I don't. Setting CPU to "performance" helps to avoid speed changes due to economy modes or heat, though if heat is an issue, deal with that directly. I try to have enough RAM that the PC doesn't even try to swap ... swapping costs time and also makes things inconsistent. My swap at present is zero, but I'm uncertain if it's feasible to get a history ... this is only a 8GM memory machine, but my new machine will probably be 32GB.
To be honest, I think many of the things suggested are mostly relevant if things aren't already fast enough. The things to balance mostly are latency against XRUNs, the latter indicate a failure to service a request on time. Often you can see XRUNs before you can hear there's a problem.
note i saw some people on reaps forum seem to be getting low 2.5 ms latency using linux… using a behr umc interface....
Some people just enjoy the process of tweaking. If it were me I wouldn't expect, or likely wouldn't even try, to get that low ... sub 10ms is enough for most purposes. And life is short.
There are several items in the 'non' toolset. It'll have moved on some from when I last used it and I'm not sure if I ever tried the DAW. The session-manager is interesting, though there are many ways to do things. I just used a start-up script on my previous system, which used to set up six desktops with various applications opened on specific desktops, so I could jump very quickly between mixer, DAW, qjackctl + patch-panel + a synthesiser, file manager, pdf-reader and so on.
A DAW on a Raspberry Pi would be quite interesting and impressive, and someone here ran BiaB in an ARM-based Win-11 on one too, but just because it can be done doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. There's horsepower aplenty on a PC, significantly less on a Raspberry Pi.
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