On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 18:57, Russell Hanaghan wrote: > > > > > > My question is this...how useful will it be in the big scheme of things? > > > I think Ive only read posts from like 2 or 3 other people that even > > > wanted to do this. Most seem to be creating music or recording it. I do > > > that to but not very much lately and thats not what this system is set > > > up for. > > > > Don't let other peoples apparent disinterest stop you. A good idea is a good > > idea. Don't think about the people who are up on things, think about the > > people who could use a killer rack on stage and have a used PC kicking > > around. > > I won't...thanks for the encouragement. I started with just that; a > spare pc and experimenting. Now granted it is only as my PA fx right now > but that is due only to lack of time and I can only experiment so much > before I approach the boundaries of danger...IE; Not having the box up > for the next gig! > My primary interest in Linux audio involves using it in a live setting. This is a lot closer to a hard realtime situation than recording, where you at least have a chance of trying it again. I think it's a much more interesting problem. It's also one that other general purpose OS'es have absolutely no chance of solving. The 2.6 kernel with Ingo's voluntary preemption patches should allow hard realtime type guarantees for audio use. As long as the ALSA driver is realtime safe (should be the case), and all interrupts except the soundcard are threaded (doable), and all jackd clients are also realtime safe (already required), and assuming no bugs (still working on it), then we have a hard realtime system. The types of timing guarantees we can provide would have to be determined by testing. Lee
