Jonathan E. Brickman wrote: > >> Just wondering. Without an RT kernel here, my 2 laptops seem to run my >> simple audio needs pretty well at 64msec latency. At least, it's never >> bothered my playing along with computer-generated audio. >> >> I don't do any heavy-duty audio work here. Once I tried Jackrack, put >> one effect in it (that worked) or one amplifer (that worked) but trying >> to use both didn't. But I don't know if that had so much to do with >> latency or lack of RT kernel as with a smallish amount of memory and an >> underpowered processor driving the whole thing. Now that I''ve upgraded >> the memory on both laptops, perhaps it would work? On musicbox, with >> 512MB, using a single good quality (larger) soundfont was enough to >> cause problems. With 768MB in it, it works without problems. >> >> I see people on the list running much lower latencies than 64msec, and >> seemingly trying to get even lower ... >> >> So, just wondering. >> > Depends entirely on specifically what you're trying to do. I'm using my > setup as a live-gig MIDI module, in the sense that when I play a note on > my keyboard, it sends noteon/noteoff via MIDI to the box, which either > (a) puts out that note as close to zero-latency as possible or (b) > delays everything, which hurts live cohesion in many ways, not the least > being my fellow band-members taking cues from the positions my fingers > are in. That's sort of what musicbox is headed for. > It's true that RAM and CPU are both needed if you're going to use your > laptop for effects. A good sound system can ease the CPU needs some, > but not much in the effects zone. Apart from MIDI event processing, > soundfonts are actually perhaps the least resource-intensive > music-generation task in my current experience, as long as your sound > system is reasonably tweaked, except some simple sound synthesis tasks > in well-written code, e.g., some organ-only simulators. Sophisticated > sound synthesis will eat your CPU alive (that's why I bought this AMD > X4), as will anything but the simplest effects setup. > > Which brings me to a 'hmmm'. CPU. GPU? :-) Not yet, but we can pray > for it :-) CPU in musicbox is a 2.8GHz Celeron processor. Not the Celeron M, the non-M version. The "GPU" is old Intel 8xx series junk, and probably the source of about half of the xrum problems ... I tried a music distro on it that used KDE3 with Compiz, and having any of the video effects turn on would peg the CPU and bring sound processing to a silent halt. -- David gnome@xxxxxxxxxxxxx authenticity, honesty, community _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
