{"id":247,"date":"2012-01-11T16:27:37","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T22:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alandmoore.com\/blog\/?p=247"},"modified":"2012-01-12T11:46:25","modified_gmt":"2012-01-12T17:46:25","slug":"reviving-my-home-studio-this-time-the-free-software-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alandmoore.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/11\/reviving-my-home-studio-this-time-the-free-software-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Reviving my home studio, this time the free software way"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long ago, before I ever knew a lick of BASH or even what an OS kernel was, my passion was not technology but\u00a0music<\/a>, music<\/a>, and more music<\/a>. \u00a0Roughly the first half of my adult life was devoted to the writing, playing, and recording of music, and by around 2002 I’d built for myself a tidy little home recording & mixing setup centered on Cakewalk Sonar, Jeskola Buzz, and Windows XP. \u00a0Alas, the years were not kind to my career or gear, and up until recently my music computer was busy being a game & education machine for the kids.<\/p>\n

Thanks to a hard drive crash and the purchase of new machines for the kids, I got my old music machine back, albeit lacking a functioning operating system and software. \u00a0So, I decided now was a good time to rebuild it. \u00a0This time, though, I decided the time was right to kick XP and Cakewalk to the curb and go it Free Software style.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’d tried this before, probably around 2006 or so, and not had much luck getting a working system. \u00a0Still, I figured that between my significantly advanced penguin-fu and the advancing state of free software, the time might just be right for my dream FLOSS DAW to become reality.<\/p>\n

The hardware<\/h1>\n

The computer itself is a 1.8GHz Sempron system; due to some problems with the RAM slots which I’ve never successfully figured out, the system is limited to 512MB of RAM. \u00a0It originally had a 40 GB IDE drive for Windows, to which I’d since added an 80 GB SATA for data storage and an Xubuntu install. \u00a0This latter drive is what failed, and I replaced it with a 160 Gb SATA. \u00a0The original XP install isn’t booting for some reason, and I’m not real motivated to find out why at this point.<\/p>\n

The audio interface is a M-audio Delta 44, capable of 4 ins and 4 outs at 24bit\/96kHz I\/O. \u00a0Nice unit back in the day, hard to believe it’s over 10 years old.<\/p>\n

For MIDI, I have an ancient<\/em>\u00a0MOTU MIDI Micro-express — so ancient it hooks up using the parallel port and shipped with drivers for that new-fangled Windows 95. \u00a0Still, MIDI hasn’t changed much in its almost 30 year existence, so I was hoping to keep this piece running as the cost of fully replacing its feature set (even just the parts I use) would be steep.<\/p>\n

The OS and Hardware Configuration<\/h1>\n

There are readily available “studio in a box” distributions of Linux out there, but with such\u00a0egregiousness\u00a0RAM limitations, I couldn’t afford to waste many resources on the OS; even so, I wanted to make sure I had easy access to as much software as possible. \u00a0So I went with Lubuntu. \u00a0I get along alright with LXDE, and all the software available to Ubuntu Studio is readily available in the stock repositories.<\/p>\n

In fact, it was easy enough to install all the Ubuntu Studio applications using tasksel and various meta-packages in the repositories, so after poking around in Synaptic and a good long download-fest, my hard drive was chock full of enough music-making software to keep me entralled for months.<\/p>\n

I had a lot of problems with high CPU usage — even full spikes lasting several minutes — \u00a0at first, which was disappointing but not really surprising. \u00a0But then I grabbed a lowlatency kernel from Alessio Bogani’s PPA<\/a>\u00a0and adjusted the audio system (JACK) from about 11 msec of latency to around 3 msec and all that high CPU usage went away. \u00a0It took some fiddling to get the legacy NVIDIA driver to work with the lowlatency kernel, but it was well worth the trouble: \u00a0Even with multiple programs running, software synths, and realtime effects, the CPU stays around 50% utilization!<\/p>\n

The Delta 44 worked pretty much out of the box with no problems, though LXDE’s volume widget didn’t know what to do with it. \u00a0I installed the Envy24 mixer, which is basically a clone of m-audio’s mixer applet for Windows. \u00a0It allows me to access all the same functions and works flawlessly.<\/p>\n

The MOTU piece was another story. \u00a0I almost didn’t even try to get it working, because my last foray into this endeavor proved utterly hopeless. \u00a0There is <\/em>a Linux driver for the micro express, but I could never get it working right. \u00a0I was close to dropping $40 on a USB interface with only one set of I\/O, when I figured I’d do a search to see if there was any progress.<\/p>\n

I found someone who claimed to have my exact model working, which convinced me that it must be possible, and therefore not to give up. \u00a0After digging through several old mailing list and forum conversations and spending several hours making tweaks and testing, I finally found the combination of voodoo to get things going. \u00a0Turns out the imporant keys are:<\/p>\n