Mageia for pro audio

[eric71]

I've seen some discussions on the mailing lists about "sound tasks" and just wanted to give some first impressions of my early testing of recording with Mageia Beta 1. My case is a little unique in that I use Reaper (a Windows program) with Wine. So I suspect that performance with native Linux apps like Ardour and Rosegarden might be even better.

For my usual workflow I need a few things in a distro: A low latency (not necessarily RT) kernel, Jack2, Qjackctl, up to date Wine, wineasio, Timidity running as a daemon, and Audacity to edit the final result and export to mp3.

At this point a few of the packages weren't available from the Mageia repositories, but this is probably just due to them not being high on an everyday linux user's priority list. I needed to install Qjackctl, liblame (for Audacity), and timidity-init (timidity itself and freepats were available) from Mandriva 2010.2 packages. I'm sure by the time of release in June that these packages will be in the repos. Wine is up to date. I use a wineasio binary of my own that I just copy into /usr/lib/wine so that's not a big deal. A wineasio package available in the repos would be nice, though. Jack was up to date as well.

The kernel is probably the most important part, and as with previous experience with Mandriva 2010.2 has shown me, the TMB desktop kernel performs very well for my needs (I think even better now with 2.6.38). I've read some anectdotes on the web about low latency, BFS enabled kernels actually being better than RT kernels for Wine based audio work. I'm not sure if this is true, so YMMV for use with native Linux apps. All I can say is I recorded a song yesterday using as low latency as I've ever gotten with my hardware and had no xruns or glitches. I can actually get lower latencies on my hardware in Linux now than I can natively in Windows.

One other thing that had to be manually done was modifying /etc/security/limits.conf annd adding myself to the audio group - it's interesting to note that the Debian packages for Jackd1 or Jackd2 now automatically ask you during install if you'd like to enable real time permissions for Jack. This would simplify things if it were done in Mageia, but there are probably other ways to simplify this for audio users.

I'm looking forward to sticking with Mageia through the continued development and am interested in anybody else's experiences with Mageia for making music.

[stormi]

At this point a few of the packages weren't available from the Mageia repositories, but this is probably just due to them not being high on an everyday linux user's priority list. I needed to install Qjackctl, liblame (for Audacity), and timidity-init (timidity itself and freepats were available) from Mandriva 2010.2 packages. I'm sure by the time of release in June that these packages will be in the repos. Wine is up to date.

If you want to make sure they are, you should open one bug report per missing package at http://bugs.mageia.org so that packagers see your need.

One other thing that had to be manually done was modifying /etc/security/limits.conf annd adding myself to the audio group - it's interesting to note that the Debian packages for Jackd1 or Jackd2 now automatically ask you during install if you'd like to enable real time permissions for Jack. This would simplify things if it were done in Mageia, but there are probably other ways to simplify this for audio users.

If think you should open an enhancement bug report for this too, with as much useful information as possible to help the packagers to implement the best solution.

Thanks for the report !