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Old 01-29-2013, 08:13 PM   #20
Gooey
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Posts: 25
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Quote:
Originally Posted by zardoz View Post
Hey, just a couple of thoughts:

Re. effects, the beauty of recording in Windows (and Linux) is the sheer number of free plugins, many of which are much better than the paid ones. Check out KVR Forums, it's overwhelming what's out there.

Re. Linux, in your case I can see it working well. There's a project called KXStudio that has Reaper preconfigured in WINE to work with Jack, so all the tedious setup is done. VSTs work fine, and the latency is just unreal. KX is available as a distro, but most people just apply the PPAs to their fave OS (Just Ubuntu derivatives and Arch for now.)JACK is frankly a real bitch to deal with, but the routing possibilities and latency are incredible, especially when you throw a realtime kernel into the mix. Check out the discussion at LinuxMusicians forum if interested.

Re. latency, I feel it's overrated as a potential problem. My machine is only average but I often have multiple guitars going, each with multiple plugins, and my CPU doesn't come close to maxing out. If I ever run out of headroom it won't kill me to freeze a track or two. And as I say, if 2ms latency is a problem, just step 2 feet closer to your amp. When using headphones, computer latency actually beats reality, so I can't figure out why people make such a big deal about it.
Well, Windows-specific plug-ins aren't the way I want to go. Right now I AM running a couple of Windows machines - one as my main DAW, another as a secondary one, mostly for MIDI stuff (like keyboard and drum pad controllers). But I spend a lot more time with Reaper, running on a Mac Mini that I use mainly for e-mail. I find that to be the most convenient spot to ingest (mostly mono and stereo) recordings into the LAN server for archival purposes. I spent many years wrangling Windows systems. But when I quit that business, I swore them off. OS X has been my easiest-to-live-with OS since, though I'm not all that thrilled with it either. Back in my youth, I was an EE/CS major at the University of California. In that environment, I lived in a Unix world. So I've long thought that transitioning to Linux would be fairly easy. But so far, the Linux world has seemed pretty opaque to me. What I'd like would be for some Linux-savvy person to come out here (where I live in the country) and immerse me in it for awhile.

To tell you the truth, I'd be happy to wash my hands of Windows entirely, and keep Macs around mainly for running mainstream apps like Adobe stuff, do media creation work, iPad/iPhone UI design, etc. But do everything else (programming for embedded system product design, etc.) on Linux. But I'd need to get very deeply steeped in Linux to feel entirely comfortable with that. And basically, life is too short. Which brings me back to why I came here in the first place - to figure out a way to make a Reaper DAW replace stomp boxes for my rockabilly (and other) guitar antics. Delay-based effects being used in realtime like I want to do, are probably the least vulnerable things in all the software universe, in terms of having latency matter.
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