View Single Post
Old 02-14-2018, 08:20 AM   #371
Jack Winter
Human being with feelings
 
Jack Winter's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Luxembourg/Spain
Posts: 1,922
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by David Else View Post
I certainly don't want to turn Linux into Windows! I was mainly thinking of an easier way for users to install plugins and setup audio for the DAW with Jack/ALSA or Pulse.
I suppose in principle it's quite easy, but each distro has it's own package manager. On archlinux we've traditionally had few audio apps and plugins in the repos and people have had to build/install things from the so called aur. Mostly an automated process but still somewhat of a hassle. But we have a new packager that is aiming to bring most any audio software available into the repos. In principle it could be as easy as typing "pacman -S reaper distrho-vst", and you'd have reaper with some extra plugins installed. Then click on the reaper icon added to menuing system and bob is your uncle.

But package managing software tends to vary from distro to distro, in fact one of the things that distinguishes distros. Some are command line, some have a GUI, etc.

I think if we could get the main distros to provide a mechanism to easily configure rt/memlock privs and a way to automatically set the sound card interrupt priority, and then get repositories for most linux audio software we would be in a pretty good spot. In fact possibly better than windows, as there mostly is no need to trawl the internet to find a download for some binary we need, we just install it as any other software we normally use.

Of course once we step away from that, things get thornier... For instance to install u-he plugins, you have to download and extract multiple archives, then run the install.sh scripts, and finally realize that they aren't installed in /usr/lib/vst, but rather in ~/.vst instead... Though in the case of archlinux someone actually created build/install scripts for the aur, so you get them installed into (iirc) /opt and then symlinks created in /usr/lib/vst, so that would be quite similar to just installing packages from the manager and things just work.

Many other examples around where it's similar but the exact steps are different. On windows it's mostly surf until you find the download link, and run the graphical installer. Still many of us fiddle with the install in greater detail than this on windows too

For setting the soundcard interrupt automatically I have written a couple of scripts and udev rules, so that this happens automatically, but it got more complicated than I thought due to systemd/udev and I haven't finished it and pushed it. I am also working with the new archlinux packager, to get more audio related software into the main repos, to get the realtime kernel in there and to try to convince the distro of creating a realtime group. But of course seeing that this is a distro it sometimes ends in unforeseen problems and discussion with other people that don't agree, we'll see what the future brings on that point.

Getting active and doing something for your distro is of course the pragmatic solution, does more than just talking about what is wrong IIRC there used to be something called CCRMA for fedora, but don't know if that is very active anymore?

Also nowadays pulseaudio and jack do coexist and work quite well together, it's just a question of the distro setting it up properly. It's actually quite cool as for instance it's easy to pipe youtube audio into reaper via jack while playing guitar monitored through a software amp at low latency, something that isn't all that easy in the windows world. So in a certain sense we are already ahead of windows users...

But still in the end analysis I think anyone with no experience that decides to run linux will have to realize that there is a learning curve, and it might even mean having to learn how to use a terminal to input commands...
__________________
Reaper for Linux Documentation (WIP). Software: Archlinux/KDE, Fabfilter FX, Komplete 8, Nebula, Schwa/Stillwell, T-racks Max/Amplitube/SVX, etc. Gear: i7-2600k/4700HQ/16GB, RME Multiface/Babyface, Behringer X32, Genelec 8040, etc. :)
Jack Winter is offline   Reply With Quote