Reaper. Linux, and a journey of discovery...

[Alex Stone]

After taking the plunge and deciding to install linux on the box, alongside vista, i offer the following.

My install distro of choice was originally JAD, as much to support the efforts of people who are trying to bring together a total audio solution, as an interest in seeing how far linux has come.
Sadly, and i assume because of my inexperience with linux, I couldn't get this going at all. Install stalled, and wouldn't play with my amd64 dual core. Graphics vanished, and the programme just wouldn't play.
I continue to offer these chaps my support and encouragement, and hope that new linux users like me can, one day soon, have a relatively trouble free install of what seems to be a fine effort at giving us a complete audio solution. I wish them well.

I then turned to Ubuntu, and to the contrary of the above experience, it installed relatively painlessly.
(A note here. If you own an ATI graphics card, there is a known problem with the install and regular boot. At boot, simply hold down Ctrl+Alt+F2, or Alt+F2, and the graphics will work. Thanks to the chaps at JAD's forum for this tip.)

After install,i explored the distro fairly extensively in a short time, including running Reaper with an initial wine setup. My thanks go to Justin, Christophe and the reap team for their linux support. Reaper performed well, even with the horrendous latency that, after some internet perusing, seems to be almost accepted as part of the current Alsa infrastructure, without extensive tweaking and some degree of linux knowledge.
All attempts on my part to install and configure wineasio failed, and despite some late night sessions trawling the net for info, i failed to get this working, or even seen in the programme.

I rather enjoyed the speed and smooth operation of the standard ubuntu package (7.10), and decided to uninstall that and go for the audio,vid specific package UbuntuStudio.(7.10)

Again, a fairly easy install, and i was mildly impressed with the range of audio and vid programmes available. Linux has come a long way since our last meeting some years ago.
Again, Ubuntu Studio has, and relative to the alsa challenges, is,performing well. No crashes to date, and it boots and performs quite a deal faster than win. (I'm using the amd 64bit version.)

But again, i face difficulties with the wineasio setup. According to US, it's installed, and i can see it in the wine folder. It shows up in Reaper as an asio option, but with no ins and outs to choose from. It doesn't show up in wine config (nor does jack, but i'm betting i've yet to set that up properly as well.)
To my delight, even with these ongoing challenges, most of my VST's show up in Reaper on Ubuntu, and work well with no noticeable degradation of performance over Win.
As i'm predominately a midi and vst user, this isn't quite so bad, as i can adjust audio device settings when playing back or rendering,but it's still disconcerting, to say the least. I hope to sort this out over the next week or so, with some hard study, and hopefully some input from those linux gurus who so generously share their time and expertise.

So, for an initial gambit, and in my humble and limited linux experience, pretty ok so far. Reaper performs well with UBStudio, and continues my ongoing respect for this programme and it's developers. It's not only good, but tough, and adaptable too.

Now I'm going back to the linux/wine/asio audio setup journey............

Just two roubles worth.

Alex.

p.s. Shup works in Ubuntu/wine as well.
Excellent.



EDIT 1/1/2008:: A big thank you to Justin, Christophe, and the Reaper team for allowing this thread to grow, and, in a sense, mature. It hasn't always been directly related toward Reaper, yet it still.....lives, lol.
Cheers chaps, your openminded perspective is much appreciated. I'm learning much from all the input, and i hope others interested in the topics we're discussing get something out of it too.

Great attitude.