Audacity Forum

Well, i have installed ubuntu studio 8.04 since my last post, and it has been quite disappointing so far. I can't even start audacity at all... Plus it seems to be using the very little RAM i have (256) in a much less efficient way than jaunty. The problem with studio 8.04 probably stems from the fact that it is built on 8.04.1 version of ubuntu, and not on the LTS version. Unfortunately, for some obscure reasons i have not been able to install 8.04 LTS.
I will give C64 a try, as you suggested.

One last question : wouldn't it be possible to use JACK instead of pulse, or is it for a different purpose altogether? Although i can't seem to get JACK to work in jaunty either...

I dream of the day when the sound system is finally sorted out on Linux (if only it was as simple and user friendly as XP - but let's not talk about Vista).

Jackd is fantastic IF you can get it working properly, but unfortunately that can be problematic, particularly on older hardware (works great on my new Laptop, but very difficult on my old PIII desktop). The other snag with Jackd is that it does not play very nicely with Portaudio (which Audacity uses to provide cross platform audio support). I've got it working pretty well with Audacity 1.3.7 (repository build) on Jaunty, and it works very nicely with the latest 1.3.8 version from cvs, but less success with earlier versions.

Not all audio applications support Jackd. You would generally only set up your machine to use it on a computer that was specifically set up for audio production and not for a general purpose machine.

Jackd works best with the Real Time Kernel, but unfortunately that was not very stable on my machine the last time I tried it (I use Compiz which is not recommended with the Real Time Kernel for exactly that reason).

What was the problem with 8.04 LTS ?

I have not been able to install 8.04 LTS at all. It just froze during install. For some reason i did not find the md5sum for the image, so i m not sure what is causing this (hardware? corrupt cd?). I have just installed 64 Studio 2.1, though. It was pretty hectic, given that some files are found to be outdated if you keep the current date in your bios (had to set it to an earlier date), and that some others fail to install if you go too far in the past... I haven't tried it thouroughly yet, but audacity seems to be working fine (records as many tracks as long as i want).
I get the feeling i m gonna stick to UStudio 9.04 though. It is the OS that seems to run most efficiently on my laptop, regardless of the problems i encountered with audacity and jack.

BobbyYoupla wrote:For some reason i did not find the md5sum for the image, so i m not sure what is causing this (hardware? corrupt cd?).

Most probably a fault on the CD.
Ubuntu publist the MD5 checksum of all iso images, so you can check your download against the published MD5. If the iso checks out correct, then you could burn another copy. When you boot from an Ubuntu CD there is an option to test the CD and you should do that before attempting to install (takes about 5 minutes).

BobbyYoupla wrote:given that some files are found to be outdated if you keep the current date in your bios (had to set it to an earlier date),

I'm not sure why you are not wanting 64 Studio to update, but if you really want that, you can switch off the updates in the Update Manager settings rather than changing anything in BIOS.

BobbyYoupla wrote:I get the feeling i m gonna stick to UStudio 9.04 though. It is the OS that seems to run most efficiently on my laptop, regardless of the problems i encountered with audacity and jack.

Ubuntu 9.10 is planned for the end of October 2009 - perhaps the "Karmic Koala" will fix things

It wasn't a fault on the CD, it was because of a lack of RAM as i found out later. I needed the alternate CD to install ubuntu 8.04. It's installed now and running almost perfectly, Audacity behaving like it should. The weird thing is that i get much better performances in 9.04 (principally in terms of latency) on the same machine! This is how it should be with a normal 8.04 kernel, but i ve installed the rt one and set the audio priority to the maximum..
Anyway, this conversation might be a little too far off the topic now...

BobbyYoupla wrote:It wasn't a fault on the CD, it was because of a lack of RAM as i found out later.

That would do it. Probably a good ide to increase the RAM on te machine if possible. Although Linux will run with very little RAM, it will benefit a lot from extra RAM.

BobbyYoupla wrote:It's installed now and running almost perfectly, Audacity behaving like it should.

Good, so that's the problem fixed for now?

BobbyYoupla wrote:i get much better performances in 9.04 (principally in terms of latency) on the same machine!

That's one of the claimed advantages of the fully implemented Pulse Audio (new on Ubuntu 9.04). Good to know that the claim is true.

BobbyYoupla wrote:i ve installed the rt one

I tried that on an old machine and it made a noticeable performance improvement to the machine generally and not just the sound system. Tried it on my new laptop and it was not very stable - I will probably try it again when the rt kernel is next updated.