I fancy having a go on the old Linux. Which distro would people recommend for working with renoise?
The standard Ubuntu or Fedora or is there something specific that’s better.
I work with linux command line every day fro my job but know bugger all about the audio or gui side so anyone any recommendations?
i run Renoise on #! (Crunchbang) Linux. i think one of the most important things is that you keep enough system resources free for doing audio, so you don’t want a heavy WM like Gnome or Compiz or KDE. #! uses Openbox which is very light indeed.
aside from that, i know there are also a couple of specialized Audio/Video distros, like AVLinux and… more which i can’t remember 
Latest research reveals that using Linux for audio production reduces your expected lifespan by at least 6 years. You can do things, but everything is considerably harder and less stable than on windows or mac. If you would prefer keep making great tunes rather than keep configuring and tweaking your OS, I’d stick with Windows.
Easiest distribution to install and manage is probably still Ubuntu. Dedicated audio distributions often are better configured for audio production, but often have other issues with general software.
thanks very much guys. Planning on a dual boot rather than VM. Will have a think about whether I’m going to try other programs before I effectively destroy everything tonight
As of Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 - I cannot recommend it for Renoise Linux starters – it eats up your GPU (with the default 3D-heavy window manager Unity) and the Gnome 2D alternative is not very usable (-- lots of customizations needed to get it work smooth).
a) you have to start a fight between a sane Renoise (ALSA/Jack) combo and PulseAudio (-- which is by default activated in the latest Ubuntu release.)
Another thingie goes with the Linux kernel – you have to install a lowlatency linux kernel to get everything run smooth (-- which then sometimes breaks with your proprietary NVIDIA / ATI GPU kernel drivers), … – the next bad thing is, your graphics card turns into a soundcard with the HDMI standard (-- an linux distributions are not yet well prepared for this with their sound auto configuration scripts).
c) sometimes you have to fiddle with your systems interrupt priorities and/or usb configuration if you use an usb audio sound card to fight so called xruns (clicks).
Either install Ubuntu 10.04 – which was a sane release in terms of GPU / CPU eating and a stable, well configured GNOME desktop, …
Or wait for the Ubuntu 12.04 release – which fixes some of the above issues in the default install and makes PulseAudio transparent to pure ALSA and/or Jack softwares.
d) Another issue with Linux is - -you won’t get run all the sweet (Windows/MacOS) VSTis without major headake – and when asking VST vendors to%2
Update: half of the issues list above was lost (@renoise forum admin - is this a server errror?).
In short: This Is A Nightmare for Linux starters. You have been warned!
koppi, you seem to know very well what you are talking about. just one question: what’s with all the Ubuntu-stuff? even the Gnome environment is bloated when it comes to audio production. as i said in my first post, try out Crunchbang for a lightweight and user-friendly situation.
For me the Gnome 2 desktop worked quite ok with my old x31 and/or (quite not so old) t61 thinkpads. But Unity was a show stopper with Renoise audio lagging / graphics hanging.
For Ubuntu 10.04 / 11.10 you need the “Old Lowlatency kernels” OpenID transaction in progress ,
For 12.04 you grab the lowlatency kernels from https://launchpad.net/~abogani/+archive/lowlatency (which is the current Ubuntu testing / 12.04 rc branch).
Canonical has put some more developer power on the issue lists with audio. David Henningsson https://launchpad.net/~diwic fights hard for the next ubuntu release to become more usable in many regards. Go to the blueprints https://blueprints.l…hpad.net/~diwic and see, what these guys are doing. It’s truely amazing, and there is some hope that someday linux audio will work a bit better.
David has a blog, it’s called “A better sounding world” http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/
One “state of the art” thing with linux and hda intel sound cards is, that you can retask your sound card’s audio jacks, e.g.: turn your mic jack into a headphone jack.
Read more here: http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2011/11/29/turn-your-mic-jack-into-a-headphone-jack/
Ha! Cool! I suppose they are in essence the same thing really!
Another cool thing is, you can generate a so called codecgraph (which represents the logical codec connections in the ALSA soundcard drivers). More about this at http://helllabs.org/codecgraph/
I must look into this #! you speak of.
While I love linux, I’d miss my VSTs too much.
check it out: http://crunchbanglinux.org/
it is lightweight, bloatless, fast, midway between n00b and advanced user (you can use the mouse and GUIs for everything but are sometimes encouraged to use your terminal and edit config files). the biggest plus is that it has a really awesome friendly community with linux-snobs being totally absent. i could recommend it to anyone wanting to check out Linux.
I run KDE with Kubuntu 11.10, and have no problems with audio or performance whatsoever. I did have problems when I used GNOME however, which seems similar to your experiences. I don’t think I’m going to touch the mainline Ubuntu again until the whole GNOME 3/Unity mess is sorted out.
another cool distribution. runs completly from stick (you can install, if you want). 64 Bit. Everything you need ist preinstalled (ardour not…). its a little bit out of date (based on ubuntu 9). performance and latency ist much better than with win7 64Bit. If you are into visuals you have some cool tools like fluxus.
with the tipps from the renoise manual you have no problems with memory, everything works fine (i cannot start pure data with jack, but i have to try some settings).
but at the moment i have to improve (better build up) my mixing skills and some other things, so i have no time to check out after some other distributions.
this one sounds good, will check this out once
http://kxstudio.sour…e.net/Main_Page
http://kxstudio.sour…io:Applications
Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 is a real nightmare for audio applications
I used to use Jacklab which was based on OpenSuse. Since then I’ve used an early Ubuntu (7.something I think), then moved on to Mint, Crunchbang and now Arch.
Haven’t had any real issues with getting audio working, even back in the Mint days using Pulseaudio.
But now I’m using plain old Jack and ALSA. Not even running a realtime kernel, but I have tweaked my system a little, I have decent latency and hardly get xruns.
In the past I’ve had a few Windows VSTs running mostly in REAPER/wine which in my experience was the most stable environment for this. But at present I don’t even have wine installed, I’m ‘native’ linux all the way. And yes I do miss being able to play with a load of VSTs, and drooling over the latest and greatest “pro” applications.
BUT… I can’t afford most of it! And I don’t want to waste all my time trawling through endless free plugins. I found that only a handful of free quality windows plugins keep cropping up anyway.
In linux I have my calf plugins, TAL stuff and when I can get some cash together, linuxdsp and loomer. If I had the kind of money to spend on high end software I’d probably be running a mac any way. Still, there’s plenty in the Renoise world to keep me going.
The other problem I have is musical skill, or lack thereof! So even if I had Logic and a gazillion plugins I’d probably be worse off from a productivity point of view. But I guess that’s another story.
i make some pretty okay music on linux. i’m satisfied with a standard set of ladspa plugs (swh, cmt, tap, caps/c*, foo, invada), little sprinkle of dssi (calf), and a few vsts (loomer aspect and resound, have the TAL stuff but don’t really use it). would love to use the linuxdsp stuff but i’ll need either 64bit VSTs (which the fellow doesn’t provide yet) or LV2 support in renoise. i have a few hardware synths (novation a-station, shruthi-1) that i use from time to time.
i use arch linux, it’s very nice. i only use jack on my systems and avoid pulseaudio whenever possible (because it’s useless and terrible). when i can’t avoid pulseaudio, i use the jack source and sink modules.
i am a nerd and a programmer before i am a musician, and i am very partial to dwm as my window manager, but i understand it’s not for everyone. openbox is nice, xfce is nice, i personally won’t touch the current incarnations of gnome and kde at all.
i have no complaints about my setup. no problems with jack, the ALSA drivers are solid, everything’s fine. i would advise against firewire (ffado is not very good).
in the end, it’s all about how much time and effort you want to spend on your setup. it’s no secret that linux requires much more effort for professional (or amateur) media production than OSX or win32/64. though i’m sure i could have produced more music in a shorter time if i had brought myself up on windows or osx instead of linux, the journey that i have taken over the past 8ish years has done a lot to shape my sound. i started with nothing but midi sequencers and alpha-quality modular synths (beast/bse), moving on to csound (which was a multi-year eye-opening experience for me), energyXT (awful), and finally renoise, which i’ve been using for the past 3 or 4ish years.
i view the relative lack of software as being a benefit, as it has forced me to learn my tools thoroughly. in the case of csound and beast, there was certainly room for me to explore further, as they’re very deep environments. my current workflow is satisfactory to me, i know my tools fairly well. aspect in particular is a very powerful synth, and renoise is likewise a very powerful host. there is plenty of room to explore and learn the tools if you don’t get too caught up in the “oh my god there’s so few things to use!!!” mentality.
2¢.
Well I know Max pretty well so Pure Data should be fairly manageable.
I also hear people might be trying to develop supercollider for renoise (kind of like max for live) I don’t know if it’s true or not. If so then we’re talking serious boneritis over here.
drools
Hello, just blogged: HOWTO run Renoise 2.8 on Ubuntu 11.10
Feel free, to leave some comments in the blog’s post comments section.
Kind regards, Jakob