Having just played a set, though (luckily just a house party) where I began having serious problems for reasons I still haven’t figured out, I want to ask: would it be easy to set up a dedicated machine, running Renoise on Linux, that would support my soundcard and MIDI controllers (mixer, keyboard) and perform well?
It would be very easy, choose one of the dedicated audio distros, either kxstudio or avlinux, NOT UBUNTU OR MINT (these are not very stable despite being ‘new user friendly’ distros). Choosing one of these two means that you don’t need to worry about tweaking the system to optimize it or messing around getting jack to work or anything like that. All tweaks will be ready made and all tools already installed, with the exception of renoise. If you have particular requirements and want to dig in to the technical side of linux then by all means choose another distro but you’re only making things more complicated and if you just want a stable base to replace Windows then there’s no reason not to choose one of these audio distros.
As far as whether your soundcard and midi controllers are supported or not it’s a different matter. If they are class compliant then most likely they will be supported but it is something you can check. What have you got?
As for perform well, yes most certainly. I have no problems with performances, renoise playing through jack is extremely solid and stable, I would definitely play live with it if that was my thing. Occasionally a plugin can be problematic but this is rare and obvious pretty quickly. This is one area where I would recommend kxstudio, the developer regularly patches plugins or programs as necessary and is very responsive to any kinds of problems like that.
If it were absolutely reliable, on a moderately powerful laptop, I’d be willing to sacrifice my lovely VSTs. If I could consider it a piece of hardware not requiring frequent updates and trust it to perform, that would be worth it – if all that could be done without me spending more than a few hours setting it up, perhaps by using a dedicated distro.
What do you think? Realistic? Or should I stick with the devil I know?
You wouldn’t necessarily need to sacrifice your VSTs, you can run something like airwave. Most VSTs that I’ve tried work well but you have to remember this is basically a reverse engineered wrapper for windows so it isn’t 100% reliable, things that work in it tend to work well and reliably but not everything does work in it. It is getting better all the time though and most big name plugins work.
You don’t have to worry about frequent updates, in fact there’s nothing to require you to update at all but this isn’t really recommended. Choosing something which isn’t a rolling release would mean you only get security or critical updates. However, if it is just a audio workstation then you don’t have to do any updates in theory. With distros such as the ones I mentioned you would generally only get updates to improve things though they’re both fairly conservative in this respect. I think avlinux is based on an older, slower updating, more ‘stable’ base but kxstudio has a much more knowledgeable and proactive developer who wrote quite a few of the tools himself.
I think you should go for it, it is completely realistic. The problem most people have is that they install ubuntu or mint and run in to all sorts of problems because not only are they new to linux, they are new to linux audio (which is a slightly different paradigm), plus they are running software with configurations not ideally suited to what they want to do. Of course you can tune them and work out the problems but lots of people don’t have the time or patience to bother and just give up. I’m not a programmer or anything like that and made the move and I will never go back so I’m not going to tell you to stick to the devil you know, I consider it harmful at best.
A few hours would be more than enough to get going. The only thing I can see that might cause you stumble in this window of time would be get to know the audio system in linux, understanding what jack is and what you can do with it, but really if you just want to get renoise up and running then you don’t have to worry much about that at first.
By the way, you shouldn’t think too much about ‘sacrificing’ anything. Linux actually have some extremely impressive tools. Zynaddsubfx is an incredibly powerful synth and sounds amazing, even if the UI isn’t the greatest. We have Tunefish, another great synth, Dexed, Tal Noisemaker, U-he synths (zebra, diva, ace etc), obxd, Discodsp stuff, overtoneDSP plugins which are absolutely beautiful, Loomer’s stuff. Even though renoise doesn’t let you use LV2 plugins yet you can still use them with the help of Carla which has a VST plugin so you can load that up in renoise and inside it load up any plugins of any format and even create your own crazy routing inside it. Carla also allows you to run windows vsts inside it too, as well as sf2, sfz and gig file formats.
Go for it, if you need any help then people are always around, on irc (#opensourcemusicians or #kxstudio on freenode) or linuxmusicians.com or just send a pm.
