[music-dsp] diy dsp synth - where to start?

[Jimmy Myhrman]

David Olofson wrote:

> If you have a few hundred MB of flash (or a hard drive), you
> could just use a minimal install of a standard Linux distro -
> Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, LFS, etc in
> approximate order of decreasing newbie friendliness - and
> install a precompiled lowlatency, RT-Linux or RTAI kernel.
> You can use both lowlatency and RTL/RTAI, to get user space
> "ms class" RT + kernel and user space "µs class" RT.

That sounds good to me. I've played around with Redhat a bit already, so
maybe it won't be that much of a problem after all.


> However, unless you're going for sub ms digital latency, I'd
> recommend you stay with the standard drivers and a lowlatency
> kernel. That way, it's plain application hacking, and there's
> no need for special drivers and/or kernel hacks. You should
> still be able to get the latency below 3 ms on most hardware.

I think I'll go this route. 3ms is nothing.


> For two totally audio and multimedia focused distros, have a
> look at DeMuDi (Debian based) and RehMuDi (Redhat based) here:
> 
> 	http://www.agnula.org/

Would these be preferable to use instead of, say, a normal Redhat distro? I
mean, it's not like I'm going to use the computer for any music production
or anything like that, only as a host for my custom software.


> You can even have a full desktop or server OS installed on
> top of your RT kernel, with web servers and stuff running.
> That's all in user space, and doesn't have any significant
> effect on the scheduling latencies of RTL or RTAI.

Now that opens up quite a few interesting possibilities. Hehe, maybe a web
interface for your custom synth. That would be quite interesting =)


Anyway, thanks for the very thorough answers David! I'll definitely look
deeper into this.

/Jimmy.M (http://www.jimmy-m.com)