[sdiy] PC synth

[Andre Majorel]

On 2006-08-23 18:22 -0400, anthony wrote:

> I have a number of old PC's that I used to use, but are now collecting
> dust.
> 
> The slow one (AMD K6 200MHz) I was thinking of using to load up a bare
> bones Linux type of OS (it's loaded with Mandrake 5.0 right now) and
> installing my Yamaha YMF724 sound card. I can't remember if the synth
> on it is wavetable or OPL3 - I think it's the former, but it sounds
> great whatever it is and just using the box as a MIDI controlled
> synth.
> 
> Anybody have any experience doing something like this? What would be
> the best software to use and what would be the best install of Linux
> or FreeBSD or whatever so that I didn't have to run X Windows. Linux
> runs great on slow machines until you try to run X...

For a minimal installation, forget about recent releases of Red
Hat, SuSE or Mandrake. It'll be Slackware or Debian (or possibly
one of its derivatives, but I doubt minimal server installs rank
high in Ubuntu's priorities). Unlike Roy, I won't recommend
Slackware, as I switched from it to Debian 8 years ago. <g>

But you might want to look into one of the specialised audio
distros :

  DeMuDi       http://demudi.agnula.org/
  Planet CCRMA http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

Those will give you a kernel tweaked for low latency. I don't
know how stock Linux kernels and stock FreeBSD kernels compare
but either may disappoint you, especially for real time DSP. It
helps to disable swap, stop any unneeded daemons and make sure
the system maintenance cron jobs are scheduled at times you're
not using the machine for audio. But your best bet is a low
latency kernel and apps designed to take advantage of it. By
using a specialised distro, you save yourself the effort of
finding out how to do this.

-- 
André Majorel <URL:http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/>
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