Gentoo Studio – A Gentoo Linux Professional Audio Workstation | Hacker News Reader

Gentoo Studio – A Gentoo Linux Professional Audio Workstation

gentoostudio.org

33 pointssimonpure15 comments

"An advantage of having Gentoo as the base for this distro is its package manager, Portage, which has a system of enabling/disabling compile-time options for applications. This means application binaries can be tailored to the user’s computer hardware and the user’s needs." This is less beneficial than Gentoo fans seem to think it is.

Maybe it was all placebo, but Gentoo's use flags are super well organized, and are one of the first things I missed when I transitioned to functional distros. You can still apply bulk transformation functions to every package (like those CPU optimizations, Guix even has a flag for this), or configure the flags in build phases by defining package variants, (some of which are provided in functional package repos, not often), but it's a lot of work. The Gentoo way of doing things pit the user in control and had a feeling of minimalism in the portage configuration files, straightforward use of directory structures to define masks and overrides, ubiquitous atom selectors. Even if it was only minutely beneficial, or caused "more trouble than it's worth", I remember it for how empowered it made me feel and how easy it was to manage. The same optimizations are much harder to preform in amy other distro, and that says something regardless of their effectiveness.

Some people really care about milliseconds.

In music production, milliseconds can mean the difference between being able to play perfectly (due to low-latency feedback) and making mistakes every couple of bars (due to high-latency feedback).

Try playing an instrument while listening to 100ms delayed feedback - it's practically impossible to stay on the beat.

Yes, and Gentoo makes highly fine-tuned optimizations very manageable. For most, this is not very practical, but it may offer some millisecond-level improvements for those looking for it. Being able to strictly compile for your preferred audio stack could be beneficial. My fastest booting machine was definitely Gentoo with a custom kernel. Any audio improvements may be purely theoretical here, but maybe not. I would be curious to see benchmarks or anecdotes from anyone who's needed to do this themselves.

> but it may offer some millisecond-level improvements

DA latency is a factor of processing speed when converting analog signals to digital information. The issue arrises with older hardware when individually tracking large numbers of channels, such as 64 or 128 simultaneously. Leaps in CPU speed increases have somewhat stalled due to the limits of Moore's Law and physics yet have done so at acceptably fast speeds for audio. Though the smallest latency a human can hear is about 20ms, it is easy and practical to reduce latency by scrutinizing signal path.

Audio bandwidth requirements are small. Latency hasn't especially been an issue in professional digital audio production for decades. While analog signal latency is still what it is, it practically is not any issue below distances of thousands of miles, nor is it getting any worse.

That said, even though Gentoo isn't as brain-dead simple to install and get working as most other distros, I think this is a cool idea. But installing Ardour, Audacity and Cadence on any distro would get you most of the way there with very little difference in performance on modern hardware. I think popularity would increase if these tools were neatly packaged for any distro. But if the hardware was older and very limited, Gentoo would be the way to go, with a slight Gentoo learning curve.

Minor kibbitz, but I wouldn't say, "latency hasn't been a problem for decades" in professional digital audio production. Maybe for studios that shelled out 5 large for a protools setup, but for smaller and non-protools pro recording studios latency is still a potential factor today.

Anything USB 2.0 would have latency if you were doing anything to the incoming audio live (like running a little reverb plugin on vocals) then it very well could cause audio latency and or stuttering issues.

Thunderbolt & USB 3.0 seems to have solved this (unless you are piping a lot of effects live on a weaker machine) but those only started hitting their stride 4-5 years ago.

Old digi equipment is cheap[1], usually in great shape, and sounds the same as the day it was new and better than any sub$800 USB2 interface. Previous versions of Pro Tools can be matched to the old equipment and downloaded right off digi's site.[2] But there are 2 difficulties, knowing what card goes with what interface in what old computer on what OS version, and licensing. But at some previous version, everything is cracked, or one can purchase old licensing with the hardware. I'd estimate for time researching, $500 of equipment including the old computer, as much hacking it to work as Gentoo alone would require, one could reasonably easily have 16 or 32 channels of old Pro Tools and never see latency problems from stacking effects on every channel, even on something like an 800MHz G4 or 2GHz Core2Duo. Issue is, it will sound like Pro Tools from whatever era it's from, which was never bad, just distinctive, and most wouldn't even notice.

Software's just not going to solve crappy hardware.

[1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=digidesign+19...

[2] http://secure.digidesign.com/services/avid/kb/downloads.cfm

If you mean cpu instruction optimization yeah but there are other compiler flags that affect performance and security.

The main alternative is to build packages with all such flags and disable the functionality you don't want at runtime. That's moderately less desirable because:

- Space/performance, to the extent that dead code elimination matters.

- Not all packages support such runtime manipulation.

- Doing so requires additional work from the installer to configure entrypoints or from the user post-installation to set up that config. There's something really clean and easy about being able to enable/disable a feature in one place.

I’m surprised Gentoo hasn’t said this isn’t okay and cannot be called this for trademark infringement reasons.

From the site footer:

> Gentoo Studio is not an official project of the Gentoo Foundation, of which I am a member. This site is maintained by me, Damien Moody, a.k.a. Audiodef. The Gentoo Foundation bears no responsibility for the content of this site. The Gentoo logo and Gentoo name are used according to the licensing guidelines set forth by the Gentoo Foundation.

I asked in the matrix channel, and between the "never heard of it" the common response was "why would anyone at gentoo care?"

This sounds/looks awesome! I wonder if Renoise also runs on it.

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