[SATLUG] Re: Linux packages

[Eric Hobbs]

On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 09:14, mattvaldes at satx.rr.com wrote:

> Certainly there are a million and one packages out there, but has anyone been using, or recently discovered, something that helps make life a little easier?
> 
> Thanks,
> Matt

Jack-Rack: http://arb.bash.sh/~rah/software/jack-rack/

I've been trying to mess around with some real-time audio effects
processing to see if it'll inspire me to play my guitar again.  At
first, I was using a Win2k machine, but I could never get the audio
latency down to a reasonable level.  I think the lowest I could get with
my hardware was something on the order of 250-500ms...yuck. With the
right sound card and nice ASIO drivers, the latency would be fine, but I
didn't want to spend money.

Half of my disk was sitting there unpartitioned, so I installed Gentoo
Linux (my fave) on it and installed the JACK low-latency audio server 
along with other Jack-enabled apps like Ardour (multitrack recording),
Hydrogen (pattern-based drum sequencer), LADSPA audio effects plugins,
and Jack-Rack.

Jack-Rack hooks into the Jack audio server and allows me to chain
together multiple LADSPA audio plugins and process my guitar sounds in
real-time. I haven't tweaked anything yet, but my latency is around
10-20ms...on the same hardware.  MUCH better!

Score one for Linux!

-Eric