music apps on the eee pc ..

[Jay Vaughan]

here's a short report on what works (and what doesn't) on the eee pc:

audacity - works great.  no problems whatsoever editing and loading a  
10meg audio .wav file, or countless mp3's.

hydrogen - works, but crackles.  this might be resolved by using less  
high-resolution/detailed samples .. if so, it'll be a great little  
drum machine

amsynth - doesn't load at all.  some sort of issue with alsa onboard.

ams - doesn't load, got no idea why.

BEAST - loads and run great!

freebirth - runs just fine, produces perfect 303 emulation

vkeybd - works great!  virtual midi keys..

zynaddsubfx - works very well!  may well be the best synth on the eee  
pc yet ..

spiralsynthmodular - works, though with large patches it crackles  
rather a bit.  might still be useful/usable.

ReZound - works very well, and in fact was one of the nicest apps to  
configure, since it figured out by itself that it hadn't been, sussed  
out what audio api's were available, and gave me all the dialogs i  
needed to sort it out before it started up .. impressed.  also, one  
monster of an audio editor..

jack - works just fine with the onboard alsa driver, but gives me a  
couple xruns per second.. this isn't optimal, and i'm sure it can be  
tweaked, just gotta dig a bit deeper to find out what is causing it  
and see if there's a simple fix - buffer size or so - because there  
are a lot of great jack-enabled apps that install and run, but  
crackle a bit.  so, some tweaking to be done here.


so far, the most fun is zynaddsubfx .. it just plain works, and turns  
the whole thing into a very useful little synth.  i'm gonna work a  
little more on the MIDI side of things, set up a decent MIDI  
controller situation, and use it in the next jam at stans .. for sure  
its good enough, small enough, portable enough, and i really like the  
sound.

another thing about this whole test is that this is using the default  
XAndros linux installation, which isn't exactly set up for optimal  
performance .. maybe tomorrow i'll give the eeeubuntu distribution a  
try, and see if i get a few less xruns from jack as a result.


;
--
Jay Vaughan