[Lancaster] distro for audio / music stuff

[andy baxter]

andy baxter wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a good distro for doing simple music recording / 
> editing / etc? I use ubuntu for everything else, but I've just spent a 
> fair bit of money on a new external firewire sound card with 2 inputs 
> and outputs, and then found various annoying bugs in the programs I'm 
> using (jackd, ardour, and zynaddsubfx so far), which is making me think 
> that the ubuntu people don't really have audio work as their main 
> priority when keeping packages up to date. I could use 'planet CCRMA' 
> (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/), but this is fedora 
> based I would rather use something debian based.
>   

I'm just trying out 64studio ( 64studio.com ). It seems to be very 
closely based on debian (it uses all debian repositories unless you want 
bleeding edge stuff which they have their own repository for). So far I 
am massively impressed. The installation was easy enough - you could 
complain about the lack of a graphical installer, but it isn't really 
necessary, and there weren't too many questions to answer. All my 
hardware seems to have been detected ok (on an IBM / lenovo thinkpad). 
And it is so much faster / more responsive than ubuntu - programs start 
in under half the time I would say than on ubuntu. I found this very 
surprising, because I thought ubuntu was pretty close to debian as well.

The main thing I was worrying about with switching to a distro so close 
to debian is that I would have to do a lot of extra work setting up 
things like detecting and mounting usb devices, which as far as I 
remember wasn't set up by default last time I was running debian as a 
desktop. But it detects and mounts my usb hard drive fine.

The audio programs I wanted to use (jackd and ardour) are working better 
than in ubuntu so far, which is why I decided to have a look at 64 
studio in the first place, so that's good.

Will write more if I come across anything else noteworthy in the next 
week or so.

andy