[ardour-users] Setting up a gentoo box for ardour
Justin M. Streiner
streiner at cluebyfour.org
Thu Mar 9 08:09:28 PST 2006
On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, Andrew Johnston wrote:
> learn about how to do that. What I was wondering was, how hard is it to get
> all this happening with gentoo? I found this part of the 'about gentoo' the
> most interesting, "When you want to install a package, you type emerge
> packagename, at which point Portage automatically builds a custom version of
> the package to your exact specifications, optimizing it for your hardware
> and ensuring that the optional features in the package that you want are
> enabled -- and those you don't want aren't."
I use gentoo on several different machines and platforms, but the machine
I do anyhting with ardour on is pretty vanilla, and the work I'm doing
with ardour and jack at the moment is also fairly vanilla - digitizing old
session tapes and other recordings of my band. That machine is my
general purpose do-whatever workstation - it's not dedicated to audio
work. At the moment that machine is running:
ASUS P4P800S motherboard w/2.8ghz P4 CPU
good mobo, only has two RAM slots though :(
512 MB PC3200 RAM - to be upgraded soon
Matrox Millenium G450 video card
total of 620 GB of storage space (1 x 120 GB PATA, 1 x 200 GB PATA, 1 x
300 GB SATA-133)
Gentoo - 2.6.14-r5 kernel
For right now, I'm just using the machine's line-in to take audio from the
original source and monitoring on headphones. I can occasionally pick up
a little blitter noise on the headphones, but this does not come through
in the recordings done in ardour. I realize this isn't an optimal setup,
but for what I'm doing right now and the often sketchy audio quality of
the original recordings, this works just fine for me.
I do have plans down the road to build a dedicated audio workstation with
better audio interface hardware, but that will be a long time coming.
Bottom line: Gentoo works well for me considering what I do with it. Post
from other people on this list suggests that Gentoo also works well in
more demanding multitrack applications with ardour and jack - I just
haven't tried that yet ;-)
jms
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