Notes about Linux Audio Distributions

This table of the audio applications included in one or more of the Linux Audio Distros uses the following abbreviated column names:

Linux Special Audio Production Desktop Distros I know of include Apodio, Agnula, Studio to Go!, Mediainlinux, Musix, and Dynebolic. They are a subset of multimedia production desktop distros. Thus Agnula, Studio to Go ! Mediainlinux and Musix are for music, while Apodio, and Dyne:bolic, also include video production tools like Videolinux.

Apodio is based on Mandriva and its principal desktop is Windowmaker. Packages are rpms. At the moment i find this distro the most interesting. This is a live, installable cd that comes with so many packages crammed in it that much documentation must be sought online. Apodio includes many video production apps too, and the Icecast streaming multimedia server. You will also find tools to build graphical websites, but no office suites here. Languages such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese seem to be supported.

Agnula is based on Debian, with a Gnome desktop, and packaging with apt. If not Suse 8, this is the original Linux Multimedia Production Desktop distro. Created with an arts grant from the European Union and released last year, it was supposed to include video tools too, but the project seems so far to mostly be about audio, and has stalled somewhat since the funding from the EU stopped last year. A live cd has finally been released.

Studio to Go! is based on Agnula, using a KDE desktop and is commercial, apparently a UK enterprise. A live cd demo is finally available. The demo is crippled by popup reminders and doesn't include some apps, samples, example files, documentation, and configuration options and support for advanced hardware, since the commercial version, which is affordable to most western musicians starting at 40 Pounds, comes with support, and a number of useful VST's. Nonetheless, downloading VST plugins for Windows, you can use them with wine automatically configuring them, but wine doesn't work with all VST's. The demo is not installable and will not burn cd's, but you can save files to removable media, but your work will be affected by the reminder popups

Mediainlinux is an installable live cd based on Debian, uses a Gnome desktop, and Synaptic package manager. I got the impression that it also was for video production, but, not really.

Musix claims to be pure free software that Stallman would be proud of. It is based on Debian, runs IceWM as a desktop, and uses apt packaging. Based in Argentina, the installable live cd distro gives a choice of an unstable (on my hw), low-latency, RT (realtime) kernel at boot, or a plain kernel. Spanish, Portuguese, English or French can be selected at boot time as the language for your desktop and shell.

Dyne:bolic is a live cd based on Debian, but packaging would be done with exclusive .dyne modules. The default desktop is Windowmaker. There are many video production apps too, and MuSE streaming multimedia server. The authors fancy themselves media hacktivists, fighting corporate media control of free speech. It used to include more games, but space considerations have changed as the A/V apps grew. The live cd is not installable, only nestable. This certainly would protect you if someone were trying to infect your programs. The Rasta and anti-slavery musings of the documentation suggest its origins are from Jamaicans or Africans, and may be evangelizing Reggae Linux musicians.

All these distros use ALSA to work with sound cards. I have used all with 2 or 3 sound cards that ALSA recognizes. ALSA will not currently offer the option of using more than one soundcard's onboard FM synthesizer at a time, because of frequency drift. However, external MIDI/game ports work fine simultaneously. JACK is a metaphor for connecting several JACK-enabled applications is like a number of patch cables on a music stage.

JACK is the latest in a long line of juxtaposed audio layers/servers that try to make lots of music applications chain together to do things which any one app by itself could not do. Not all the apps in these distros are JACK-enabled, and thus must be run under a different sound server, such as ecasound, snd, OSS and a whole alphabet soup of audio tools, and a maze of documents! Thus the audio distros considered here have done a lot to make thngs more user friendly and preconfigured out of the box.

To audio production specialists, RT, or real time, performance is important to keep audio tracks synchronized, and notes to play at exactly the right time. Linux RT kernels are not perfected, and not a part of the main kernel branch. Some of the above distros do seem to run JACK in RT mode, but since I am not yet deep enough into the apps themselves I am not yet concerned enough to squeeze maximal performance out of the computer to fuss with kernel panics and desktop lockups. Be that as it may, a faster computer is worth the greater capabilities.

Studying the table of audio apps, the following apps are mostly ubiquitous in the music distros i have seen: