[Rosegarden-user] xruns with Rosegarden

[Tomasz G. <tgr...@gm...>]

Hello!

It seems that I have finally got rid off the xrun problems with Rosegarden
(I spent several hours during last weekend composing my music, and got only
a few xruns, but during some background downloading process, or screensaver
operation; any way during composing situation was fine). I'll do more
testing in next several days/weeks, 'cause I'm going to focus more on my
music, but at the moment I'm quite satisfied with results.

So thanks to you all for ideas/suggestions - I decided to try some audio
dedicated distribution.
But it didn't stop only on installing the new OS, I made quite many changes
to the basic setup.

Let me share my experience, and all what I did to make it work, maybe
someone finds it useful:

1. I chose 64studio, and installed it on a single disk (without RAID) - two
partitions: one for /, and another for /home (+ swap of course).

The distribution is mainly based on Debian Etch.
Everything worked OK from the very beginning, but 'stability' of the OS was
a problem for me - I really needed newer software (e.g. Hydrogen from SVN
repositories). The option was to compile it, but without 'fresh' libraries,
and development packages, it was rather impossible.

So I made another crusial step:

2. Upgrade to Debian Sid (unstable) :)

The process was not so smooth, but I managed to get through it.
After the upgrade, the situation was OK still - no xruns with RG detected.

Encouraged I decided to go further:

3. Compiled a newer kernel (2.6.24.7) with realtime patches (rt17).

I used the same kernel config as on my "normal" system on which I had RG
xrun problems.
But running 'unstable' 64studio on my own kernel config was still fine - no
problems detected.

So the next step was to:

4. 'upgrade' the software & drivers.

I downloaded & compiled:

* FFADO (beta 2.0 if I remember correctly)
* JACK 0.112.1 (SVN version)
* Hydrogen (current SVN checkout)
* Rosegarden 1.7.1
* Ardour 2.5
* ZynAddSubFX (current CVS checkout) - using the distribution provided
zynaddsubfx I had quite high CPU load, and xruns when running with qsynth
simultaneously. When I compiled zyn from CVS, CPU load decreased about
20-30%, and I observed no more xruns when using it with qsynth at the same
time.

And the final step was (and is still) to:

6. Test the new environemnt.

Several hours spent during the weekend with satysfying results is quite
optimistic.
But I suppose next few days/weeks will give the final answer about
'stability' of the solution.

Any way when I think of the 64studio installation, and my "normal" Debian
unstable I can see the really big difference in using RAID in "normal" OS,
and no RAID in the audio setup.
Of course, there's a lot of more software installed on my usual work system,
but I don't think it could have had a negative impact on processing audio (I
tried to turn off most of daemons running too).
The more I think of it now the more I suspect the RAID deamon process having
bad influence on Rosegarden.
But why Rosegarden only?... I don't think I will be able to answer the
question....

Any way, I'll stop thinking about it, and I hope to focus more on music now,
and not on installing/configuring my OS :)

Thanks again for your help!
Cheers!