I am particularly interested in knowing which audio interfaces work seamlessly with Linux. I have read that some brands have better support than others; but I would love to hear from your personal experiences. Are there specific models you have had success with? Additionally; if there are any particular drivers or settings that you recommend for optimal performance;
Another aspect I am curious about is the latency issues I have been encountering. I have noticed some lag while recording and monitoring; which can be quite frustrating. Are there any tips or best practices you can share for minimizing latency in Linux audio setups?
Many of the older Edirol soundcards work great, some of the Cakewalk ones as well.
Class compliant soundcards generally work but read up on which ones are known to work well.
Old Emu PCI, PCI Express soundcards generally work but better avoid the 1820 and similar because they suffer from rotten capacitor issues.
Loads of audio cards work fine, search for the relevant threads here and look at the ALSA compatibility matrix to see which models are known to work.
If you want to minimise latency and run a sizeable workload on it then ideally you need a fast and modern CPU.
If you're using a USB soundcard you better hope that you have a nice USB chipset on-board and that there aren't many other USB devices fighting for resources with the soundcard.
Your Linux distro is not configured to do audio well out of the box. To improve your luck with low-latency operation requires making many, many mods.
Some audio guides cover some of these mods somewhat accurately, many guides are kind 1/2 complete or out of date or not very accurate. Some soundcards are also particular about what settings work better with them.
Then throw in the complexities of deciding how to set up the audio system. Do you want to use ALSA only, use ALSA + Jack, use ALSA + Pipewire, use ALSA + Jack + Pulseaudio etc etc etc. Everybody's situation is different and the situation dictates some of the solutions required to get the best performance.
If you're starting out you'll get better results faster by using a distro that's already been pre-configured for audio use. Otherwise you're going to be spending a lot of your free time trying to squeeze better performance out of your system instead of making beats.
Statistics: Posted by asbak — Sat Oct 05, 2024 9:34 pm