From Ubuntustudio to 64studio

A couple of months back I decided to upgrade my main desktop and audio machine to the latest version of Ubuntustudio (9.04). Installation from the DVD was a breeze, and rebooted smoothly into the new look. Basic desktop stuff was great, but setting up my audio ran into the first of two main problems. I have two soundcards, the onboard Intel HDA, and an RME card. I like the Intel to be picked up as hw:0, and take the optical out of this into the optical in of the rme card, which I have running jack. That way I can play things from firefox or other standard apps that only look for the first card, and can route it through jack. I couldn't get this sorted at all, and concluded that pulseaudio was part of the problem. Tried various suggestions gleaned from the net to no avail. Solution - take an analog out and feed it to the MIO2882 that I use for recording under osx (I also use it to mix - amazing box with insane onboard DSP).

I managed with this setup for a while, until I came to use ardour to mark some drum stem mixes from class. Good old alt-m to bring up the mixer didn't work (well - I had to type it twice). The killer for me though was the fact that the transport shortcuts no longer worked when the mixer was in the foreground. This is an absolute showstopper for me - anyone using a DAW hits the space bar alot and it needs to happen in whatever context (setting levels in my case) one is working in. Found others with the same problem but no solution, so thought I'd try 64studio instead - surely no regular ardour users could stand the transport drama?! I was also getting regular xruns, but I was running things like google desktop and gnome-do so this was my fault really! Didn't care too much as I don't record on this machine. Time to separate audio from office things anyway, and another box (identical specs) became available.

Tried the stable 2.1 iso, but it kept failing with a stupid config error regarding tetex-bin. Perhaps my DVD had errors, but the installer couldn't move on, so downloaded the beta 3.0 iso and installed. Very smooth installation and jack setup instant. Optical out from hda card all good... alt-m in ardour is good and my transport shortcuts work again - yay! No xruns so far either so I'll be sticking with this solution for a while.

Lesson - once an audio machine is working and stable, I will avoid upgrading until knowing for certain that the things I use regularly are working as expected. No more mixing everyday office and network stuff with serious audio apps as well. I think ubuntustudio is fantastic, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in audio work, but the latest version needs a bit of tweaking. I feel a bit guilty that I'm not helping the ubuntustudio community in a real way (although this sort of testing is useful I guess) but I do a lot of other open source work so horses for courses.

Here's the setup - I use the macbook as a glorified mixer to control the MIO, and use synergy to share the same keyboard and mouse between machines.