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Elk OS – Audio Operating System

elk.audio

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Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#11

Post by mastrsushi »

"With Elk hardware companies can move away from dedicated chips and use general purpose ARM and x86 CPUs without any compromise in terms of latency, performance and scalability."

Less diversity decreases competition and overall technological development. In the 1980s, some OS developers actually blamed Unix for stalling the progress of OS research.

Wouldn't a world of Arm based synthesizer be kind of stagnant? Sure you can dream that compatibility allows more open platforms, but we all know hardware companies always end up making the end product proprietary anyway.

To be fair, I don't know a lot about hardware. I'd also like to guess that the world of music electronics has been longing for some sort hardware medium to sort out the mess of obscure ISA's and poor documentation that hardware engineers have to put up with.

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#16

Post by casmclas »

nitrogen wrote: post #14

Cookie consent by scrolling doesn't seem like a legitimate way to obtain user consent.

I mean, it's no worse than the standard antipatterns, which are designed to be so easy to click "accept" and so hard to follow the "don't accept" flow. None of them are about coming to an agreement with the user; all of them are about obtaining as much data as possible. Until the EU mandates a handwritten letter to obtain permission for tracking cookies, these demonstrations of bad faith will be our friends on the internet.

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#19

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #10
protoman3000 wrote: post #4

It’s a Linux distribution with real-time kernel. Here’s a download link if anybody is interested: https://github.com/elk-audio/elk-pi/releases

So the real time kernel patches have been mainlined? How comprehensive are the real time features of Linux now?

Almost all of the original PREEMPT_RT patchset are mainlined now, but the features are not (all) enabled by default. Low latency will always present a tradeoff with bandwidth, and Linux is used for so many different purposes that one is not clearly more important than the other.

For more than 10 years, Linux with the PREEMPT_RT patch has been capable of more-or-less hard real time, with latencies in the 10's of usecs range. That can be thwarted, however, by a variety of hardware features (SMI being the worst offender, plus devices that hog the PCI bus for too long), so you are not guaranteed this performance just by running that kernel.

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#20

Post by LeoPanthera »

andrewflnr wrote: post #18

When I saw the headline, I wondered/hoped if it was an OS with an audio/only UI. I'm sure this is cool, but a fully thought-out audio-only UI would be fascinating.

I started developing a blind computing system in the late 80s based on a BBC Micro and a very early speech synthesizer.

It never went anywhere, and I'm no longer in contact with the blind friend who was helping me, but I often wonder if today's solutions such as Apple's Voiceover aren't the ideal solution.

They seem to be trying to adapt the GUI for the blind, rather than trying to build a text/voice based system from scratch, like I was doing.

Siri / HomePods and similar appliances are getting there, I suppose, but they still feel like computing accessories, rather than fully fledged computers themselves.

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