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Elk OS – Audio Operating System

elk.audio

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Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#41

Post by mwcampbell »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #38
mwcampbell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a legally blind developer who has worked on accessibility for a while (see my HN profile for more), I'm inclined to agree with you. We use screen readers like VoiceOver because, practically, we often need to access mainstream applications. But I think we tend to get too dogmatic about going mainstream, to the point that some of us are disdainful toward systems designed specifically for blind people, particularly i…

Yes it was a software synthesizer called "Speech!" by Superior Software, blown into a ROM.

Ah, must have been a BBC Micro-only thing, because I never heard about it.

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#42

Post by LeoPanthera »

mwcampbell wrote: post #41
LeoPanthera wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it was a software synthesizer called "Speech!" by Superior Software, blown into a ROM.

Ah, must have been a BBC Micro-only thing, because I never heard about it.

It certainly was, yes. The BBC Micro had an optional hardware speech synth you could add, but it was very inflexible, limited to a fairly small set of pre-defined words. "Speech!" could render arbitrary phonemes which make it a lot more flexible.

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#43

Post by cmiller1 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23
cmiller1 wrote: post #5

Interesting, I was actually looking into distros set up for audio recently because I was hoping to build a little jukebox r-pi or similar but noticed you'd have to recompile the kernel on the official pi distro to get full support for high-resolution audio

"high resolution audio" is a bit of a weasel phrase. My RPi4 is quite happy doing what any audio engineer would consider "high resolution audio", no kernel recompile required.

192 khz/24 bit

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#45

Post by noizejoy »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #29
jancsika wrote: post #6

> 1ms round-trip Ooh, a rare latency claim that actually specifies which type of latency they mean! One millisecond round-trip latency, if true in practice, is quite impressive. I'm going to continue reading now... :)

I’ve never understood the latency requirement for professional gear, are you able to articulate why there’s a need for lower latency than average consumer gear?

When playing a software instrument via an external hardware controller (typically via MIDI over USB), even a tiny delay from the musician striking a key or a drum pad to the resulting audio out of the speaker can become very problematic for instruments with a very fast attack, where exact timing matters a lot to the performance. Examples include drums and percussion, pianos, many plucked type of sounds. With slow attack sounds like legato strings, extra latency is generally much less of a problem.

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#46

Post by InitialLastName »

mastrsushi wrote: post #11

"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 y…

I work in that industry; at this point most of the big players are on either ARM SOCs or SHARC, with a few plucky folks basically making x86_64 servers.

Once performance is comparable for the workload, ARM-based synthesizers aren't inherently any more stagnant than DSP-based synths, in the same way that ARM-based tablet apps aren't necessarily stagnant; if anything, the freedom from crappy compiler lock-in, incomprehensible instruction pipelines, assembly code, and (as you say) poor documentation. Moving to ARM, GCC/LLVM support, and (eventually) Linux makes all the things other than making neat sounds (UI, interconnect, networking, power management, etc) easier, so that developers can spend more time on the creative bits.

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#47

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cmiller1 wrote: post #43
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"high resolution audio" is a bit of a weasel phrase. My RPi4 is quite happy doing what any audio engineer would consider "high resolution audio", no kernel recompile required.

192 khz/24 bit

Just put a hifiberry card in there. Done.

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#48

Post by neolog »

> Working with our 5G partner Ericsson, Elk will open up completely new products and network services to connect musicians and equipment remotely over the internet in real time.

This seems difficult. What is the 5G latency chain like in practice?

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#49

Post by michaelpb »

twobitshifter wrote: post #39

I remember Ubuntu studio being geared towards musicians. Does Elk have its own proprietary components? I noticed that the raspberry pie image is noted as open source but not the OS in general. https://ubuntustudio.org/tour/audio/

Looks like it uses a "Yocto" script - https://github.com/elk-audio/elkpi-sdk - https://www.yoctoproject.org/

I thought of Ubuntu Studio as well, but it looks like Elk is intended to be more lower-level / for appliances. I'm not totally sure though, but I'm guessing it doesn't come with the full suite of Ardour etc.

I do wish there was something like Ubuntu Studio, except focused on audio-only (and more polished / supported). Mostly just because JACK + low-latency kernels are an ordeal to set-up and maintain on a normal desktop, so it's much easier to just install a pre-configured distro on a studio computer and be ready to jam whenever inspiration strikes. Unfortunately KXStudio as a separate distro isn't around any more. I still use a KXStudio 14.04 install on an old (airgapped) DAW computer.

Re: Elk OS – Audio Operating System

#50

Post by cahooon »

neolog wrote: post #48

> Working with our 5G partner Ericsson, Elk will open up completely new products and network services to connect musicians and equipment remotely over the internet in real time. This seems difficult. What is the 5G latency chain like in practice?

My guess is that they don’t mean audio.
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