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Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

hydrogen-music.org

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Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#111

Post by [deleted] »

YZF wrote: post #99
gens wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find bout of your claims hard to believe as OSX has a sound architecture similar to PulseAudio. Are the 3ms measured or is it just what OSX tells you ? A buffer of 3ms at 48kHz holds 144 samples. That means shoveling 144 fresh samples (per channel, ofc) ~333 times a second and sending them to the sound card immediately . That may be possible if your sound card supports resampling (and minor magic) and only without…

The problem isn't the CPU, the problem is the OS going out for lunch, and then designs that assume the OS will go our for lunch (i.e. deep buffers everywhere)... The CPU can move data between devices with sub-microsecond latencies...

[deleted]

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#112

Post by eon1 »

eropple wrote: post #79
baldfat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never in my life seen a Mac out perform a Window machine when it comes to latency and professional audio recording. When it comes to $100-$200 parts it comes to drivers and sometimes Mac wins and sometimes Windows wins. I have a bias that goes beyond Pro-Tools but Pro-Tools was a thing because Apple hardware was not capable of producing Professional level recording without spending thousands of dollars in thei…

> Since Windows XP Windows and Audio Latency has not been an issue Core Audio literally-just-works with low latency and aggregated devices. DAWs on Windows still either use MME/DX for north of 50ms, often 100ms+ latency or ASIO (exclusive device usage and no aggregation, assuming your hardware even has ASIO drivers because ASIO4ALL is at best rickety) on Windows. I don't know what you think is going on with OS X, but…

> low latency and aggregated devices

Hang on, no way, you take one or the other. Aggregating devices adds a huge chunk of latency and, frankly, I don't think is that exciting a feature anyway. Maybe for your specific setup, but generally speaking you should buy gear that suits your needs, rather than try to cobble something together from existing devices.

Having used OSX and Win7 (on the same machine) I would agree CoreAudio is less hassle and definitely lower latency - IIRC, OSX reported just over half the latency of W7 on the same setup.

That said, I'm not sure what you think is going on with ASIO, since any class compliant USB audio interface has compatible drivers inherently..

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#113

Post by eon1 »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #94
baldfat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we will disagree 100% I don't think we are talking the same thing. BUT latency (aka delay) in audio recording is a HUGE deal. When someone is playing to a click track and previous recorded pieces and have that person perform with that delay makes it even worse. It's impact on the ability for the drummer to perform has made it default to record drums first. The difference between on beat, before beat or after bea…

> BUT latency (aka delay) in audio recording is a HUGE deal. When someone is playing to a click track and previous recorded pieces and have that person perform with that delay makes it even worse. Please dude, look up latency compensation. You have zero idea what you're talking about and it's obvious. > In actual Professional world there are plenty of Windows based studios that won Emmy's, Oscars and Grammys. I don't…

I think they have a fair idea of what they're talking about, but you've both rushed to reply without thoroughly reading. Seems they missed where you talked about it being okay as long as you can monitor realtime and you've missed that they missed that.

You are wrong about the need for proprietary ASIO drivers for all devices, or that many of the best audio interfaces don't support Windows.. One manufacturer is not "many" and while they are high range, it's definitely arguable whether they're the best.

Anyway, in my experience it's rarely the hardware itself that requires the majority of setup, and either way it's a once-off. Unless you're the kind of person who uses the same template for every recording session, in which case you have bigger problems than setup.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#114

Post by pmoriarty »

unicornporn wrote: post #29

For full av more fully featured Linux sequencer I'd recommend Renoise. It's a tracker (and is not floss), but is super impressive.

Just to add a bit to this:

Renoise is really rock solid, fast, light-weight, powerful, Lua-scriptable, and really cheap compared to your typical commercial DAW, like Bitwig. I think I paid less than $80 for Renoise, compared to about $400 for Bitwig.

The tracker paradigm is very different to the piano-roll paradigm that most other DAWs use. If you can get used to the tracker way of doing things, which is very keyboard-centric (kind of like vim and emacs), then you could be very productive, if not you might be better off with a traditional DAW.

Finally, trackers are usually used for making electronic music, and might not be the best fit for other types of music, or for making or editing long recordings. You might be better off with something like Ardour or Bitwig for that.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#115

Post by rhizome »

diminish wrote: post #71
RileyKyeden wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes with hundreds of effects, supports scripting, and has a huge library of user add-ons: http://stash.reaper.fm/ You must have a different definition of basic. I've never felt limited by Reaper.

Maybe You have never asked anything beyond basic DAW features. It lacks a live ecosystem and community too.

What do you mean by "live ecosystem?"

Also, have you seen https://www.reddit.com/r/Reaper/

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#116

Post by thecrumb »

flavor8 wrote: post #32
zevv wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me a huge change the past years was the coming of Bitwig Studio audio workstation to Linux. Commercial software, but rock solid and high quality.

Do you have to jump through Jack shenanigans to get it working? Or does it just work, nicely?

On Linux Mint - install, configure your inputs, select your soundcard/device, done. It will work fine with Alsa.

It will also support JACK but for quickly getting up and running it's about the simplest DAW I've setup on Linux configuration wise.

Not open source but I give them lots of kudos for supporting Linux from the start.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#117

Post by gtani »

Pxtl wrote: post #50
donquichotte wrote: post #10

I have tried Hydrogen some time ago when I tried to build a linux audio workstation with Jack and Ardour. As much as it pains me to say this, don't expect it to be even remotely as good as commercial software drum machines like EZDrummer, Superior Drummer or Studio Drummer in terms of sample quality or usability. Generally, I found it prohibitively complicated to set up a well-working low-latency audio workstation, e…

After hearing some oldschool electronica my 9-year old asked me about drum machines. Is there a good kid-friendly one you can recommend for win or android?

cheap hardware (you'll probably want velocity sensitive pads) Teenage Eng Rhythm, Korg KR mini and Volca Beats, the Alesis sr 16/18, Akai makes seemingly dozens of beat makers/sequencer/samplers, others from Arturia, boss, the Roland tr09 recreation, etc.

Also DAW builtins: Ableton live DM's, garage band/Logic Pro drummers, I'm pretty sure FL studio, cubase, bitwig, reaper all have something similar

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#118

Post by akx »

gens wrote: post #87
squeaky-clean wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, none of my audio devices have required special drivers for Mac, and I can easily get 3ms latency by just plugging it in and making sure buffer size it at a minimum. I produced on Windows forever and didn't believe there would have been a noticeable difference switching to OSX.

I find bout of your claims hard to believe as OSX has a sound architecture similar to PulseAudio. Are the 3ms measured or is it just what OSX tells you ? A buffer of 3ms at 48kHz holds 144 samples. That means shoveling 144 fresh samples (per channel, ofc) ~333 times a second and sending them to the sound card immediately . That may be possible if your sound card supports resampling (and minor magic) and only without…

I thought I'd try and measure this at some resolution (since my phone can capture at 120 FPS, I should be able to see 8 millisecond increments in a video).

Stepping frame by frame through the video I took (https://youtu.be/IHmC-q_iPiE) at the point where I press the key to sound a note, there's a 4 to 5 frame latency until I can visually see the speaker membrane move, so that's about 33 to 41 milliseconds.

Bitwig is set to 64 samples (1.45 ms) latency.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#119

Post by NTripleOne »

diminish wrote: post #65
squeaky-clean wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have used it for a long time and it's really the most basic of all the DAW alternatives. You clearly haven't. The only possible way there's a shred of truth to this sentence is if you're referring to the included sample-sets/virtual instruments compared to other DAWs, which Reaper doesn't include many of.

you are wrong. I have.

Well that clears that up then doesn't it.

Re: Hydrogen – An advanced drum machine for Linux

#120

Post by davidgerard »

trickell wrote: post #11

Check out LMMS (Let's Make Music). It's like Ableton for Linux and already has VST's like Hydrogen, etc. built into the software itself: https://lmms.io/

I'm a happy LMMS user of many years, but "It's like Ableton" is somewhere between wrong and not-even-wrong. It doesn't have anything like the feature set nor the basic paradigm of Ableton, and anyone trying LMMS on this basis will be seriously disappointed.

The actual comparison is FL Studio - because LMMS started as a cheap-and-cheerful open source clone of FruityLoops, to the point where many FL Studio how-tos (particularly for the 3x Oscillator, sorry Triple Oscillator) also work for LMMS.

LMMS also imports pretty well from Hydrogen, apparently.

LMMS plus points: it costs $0, and it's open source! Minus point: it has only volunteer developers, who come and go; there's no support organisation.

LMMS is very easy to get started on and it's lots of fun. The Woolworths guitar of disco; cheap, cheerful, inadequate and readily available.

[The Woolworths guitar was cheap and helped punk rock along greatly; Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks had one that he'd basically beaten to a plank.]

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