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Re: [sc-users] [OT] laptop for audio



I run a Dell Latitude E6500 machine with UbuntuStudio. I ran another Dell machine until it blew up with UbuntuStudio too. It works fine, except for the wifi card, I think Broadcomm, which as previously noted causes xruns, particularly when you try to get it down to live performance latency. My solution was to buy an external wifi box, it was cheap, particularly compared to the endless hours I spent trying
to get the Broadcomm box(es) to behave.

One thing to note is the latest version of UbuntuStudio (18.10) has a bug in it that causes it to run some useless task constantly, this will soak up most of your cpu bandwidth, and heat up the laptop. One cure
for that is to run:

sudo systemctl stop systemd-udevd systemd-udevd-kernel.socket systemd-udevd-control.socket sudo systemctl start systemd-udevd systemd-udevd-kernel.socket systemd-udevd-control.socket


On 2/24/19 4:28 PM, jamshark70@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 11:38 PM<valle@xxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
I’m thinking about switching to linux, but I’m totally unaware about hardware knowledge.
So, I’d like to know what are your options for real time audio, SC indeed being a strict requirement.
Not a hardware recommendation, but let me suggest Ubuntu Studio (or
other multimedia distro) instead of vanilla Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Studio uses a lowlatency kernel by default, and the team have
already tuned interrupt priorities so that USB audio works
out-of-the-box without JACK xruns. When I was using vanilla Ubuntu +
lowlatency kernel, I could never get the interrupts quite right. With
Ubuntu Studio, I didn't have to touch a thing and it's running
beautifully.

(You don't need a RT kernel. Lowlatency is enough. The vanilla kernel
will probably not run JACK well enough for SC.)

One thing to check for hardware is the wifi card. Consumer laptops
often put wifi and USB interrupts on the same bus -- and third-party
wifi drivers often don't take any care for RT safety, so the wifi
driver can interfere with audio timing. My old laptop had a Broadcomm
card. Ubuntu doesn't have its own Broadcomm driver, so I had to
install a third-party driver, and I had xruns all the time. That
machine was lost in an accident, and the replacement has an Atheros
card, for which Ubuntu ships a driver. Seems a lot better.

hjh

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