gutturalpiss
New member
Oh nono I had no intention of talking about Linux from the start, just adding dither to the noise since it's interesting to see it being mentioned anyway. I took the chance to ask my question as well 
Ok thanks, that's pretty much all I need. But to roughly answer those now:
VST Compatibility = Partial
Very fluctuating. Some plug-ins run extremely well, and some fail. The list of VSTs I use myself is slim, but they do wonders. They're Guitar Rig 3 (this one I prefer running standalone and routing due to high CPU overhead), Addictive Drums, URS EQ & Dynamics suite. I have spent some $$ on stuff that I casually use and I regret it, but two of those are Ethnosphere and SoundBytes BagPipes and they work 100%. I kept an eye on http://ladspavst.linuxaudio.org/ before making my purchases.
I probably have over a hundred free VST(i)s, of which the DSK suite is my favourite and they work perfectly as well.
Before, I relied on http://quitte.de/dsp/caps.html for the eq & dynamics, while on http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html for the multi-band tricks. Since the routing is pretty much anywhere-anywhere, I was able to easily simulate multi-band compression. If you don't need GUI for these stuff, then you will have no problem using native Linux plug-ins to handle them.
Audio Interface Support = Optimal, but not 100%
Thanks to http://ffado.org a lot of the more popular fw devices work. I'm happy to report that I just (like for the last 2 weeks) used a Focusrite Pro 10 to record an orchestra. So minus setting it up, the fact is that it works at least 95% (5% just in case I didn't face problems that I was supposed to).
Sometimes, depending on your laptop fw chip, you may face annoying issues. So this is why the support is not really "full". For my Ricoh, it's known across platforms to be problematic and will occassionally give up the fw connection in which case need to replug & reconnect.
For USB Audio, no USB 1 devices have been reported _not_ to work. Only USB 2 devices have been reported to not function.
For PCI, Echo, RME and M-Audio have shown their might for the Linux support. Especially Echo; they're very friendly and co-operative with the Linux folks.
4GB RAM & 64-bit
Supporting more than 4GB RAM is a low-level thing, not really dependent on OS. Any architecture above 64-bit can address beyond 4GB of physical memory. Linux servers and workstations run with 32GB RAM commonly!
People even on 32-bit are requesting PAE support because it works so well and there's no need to run a 64-bit kernel: http://bugs.archaudio.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=3
But Linux Audio on 64-bit is not something viable if there's a need for VSTs. I only know 2 people who run Ardour-only 64-bit studios coupled with the tool jconv for reverb and convolution (pretty popular in research institutes).
My current interest is on Ambisonics, and on Linux I have the perfect tool for that - ambdec from http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/ the same fellow responsible for jconv. On Windows or Mac, not many choices for ambisonic mixing/playback so I had to skip REAPER and work with Ardour.
http://www.openoctave.org/ might be of interest to you.
Ok thanks, that's pretty much all I need. But to roughly answer those now:
VST Compatibility = Partial
Very fluctuating. Some plug-ins run extremely well, and some fail. The list of VSTs I use myself is slim, but they do wonders. They're Guitar Rig 3 (this one I prefer running standalone and routing due to high CPU overhead), Addictive Drums, URS EQ & Dynamics suite. I have spent some $$ on stuff that I casually use and I regret it, but two of those are Ethnosphere and SoundBytes BagPipes and they work 100%. I kept an eye on http://ladspavst.linuxaudio.org/ before making my purchases.
I probably have over a hundred free VST(i)s, of which the DSK suite is my favourite and they work perfectly as well.
Before, I relied on http://quitte.de/dsp/caps.html for the eq & dynamics, while on http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html for the multi-band tricks. Since the routing is pretty much anywhere-anywhere, I was able to easily simulate multi-band compression. If you don't need GUI for these stuff, then you will have no problem using native Linux plug-ins to handle them.
Audio Interface Support = Optimal, but not 100%
Thanks to http://ffado.org a lot of the more popular fw devices work. I'm happy to report that I just (like for the last 2 weeks) used a Focusrite Pro 10 to record an orchestra. So minus setting it up, the fact is that it works at least 95% (5% just in case I didn't face problems that I was supposed to).
Sometimes, depending on your laptop fw chip, you may face annoying issues. So this is why the support is not really "full". For my Ricoh, it's known across platforms to be problematic and will occassionally give up the fw connection in which case need to replug & reconnect.
For USB Audio, no USB 1 devices have been reported _not_ to work. Only USB 2 devices have been reported to not function.
For PCI, Echo, RME and M-Audio have shown their might for the Linux support. Especially Echo; they're very friendly and co-operative with the Linux folks.
4GB RAM & 64-bit
Supporting more than 4GB RAM is a low-level thing, not really dependent on OS. Any architecture above 64-bit can address beyond 4GB of physical memory. Linux servers and workstations run with 32GB RAM commonly!
People even on 32-bit are requesting PAE support because it works so well and there's no need to run a 64-bit kernel: http://bugs.archaudio.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=3
But Linux Audio on 64-bit is not something viable if there's a need for VSTs. I only know 2 people who run Ardour-only 64-bit studios coupled with the tool jconv for reverb and convolution (pretty popular in research institutes).
My current interest is on Ambisonics, and on Linux I have the perfect tool for that - ambdec from http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/ the same fellow responsible for jconv. On Windows or Mac, not many choices for ambisonic mixing/playback so I had to skip REAPER and work with Ardour.
http://www.openoctave.org/ might be of interest to you.
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