A New Computer

I probably set up and configure (or reconfigure) at least ~5 computers a year for professional audio. A few years back I started configuring some machines to use Arch while continuing to mainly setup and use/support KDE Neon. The two Linux OSes share a lot (and can be functionally equivalent), but differ quite a bit…

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New Article: Pro Audio on Linux

Pro Audio on Linux

Like many of you, I keep an eye on r/linuxaudio for announcements, software updates, and generally to try to help people new to Linux audio when I can. To that end, I took a few hours and put together an introduction to pro audio on Linux here. I decided to host it on GitHub rather…

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Bad Pipewire! Bad KDE Linux!

It’s the end of May, Spring is slowly giving way to Summer as the bees buzz around flowering trees and Pipewire is broken on KDE Linux again. It’s a poetic tale as old as time, well, at least as old as Pipewire. Or KDE Neon. Or both. (or maybe it’s just my janky old system…

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Multichannel Audio Devices and Linux (not a love story)

Something has been bothering me for some time since moving to PipeWire on my Linux boxes, and that is the way multichannel audio devices are handled. As we all know (and loath), Linux audio is complicated and terrible, but the upshot is that it gives us a lot of control and the possibility of extremely low latency — critical to realtime audio recording, processing, programming, etc.

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A Flawless Linux Audio Experience…

I’m not just an emissary for Linux Audio, like everyone else who relies on it and extols its (few) virtues, I’m also its biggest detractor. So when you read “a flawless linux audio experience” you might think I’m trolling you, and in the distant past (say several months ago) you would definitely be correct. But…

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Pipewire and JACK on Arch Linux

This is a quick post to talk about my recent experience configuring Pipewire and JACK on Arch Linux. Now, I’m not an Arch adherent and maybe you aren’t either. That’s fine because I’ll talk about the minimal install and the packages that are required to get Pipewire and JACK working. This will not cover moving…

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Running A University Linux-based Audio Lab: Part 3 — Software Installation in Detail

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I introduced Linux as a viable operating system for a university music and audio programming lab and described in some detail Linux audio configuration for low-latency audio applications.  In this part I will walk through *most* of our post-install script in some detail so you have a better picture of the necessary configuration required. But first…

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