OSX and Linux status update

dehuszar · Post by **dehuszar** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 6:19 pm

I've been watching this little tete a tete with a bit of amusement. As someone who works regularly with Linux and has a reasonable amount of experience with OpenBSD, I find this all a little ridiculous. I hope this will not sound disdainful as I don't mean to, I certainly don't know it all, but here it goes anyway.....

First off, the Muse VST box uses Wine to port the VST libraries over to the Jack and ALSA audio servers. You STILL NEED LINUX DRIVERS FOR IT TO WORK on your soundcard. Moreover, the VST engine is NOT ASIO. It is, like DP, or Modular, a toolkit which sits upon an established platform and framework. Muse's product just takes the work out of it for you.

But you'll note that if you try and recreate the experiment at home (which is not THAT hard to do), you'll find the support page which directs you to Linux drivers for RME, and Sound Blaster cards, etc.. Now I know Phyx is intent on building such a driver, but as I'll get to in a moment, a driver and windows emulator alone do not a working platform maketh. More on this...

But first, Wine definately takes a hit in performance, however, it tends to still perform on par with Windows applications where Linux is more efficient and has control of certain aspects of an app. For instance, any time an app has to do heavy read and write tasks, a UNIX based system will almost always smoke a Windows system and throw the butt out the window as it drives off. A jounaled Tree system of file-management like ReiserFS, XFS, and to a lesser extent ext2 or 3, is far more efficient than Fat32 or NTFS and has a far greater range of file compatibility.

You'll note that the large majority of servers and clusters which host 10k+ users are on usually some BSD, Solaris, and occasionally Linux platform. If Windows weren't such a Frankenstein of different mergers and technologies, there would be no way that a full application running under wine (note I say a FULL app, like if I'm running Photoshop) could compete with native Windows.

But if you're only porting certain libraries to gain access to VST synths (which unless sample-based are usually just .dll files), or video codecs, and the rest of the work is being done natively, you get performance gains to balance out your losses which come from non-native emulation.

Furthermore, getting Nuendo to LOAD in Wine is an enormous difference than getting it to record one single track. The main reason for this is that the only reason Wine works at all is that it fakes windows apps into using Linux hardware and frameworks, but I've yet to see an instance where you could get Wine to make your GeForce 6600GT with Linux drivers to work AS A GeForce 6600GT in a Windows app under the auspices of being Windows drivers.

Transgamer has gotten the closest, but what they've done is to port as much of the DirectX code as they've been able to reverse engineer, and then have it talk to whatever native Linux audio and video engines you can point it to.

But they are a for-profit company with a development team of at least 25, plus volunteers. And they've still got a long way to go. None of the major Windows emulators barring MAYBE VMWare (whose latest version I haven't used), or XenSource (which I haven't used at all) can even figure out how to get USB ports to work in Windows apps under Linux.

Photoshop runs under Wine because you do not need any specialized hardware to get it running. Cubase and Nuendo do not share this luxury.

Not that you would even NEED all of that, as the SFP OS; i.e. GUI, was built (as has been mentioned in several places on the Z including Wsipple's first couple of posts) in wxWidgets, formerly wxWindows, and is already portable to any platform that supports C++, which is I think almost all of them dating back to the mid-late eightees.

What you need in order to use the SFP OS on top of whatever drivers you are able to concoct is a binary which can load the dsp libraries, and push the modules and devices onto the SHARC chips, which as Tom as illustrated, is made quite difficult with great intention.

You see, Linux, or BSD, or whatever is pretty smart. In an old experiment I tried, SuSE, Ubuntu, and Linspire (all using LiveCDs) were able to see my Creamware cards through my old Magma's Cardbus controller (which requires a bevy of drivers and coddling under Windows) and I could mknod and modprobe them all the live long day.

But that doesn't make it a usable solution because, like on windows, until you run "SFP.exe," or in our theoretical case, "./sfp", then there's no means of communication between a driver, and our mecca of aural excitement.

Even if you create a driver for Linux, you'll still have to figure out how Windows would read the driver for it's own purposes, only to be able to load a GUI which is designed to be cross-plaform to begin with.

As Paul Tanti once told me, the driver is really more of a place-holder for the SFP OS than anything else. So when Cubase or Sonar says "Oh Creamware driver, where are your thoughts on ASIO being kept and with what options should it be loaded to suit you best?" and the Creamware driver says, "see SFP.Software.24bit-ASIO".

Now obviously I'm fudging that entirely, but the point is, the driver itself doesn't do much, unless you understand the interplay which is taking place in that encrypted space.

So I recommend that you (Phyx) contact wsippel and sign their NDA, because your BSD experience will help them GREATLY. Really.

Remember, OSX's Darwin core is based on BSD, and BSD is binary-compatible with Linux and most other Unices.

To boil it down, there are so many layers of complexity and hardware abstraction going on under Wine, that while it's already hard enough getting a stable SFP system under Windows natively, given Scope's pickiness with hardware and the basic bugginess of most of the sequencers out there, trying to make that whole lake of mud run semi-intact in a foreign OS is probably not the best approach.

There is already a project in motion which needs you. And I would like to extend my support should you wish to walk it. But you'll likely need some documentation which requires a bit of hoop-jumping to really achieve what you want.

This concludes my off-the-cuff rant, and I hope that those who spot a few factual errors will correct me as I'm not infallible. Flame on.

With love and respect,
Sam

Post by **hubird** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 8:06 pm

marcuspocus · Post by **marcuspocus** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 10:26 pm

Finaly something sensible in this thread

Yep dehuszar, with my actual knowledge of unix in general and windows stuff, i can say that you explained it pretty well, and that about the closest to reality you could get.

valis · Post by **valis** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 7:47 am

Nice

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 12:00 pm

It seems to make a lot of sense to me and I don't even know what the hell he's talking about.

emzee · Post by **emzee** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 4:25 pm

I'm glad he's on our side......

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 6:51 am

Any new news on this Linux port Willie ?

Ferry · Post by **Ferry** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 10:58 am

Maby useless maby not

The (Unofficial) tripleDAT Home Page (Linux driver and more):

http://web.archive.org/web/200202060456 ... ~e9125471/

[ This Message was edited by: Ferry on 2005-09-17 11:59 ]

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 7:23 pm

On 2005-09-17 14:47, stardust wrote:
Its like a reminiscence to ol' creamware days before the crash.

oh yeah - the days of ISA cards...
... but you need a Pentium 90 and 16 MB to run it...

cheers, Tom

[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2005-09-17 20:25 ]

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 8:27 am

I'll take that off your hands if you pay the postage & give me 50 euro

Me$$iah · Post by **Me$$iah** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 5:12 pm

OK so seriouslty now,
are the TripleDAT cards any good?? would they run in my comp now AMD3.2
could I use one along with my Pulsar??

Ive never seen a TripleDAT working, so Ive got no idea, but I have been thinking about picking one up from ebay or summat
Is it worth doing
please tell--I just gotta know

-Messiah

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 12:45 am

On 2005-09-18 18:12, Me$$iah wrote:
OK so seriouslty now,
are the TripleDAT cards any good?? would they run in my comp now AMD3.2
...

the cards WERE extremely good (in multitracking context) 10 years(?) ago - and NO, that stuff will not run with your new AMD, let alone XP etc...

forget about the eBay offers, usually they are close to fraud with their 'capabilities' list - you'll have trouble with ANY version of the Triple board or the so-called TDAT16.
None of them runs beyond Win98.

I have the TripleDat plugin for Scope (Win98 required) and even in a fairly 'conservative' setup it was never usable for recording. It cannot even deal with regular filenames (8 plus 3 if you remember...).
It has some nice editing capabilities, tho - and the noise reduction (Osiris) is extremely good (considering the price I paid).

I'm recording with VDAT (if I ever do, not much time currently), as I like the 'burn-all-live-to-tape' approach.
If this recording is a (to be restored) vinyl track, then I use Triple and Osiris - in all other cases I'd rather prefer CoolEdit Pro - if I only could get a license...

cheers, Tom

ps - oops just noticed the thread's title, sorry for the OT.
it's really not worth discussing Triple any further in this context, even (ex)Triple hardliners like Krizrox are more happy with 'modern' sequencers for editing today (Cakewalk in his case)

[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2005-09-19 01:52 ]

Me$$iah · Post by **Me$$iah** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 3:43 am

Cheers Tom

Stay on target

samplaire · Post by **samplaire** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 11:04 am

Back to the topic: does anybody work on the OSX support at the moment? Can anybody say it?

enb141 · Post by **enb141** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 7:31 pm

I doubt there's a developer working on windows

next to nothing · Post by **next to nothing** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 8:23 pm

maybe the "need" for OSX ASB remote software speeds things up a bit?

ooo000ooo · Post by **ooo000ooo** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 6:43 am

well, the noah software didn't seem to speed them, so I wouldn't hold my breath

Post by **garyb** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 11:05 am

it'd help if osx didn't change radically every 6 months....as you might have noticed, the asb software in beta only works with 10.4...

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 1:29 pm

10.4 is the first version that can be considered an OS according to what one would expect from Apple - 10.3 started to become usable, anything older was just crap.

Btw just yesterday I read about a company willing to release '...also a version for OSX...', (some graphic soft) but couldn't due to lack of qualified programmers.

[rant]
since OSX is BSD based I've had a closer look on what's offered there, how it's packaged and so on - also on a bunch of Linux distributions, some cheapos that accompagny mags or books, some downloads...

my respect towards Apple has grown tremendously since I waded through all that wannabe, lookalike and toyish mess...

if that reflects only half of the general level of programming (skills and concepts) in the x-ish domain, then it's no wonder those things don't get on.
Obviously there was a reason to charge a fortune for those OSes years ago - at least SGI, Sun, HP etc had some reputation.

that's my honest opinion without wanting to diss someone (or a group) just for fun.
I have been really angry about dozens of wasted hours because I believed the sh*t I read online, in mags or in books.

during the same time I've installed (or updated) at least 5 machines with OSX 10.4 without the slightest glitch.
those do what they are supposed to and they do it without superfluous techie messages and without ambigous naming...
[/rant]

don't take it too seriously tho - I feel better now ...

to be fair it should not be omitted that the whole CWA Linux & OSX project could be delayed because of the infamous 'intellectual property' issue and NOT due to untalented programmers.
The nasty lines above apply to big mouthed stories in my mags and not necessarily to Willi and his group

cheers, Tom

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 5:53 pm

[counter-rant]

If you are going to rant about the whole BSD/*nix world, please at least be specific with what you wasted your time on. Otherwise blaming "poor coding" for the fact that you were too lazy to download the FAQ/Howto or learn new concepts isn't going to convince anyone =P. Did the BSD disklabel stuff scare you away?

[end of counter-rant]