KXStudio project is currently on a break

Unofficial support for the KXStudio Linux distribution and applications.
More info at http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/

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finotti
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KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by finotti »

If you haven't heard, it's stated in KXStudio's home page that
NOTE: The KXStudio project is currently on a break, regular development is expected to return later in 2019. Thanks for understanding.
I have no further information (it could be just for the holidays, it could be much longer, I have no idea), but since falktx is (very unfortunately) not active here anymore, I thought I'd pass it along.
scacinto
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by scacinto »

I discovered this when Filipe canceled my monthly donation to the project. I pray to all the pagan gods that the project is not dead...
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by nils »

How about you KXStudio-users offer to help out? Build a team. I bet there are many tasks that will help faltkx and make the kxstudio-life easier.
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by lilith »

Hope it's nothing serious :(
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by rghvdberg »

nilshi wrote:How about you KXStudio-users offer to help out? Build a team. I bet there are many tasks that will help faltkx and make the kxstudio-life easier.
This.
But how where do we start?

I'm afraid this will mean massive mentoring by falkTX and the last thing I wanna do is stress him out by my noob questions.
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by rghvdberg »

Oh btw, falktx said on irc that a full explanation will come around Christmas.
So don't panic.
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by briandc »

I think taking breaks is totally healthy and necessary for all people. Sometimes it seems like technology is pushing things too fast. Things never stay the same, always updates, etc.

A big thumbs-up to falkTX on his decision. He's REALLY helped linux audio come a long way, and he deserves it!

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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by lilith »

Ok.. sounds good :D
dave
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by dave »

FalkTX deserves a community award in recognition of his excellent work. If I could program my way out of a wet paper bag, I would help out.
mendo
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by mendo »

rghvdberg wrote:
nilshi wrote:How about you KXStudio-users offer to help out? Build a team. I bet there are many tasks that will help faltkx and make the kxstudio-life easier.
This.
But how where do we start?

I'm afraid this will mean massive mentoring by falkTX and the last thing I wanna do is stress him out by my noob questions.
I think this is a good idea.

I previously did some packaging on another domain. So it would be feasible if everyone would adopt 1-3 packages.

Please also consider that the Ubuntustudio is under a similar resource strain.
They discussed their way forward here:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubunt ... 08940.html
--> As you can see, they are thinking very much open to other initiatives.

But this is maybe a different thread.
millerthegorilla
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by millerthegorilla »

I disagree that it would be a separate thread, as I would suspect that perhaps that is what FalkTx will announce, the same strategy as the Ubuntu Studio team.
When Desktop Spins became popular there was a really sound way to add some packages to a base install and then burn the new environment as new iso file, for distribution as your repackaged flavour of linux.
Since that time, we have been getting some really quality desktop environments, but the process of creating them has become more difficult and time consuming, and the strategy that is proposed by the Ubuntu Studio team has been discussed in these forums as well. It makes a little more sense, from the perspective of creating choice, in that the end user can use their desktop environment of choice, and then install the music environment production over that. Systems that start as monolithic almost invariably move towards the modular, since it better describes the needs of the community that uses it.
Mostly, though, I suspect, the reason is that there is a huge amount of work involved in creating the desktop environment and not enough reliably available people to work on that and the audio packages. FalkTx, is almost exclusive in this regard since not only does he produce the desktop environment, he also makes the extremely useful and good packages like Cadence, Carla etc etc. ie a lot of work.
Eitherway, his contribution to the libre music community has been invaluable, timely, well produced, stylish and above all extremely useful. Hopefully the work load won't have made it too difficult for him to continue his involvement, since his experience is also invaluable, but there is a lack of people available to help out in open source projects generally, it seems. As with so many other things in modernity, community seems to increasingly be a matter of someone else's job.
I think it would be great if we could arrive at more community involvement in the production of KXStudio, but a lot of the code base seems to have evolved from a personal project and doesn't seem to currently be organised in a way that would facilitate community involvement, although I might be wrong. There is no fixed point of issue reporting for instance, a whole bunch of different repo addresses, and a whole bunch of other small chaoses that are probably part of a transition to better coordination that many long standing projects have gone through as they have migrated everything to the better facilities offered by organisations like Github with its plugins, and RAD integration.
It is an opensource project, at least as I understand it, so there may be, if FalkTX is happy with the idea, the opportunity to fork the project, if there are enough people who want to maintain a desktop...
FawkesThat
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by FawkesThat »

When I first saw the break message, I was a little worried. I've run through just about every audio distro I've come across. I settled on KXStudio quite some time ago. I'm even quite comfortable installing it for non-technical folk - usually musicians - who don't need to, or can't afford to, get into the hardware rat-race Windows forces upon people. All they need is an update checker and a little textfile how-to on using synaptic to apply updates.

That's a major credit to FalkTX's work - before you even start looking at the audio capabilities of the system.

I've been desperate enough for a new audio distro that I've a spare disk here with a base Gentoo studio install. Although, that's the last resort, I don't want to unlearn debian packaging and try to wrap my head around that of Gentoo.

So, I'm currently running KXStudio on KDE neon. Which I don't think is meant to be possible yet. I have gone through the process of installing several times so I've got it fairly well documented.

Here's how, I'll leave it to someone else to figure out why it works....
  • * Put KDE neon on USB, and boot target system from the stick.
    * Install KDE neon. Download updates & install third-party along the way.
    * Reboot.
    * Install a few prerequisites, and add the snap version of GiMP

    Code: Select all

    sudo apt-get install htop synaptic apt-xapian-index git etckeeper
    sudo apt-get install snapd snapd-xdg-open
    sudo snap install gimp
    I've tried with just the snap components; that did not work. It seems to need that GiMP version to be able to work, and it needs it at this point.

    * Add the KXStudio repositories (I downloaded copies)

    Code: Select all

    sudo apt-get install ./kxstudio-repos_9.5.1-kxstudio3_all.deb
    sudo apt-get install ./kxstudio-repos-gcc5_9.5.1-kxstudio3_all.deb
    * Install lowlatency kernel, tools for cpufrequency, &c

    Code: Select all

    sudo apt-get install linux-lowlatency linux-tools-lowlatency indicator-cpufreq cpufreqd cpufrequtils rtirq-init
    
    * Make a few needed changes - user in audio group, rt audio tweaks, order sound cards

    Code: Select all

    sudo usermod -a -G audio fawkes
    ## System config file changes required
    
    sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf
    
    # Append 'fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288' and save
    
    sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
    
    # Insert code to order sound card(s)
    # I use 'options snd slots=snd-ice112,snd-ice1712,snd-aloop,snd-hda-intel'
    
    * Now, time to bring the system up to date before a reboot

    Code: Select all

    ## This is the FIRST use of apt-get update
    sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
    sudo reboot
    * Once rebooted, it's time to install the KXStudio bits.I've used synaptic to do this, and list the packages marked for installation below:

    Code: Select all

    kxstudio-meta-all kxstudio-docs kxstudio-desktop kxstudio-artwork-kdm 
    kxstudio-artwork-ksplash kxstudio-artwork-icons kxstudio-meta-audio-plugins-vst
    kxstudio-meta-audio-plugins-ladspa kxstudio-meta-audio-plugins-dssi 	kxstudio-meta-plugins-lv2
    libffi-static qtbase5-static glib-static pango-static
    This is pretty much everything except kxstudio-desktop-kde4. It's a huge load of software to pull down, particularly when I'm doing this over a 3G mobile connection.
    * Once that's all in place I went for a shutdown rather than reboot.
    * Once logged in the kxstudio-welcome is displayed. I opted to take everything listed.
Now you're on to adding whatever else you want or need. I do a lot of graphics work, so the availability of GiMP 2.10.8 was what prompted me to try this. [Aside: I subsequently spent three days trying to put KXStudio on KDE neon without the GiMP bit]. For me, the newer kernel version runs my quad core i5 much better. Previously I'd get an xrun or three every hour.
I've even got the two Edirol DA2496 cards working together perfectly. For this I'm using zita-ajbridge. The current version in neon offers a -S option which stops it from doing any resampling.

Anyone who has tried to use multiple cards probably knows the whole rigmarole of stuff which works poorly - if at all. Using alsa_in/out isn't reliable. Nor is starting the audioadapter module with jack_load. Both of these do resampling. The latter will drop samples to keep going; after all, it is just an example module.

My pair of Edirol DA2496 cards are linked together with a word clock cable. Of course, the ICE1712 driver doesn't know about that. Instead, I have a S/PDIF TOSLINK connection from card0 to card1.

I'm using Claudia, so my default studio is using hw:DA2496 (card0) for JACK. Sample rate 96000, buffer size 1024, periods/buffer 2, dithering shaped, soft mode, duplex, hardware aliases,hardware monitoring,hardware metering. Some fiddling with alsamixer, alsactl store, and envy24control, is needed to get both cards working together consistently.

Within Claudia, I've run two custom applications for the second card's inputs and outputs:

Code: Select all

# First app - Input - named 09to16in
chrt -f 85 zita-a2j -S -d hw:DA2496_1 -r 96000 -p 64 -n 2 -c 12 -v >> $HOME/.zita-a2j.log 2>&1
# Second app - Output - named 09to16out
chrt -f 85 zita-j2a -S -d hw:DA2495_1 -r 96000 -p 256 -n 2 -c 10 -v >> $HOME/.zita-j2a.log 2>&1
With this idling, and unconnected, Cadence reports the DSP load at around 1%. I've run a test feeding all sixteen inputs into Ardour and recording for over six hours. No xruns, and no dropped samples in the zita logs (above). That showed a DSP load of around 3%.

I now need to sort out the precise latencies from card to capture ports, and from playback to card. Great to know they're marching in time, but I don't know if one is three steps ahead, or behind.

And keep my fingers crossed this install doesn't explode in an unterminated string of dependency errors. :D
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by sysrqer »

Just a small note, Neon team does not recommend using apt for updating - https://blog.neon.kde.org/index.php/201 ... -software/

Code: Select all

pkcon refresh
pkcon update
FawkesThat
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by FawkesThat »

sysrqer wrote:Just a small note, Neon team does not recommend using apt for updating - https://blog.neon.kde.org/index.php/201 ... code]pkcon refresh
pkcon update[/code]
I'd noticed that. Which is where I'm expecting this to start getting brittle. Running the above currently says I've no updates. I'd not taken notes the first time I - by luck - got a working install. Several abortive attempts to document getting a very unsupported setup had involved letting Discover get involved (thus, I assume, pkcon).

I went with what I know - which isn't recommended - to get a stable, but "unsupportable", system. I'm hoping by the time the dependencies start coming unstuck there's a KXStudio release I can drop in. In use, this system won't be online. Without a running OS I can't sort out the physical wiring inside a flight case. What was there was horribly outdated, and I've partitioned so I'm not going to lose any data with a subsequent reinstall.

This certainly looks purty. 8) Like a sports car, I'll probably wrap it around a tree in the first month of running it. :wink:
alanharris69
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Re: KXStudio project is currently on a break

Post by alanharris69 »

I am using two builds, KXstudio not connected to Internet with MOD duo and a small beringer interface, and debian with the KXstudio repositories. as far as I can tell the work is well done and Filipe is well due for a rest
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