Comments on: 64 Studio Review

By: DC

DC — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 07:09:25 +0000

I have to agree with Federico, this is a pretty piss poor review. You took a distro designed mainly for audio work which brags about realtime kernel features and installed it in a VirtualBox machine with no audio support configured. You barely grazed the surface when it came to software packages aside from just listing them off and instead focused on where the menu bar was located which is the very LAST design decision that even matters. Once you are in a program working no one cares where the menu bar is. It really sounds like you just installed it as an easy way to sample a bunch of creativity software because again, instead of really taking 64 Studio for a test drive you just continued to reiterate that you would like to try said package on your Fedora or Ubuntu machines. On a side note I have tried Ubuntu Studio and it was slow and clunky. No offense to Canonical because Ubuntu is a great product but they really missed the mark on a distro streamlined for creativity.

By: federico

federico — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:13:45 +0000

“Also, it’s possible that a lot of the benefits of 64 Studio vs Vanilla Debian are below the surface. If they have a custom kernel tuned for creativity and have the jack audio framework all setup for you already, then that’s a huge plus for them.”

Well it is so, and I should say this is a very superficial review. 64 Studio is all about jack (realtime-kernel, special repos with lot’s of backports of new audio software, gstreamer works with jack out of the box, etc). Actually 64 studio is mostly an audio oriented distro. An there are live CD’s. But if you really want to experience the advantages of low-latency with jack you better make a partition and try it for real (not in a virtualbox).

Next time you write a review about a distro like this one, you better make a little bit more research.

That said, I have also tried ubuntu studio. It looks prettier but is more unstable, jack does not work as well as in 64 studio and I did not like the fact that the left linuxsamplet out.

By: Eric Mesa

Eric Mesa — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:21:33 +0000

@Soundlessnux – I don’t know what strange chipsets you and others have. Linux has never given me any audio problems on any computer or laptop I have ever installed it on. Even when they went to PulseAudio in Fedora 8 it worked for me. Perhaps my audio hardware is just that generic that it always works, I don’t know. I know you’re not the only one to complain, but I can’t say that I’ve ever had a problem with it across 5 different computers from five different manufacturers.

By: Soundlessnux

Soundlessnux — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:03:07 +0000

Sound was not working due to Virtualbox?

Are you really not aware of the awful reality *nux sound-solutions are in?

Sound on linuxes doesn’t work 2/3rds of the time due to Pulseaudio. Or due to Alsa-OSS-Esound conflicts. I have seen it so many times it makes me cry.

By: Eric Mesa

Eric Mesa — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 13:21:31 +0000

Yeah, I figured that was part of the problem of a review like this. I had a feeling that a lot of what they had done was under the surface so it would be hard for me to tell what the true advantage was. If I worked for a computer mag or website I probably would have installed a vanilla Debian install to compare the kernel customizations. And, of course, I mentioned that I was pretty sure they had hooked up the audio stuff in the background – it just didn’t work in VirtualBox for some reason.

Thanks for the info on the installer. For some reason, I thought back when the last Debian came out (etch?) that there was all this hoopla over the fact that they FINALLY had a graphical installer. I didn’t know that it had been pushed off until the next version. I could have sworn I read tons of LinuxToday.com articles about how Debian had finally joined the rest of the distro world in providing a graphical installer.

By: James

James — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 07:35:29 +0000

I’ve followed 64Studio for a while (although I’ve only tried the 32-bit version). The stuff the team have done under the surface is quite a lot. As above, the kernel is real-time and jack is configured, but also all the other sound stuff is linked together to work together with very little fiddling around. 64Studio is based on Debian etch and therefore the installer is from etch. I’m sure when lenny comes out as stable, the installer will change to the graphical one. I’ve found it to be the easiest sudio distro to use.

By: Eric Mesa

Eric Mesa — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:18:46 +0000

Thanks for the confirmation there.

By: John

John — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:16:17 +0000

The 64 Studio Kernel is personalized with real-time and SMP patches. And yes, it’s already “jack ready”.
I found it to be a bit more focused than Ubuntu Studio, but that’s just my opinion, of course…