What HW/SW do people have working?

[Scott]

Larry David wrote:
> Are you using a Linux machine regularly to do audio/MIDI and finding  
> it solid and useable, or is this still mostly an experiment to see  
> what you can get running and for how long?

I'm not doing any MIDI, just audio recording 12 tracks in Ardour.  It's working 100% 
with no xruns or crashes.  My longest continuous session was 45 minutes before I 
stopped it to save.  I'm actually a little surprised it's working so well in 8.10 
considering it was complete trash in 8.04.

About 5 years ago I had an old DAW that ran in NT4 and used a PCI audio capture card. 
  It crashed about 1 in 5 times and both the hardware and software folks claimed that 
was normal.  There was no win2k or newer support and it suffered from a 1/2 second 
recording delay.  That was the biggest pain because it required tons of 
post-production editing.

RT provides for only a 2ms delay which is a dream... I just hit record and can punch 
in/out at will then export to an audio file.  Even a Mac or PC can't match that.  If 
it wasn't for RT capability I wouldn't have bothered with Linux.  The fact that my day 
to day work takes place in the context of Linux helps, but it wasn't the deciding 
factor in choosing an OS to host my audio tools.  I'd use a Nintendo if the quality 
and applications were as awesome as those available to Linux :^).

-Scott