carmen wrote:
it would help if you can provide a backtrace so that these crashes can be diagnosed..
Pd does say 'warning: MIDI in Windows is dangerous' on creating any MIDI objects, I figure everyone knows this already. Also, I don't know how to provide a backtrace. I would love to get my hands dirty with the PD source but it resolutely refuses to compile on my machine. I've tried four different Windows-based unix-like and non-unix-like compilation environments, each taking upwards of ten hours to install and experiment with, and have achieved not a single compile. That's forty hours of potential music making, and all of my spare time for three weeks, gone, on nothing, not to mention the stress and frustration as gig dates loom and I still haven't actually made any music. And it turns out during that that I probably ended up getting several broken CVS versions, instead of 'the proper one', whichever that is.
have you tried Ubuntu Studio, Musix, Studio-to-Go, Studio64, DeMuDi, CCRMA or Dynebolic/PureDyne?
The issue isn't with Linux per se, it's my USB audio device. The built-in audio is gross on pretty much every PC laptop, and I just can't make my USB audio device go. It's a Tascam US122, which I specifically bought because people said good things about it working in Linux, but I can't make it go. (I've browsed the code, the logs, and the web trying to see if I can figure it out for myself, and I can't.)
Ubuntu (Hoary and Breezy) freezes my machine on boot (it's a PCMCIA issue but I can't work out how to disable it). I have a mostly working DeMuDi install which does almost everything except support my USB Audio / MIDI device, although I had to roll my own kernel to get around the PCMCIA issue (which seemed to be causing random kernel panics on boot).
I pay through the nose for internet which doesn't make downloading install discs particularly fun, and to be frank given my low success rate in the past I've lost the enthusiasm. I have been along to an installfest or two but no luck there either, it seems that the kind of people who know how to make Linux work on a laptop just know how to browse the web and how trial and error works, which is what I know already anyway.
So yes. I have tried many Liunx distros, multiple times. (I tried my first distro in 1999, in fact, with Red Hat 6. Couldn't make it work like I wanted then, either.) There is no silver bullet to this problem, that I know.
but if Tk is slow, and OSX is slow (they both are)
Most systems are slow, for given definitions of slow. Definitions of slow also have a habit of morphing over the years, so that the 'blazingly fast' cpu of 1999 magically becomes 'slow as a dog' by 2005. It should be called Moore's Treadmill, and it should've been smashed to small pieces ten years ago. I'm getting off.