I installed DeMuDi, the Debian-based audio/multimedia distro, on Sunday night. It took a few hours to get everything working, but it’s looking fairly nice.

Key features: multimedia-optimised kernel - I think the main alteration is to do with scheduling so that real-time processing goes smoothly - and a fair range of the current best (libre) Linux audio software configured to work out of the box. I’ve tried and failed to get stuff like Jack and Ardour to work before, on a variety of other systems, and sticking a whole new distribution on a separate partition is basically less fuss than trying to figure it all out.

Based on an hour or so’s messing around with Ardour and Jack Rack, I can definitely see the potential. Jack is basically a low-latency audio stream server that works like a patchbay, enabling you to connect applications’ inputs and outputs together. So it’s possible to plug a guitar into the line-in on the soundcard, run it through a ton of effects on Jack Rack, and record the output into a track on Ardour; or record the clean signal to Ardour, then patch the playback for that track through Jack Rack, then patch it back into Ardour for mix-down (at least, I think this is possible - haven’t actually tried it yet).

All of the graphical user interfaces suck without exception, but the bash-scriptability of most things might make up for that.

Other included software: CSound, Cecilia, Audacity, a few drum machines and trackers and what-not. It’s weighted towards the hard-to-use-but-amazingly-powerful end of things. There’s nothing as immediately gratifying as Buzz. But there’s nothing Buzz can do that you couldn’t in theory do with Jack and a suitable collection of generators and processors.

It all fits on one CD, which is nice. And then after that, apt-get…