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I’m using SliTaz to design a high performance audio server. Though it’s a challenge for someone like me, who’s familiar with Windows and new to Linux, to get this machine going, SliTaz is looking like the ultimate OS for building a music computer. I would appreciate any advice you can offer about how to slim down SliTaz; the goal of the slimming is to improve audio latency performance by reducing memory and CPU usage from unessential processes and OS activity. This is typically done by removing/disabling functions or adjusting those that are essential (for better performance) and occasionally by installing tools that allow further tweaking and adjustment and similar approaches.
If I understand correctly, unlike Windows, Linux and SliTaz don’t have a registry and processes, drivers, etc, loaded in the background, unless they’re supporting something that’s already running. I have an Ubuntu OS on the machine to handle ripping CDs, Internet access and downloading cover art. The SliTaz boot section will only play music files and will not connect to the Internet, play video, have WiFi / remote control or other frills. However, the things it does have to do include:
Booting and running without error or hang-ups, playing music files with Alsa and MPD players, playing music from CD drives, thumb drives and hard drive, playing music files with a variety of DACs and Sound cards, ability to clone/image the OS (I would probably do this in Ubuntu, with Clonezilla), and occasionally install new software.
From the top processes dashboard I see about 25-30 items and I’m guessing many of them aren’t essential to keep the machine running or playing music files, but it’s hard to tell which package the process is connected to, and which processes are essential. I don’t see a lot of mechanisms to configure the machine, outside of the package manager, but I’d be interested in knowing if there are. As an example, I will probably go with XVesa for the GUI; assuming the screen is viewable, 16 colors should give the best sound. I have a lot of XOrg packages installed by default, so I’m led to wonder whether I should remove those with XVesa running or if simply having the machine while it’s in XVesa mode doesn’t have any effect on the machine.
I’m interested in any advice those of you out there can offer about groups of default packages that can be removed or are essential, anything I should install, as well any ideas about the goal stated above, to improve latency performance through the memory and CPU usage.
Thank you for your feedback.
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Unless your PC is from 1994 I don't think you'll have a problem with latency for just playing audio. But there are low latency/real-time patches for the kernel, these are usually used by people who record music, and I am not sure it would help anyways. Also if you are using things like sound cards, there is a chance that the lowering the burden on the CPU will not increase performance as the sound card will be doing all the work anyway.
I have some experience tweaking Win 7 for audio. We’re talking about state-of-the-art audio gear behind this kind of machine, so the difference in sound quality with a typical Pioneer or Onkyo system is probably not going to be that noticeable, regardless of the OS, hardware, etc. However, with gear that’s sufficiently sensitive there are differences to be heard by taking the fans off the motherboard, disabling the Intel HD graphics driver, using a different player or sound driver, disabling Windows services, etc. These changes don’t make much difference individually, but the sum of them often does. Thus the focus on latency and resource usage.
I’m interested if anyone has any more information about latency patches or tweaks that could affect music playback (recording is not of interest). I’ve found the Tiny SliTaz page, which seems to be in line with the direction I want to go. I won’t attempt anything with TS before I know a lot more about what I’m doing, but recommendations about certain kernels, characteristics or posted versions would be something I can come back to.
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SliTaz is already pretty bootstrapped processes wise, so all that is running is already the bare minimum processes. No real tweaking required from your side on the linux side.
What you do however need to tweak is ALSA because it manages your sound, but the default is fine. The other is the player you will be using. Personally I like deadbeef because it's both light, functional and low on resources. I created a package for it which you can download from http://www.trixarian.net/SliTaz 
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Hello Trixar, yex, Deadbeef was on my list of players to install. Thanks for the link.
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depends what you want - I use slitaz for a sound-monument and also for exhibitons - slitaz-base without X und mpd - works perfect since 2009 - the quality of the sound depends only on the soundcard - best price / quality product is the Delta Audiophile 2496 - the ceapest good soundcard is the BEHRINGER U-CONTROL UCA 202 with a Burr-Brown soundchip about 25€.
if you need something like 5.1 or 7.1 you can try Asus Xonar soundcards or ESI Juli@
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Here is the two wiki's you'll need to learn, use and optimise ALSA:
http://www.alsa-project.org/ (Official one and has more up to date guides)
http://alsa.opensrc.org (Unofficial one and has a few good guides)
Well, I have noticed a distinct difference between the Sound Quality of Linux compared to Windows. I duel boot between Windows XP and SliTaz. Even running XP with everything maxed on the latest Winamp just doesn't produce the same level of sound quality I get with SliTaz running Deadbeef. This is why I just end up using SliTaz to listen to my music.
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Trixar, you're right about DeaDBeef. I have it working in Ubuntu and hope to get it working in SliTaz this week. It's one of the most configurable and simple players of the 8 I installed. thanks
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I played with just as many players too. I used to stick with Rhythmbox, but it was pretty heavy on resources so I went looking for something with just as many features, only lighter. After trying every player in the repository (Ubuntu & SliTaz) I finally found DeaDBeeF, which is the one I'm sticking with 
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Yes, definitely one of the lowest resource players. Hard to compare apples to apples, but I think it's probably lower than MPC, which looked to be the previous winner.
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Well, technically MPC alone is lighter since it's a server/daemon that runs in the background even when a player front-end is disconnected. The reason I don't really use it is because the front-end players just aren't feature rich enough for me nor are the ones that do very light. I also don't like the idea of having to configure two programs (the server/daemon and player) just to listen to my music.
Of the stand-alone players in SliTaz I found that consonance to be the lightest, but it's not very feature rich or configurable. Like I said, I tried a lot of players before 
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Trixar, if you're still there, it sounds like you're indicating that the lightest and most efficient/direct setup is DeaDBeef or Consonance? If I use DB and uninstall MPD I can get rid of one unnecessary layer? I'm probably making the error or oversimplifying how this works, but if DB can give me a me a more elegant/efficient infrastructure and overall solution, I can dispense with MPD altogether and not have it running in the background unnecessarily.
One more thing. Right now, in Unbuntu I have all the players running and outputting to my USB DAC. In SliTaz, Consonance and DB run but won't output to my USB DAC. The DAC is visible in Devices, but the ALSA Mixer only shows my Juli@ sound card.
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Actually, I'm saying that in order of lightness, they're ranks like this:
1. MPD with a light (and limited) player front-end
2. Consonance
3. Deadbeef
While in order of functionality they rank as follow:
1. Deadbeef
2. Consonance
3. MPD with a light player front-end
It's pretty much down to what you need vs how much resources your willing to give it. Note if you choose to use more advanced front-end for MPD, it uses a little more resources and can fall between just under Consonance to just under Deadbeef depending on the features it has. Personally, I chose Deadbeef because it fit my needs by being both feature rich and light.
As for Ubuntu, it uses PulseAudio for it's Sound, even though it's really badly configured to the point that the project head of PulseAudio denounces the version Ubuntu uses. But even badly configured it's pretty amazing. Actually, by editing the pulseaudio.conf in your /etc folder, you can actually reduce PuleAudio's resource hungry nature by a whopping 75% just by uncommenting the niceness line. Anyway, I'm getting off topic.
SliTaz uses ALSA like I mentioned before, which comes with it's own issues and in some ways, limitations. For your problem, I'm guessing you could try using this link to solve it: http://alsa.opensrc.org/TwoCardsAsOne
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I have no juli@ - but I found this - instead or .asoundrc you can put it in /etc/asound.conf
it from here: http://alsa.opensrc.org/Ice1724#ESI_Juli.40_PCI_.28Gentoo_1.2006.2C_GNU.2FDebian_4.0.2C_Fedora_Core_6.29
-The ESI juli@ works very well using optical s/pdif (I've not tried analogue output). I use kernel 2.6.25 vanilla on gentoo. Here my .asoundrc to use s/pdif (don't hesitate to correct it if there's something wrong).
defaults.pcm.rate_converter "samplerate_best"
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm {
type dmix
ipc_key 1478
slave {
pcm "hw:0,1"
format S32_LE
period_time 0
period_size 1024 #useful if you ear scratch or have a crappy sound (try other values if it doesn't work)
buffer_size 8192 #useful if you ear scratch or have a crappy sound (try other values if it doesn't work)
rate 96000 #set to 44100 or other.
} } }
to find out which card is the juli use aplay -l
EDIT: did you read this howto: http://alsa.opensrc.org/DigitalOut
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Here’s the resolution to my problem with getting sound from USB devices, posted earlier by Mojo. You have to open a Terminal, log in as root, go to the directory below and open rcS.conf in Leafpad and add the snd-usb-audio command. Strange that this didn’t happen with the SliTaz install.
/etc/rcS.conf LOAD_MODULES= snd-usb-audio
Trixar, I’ve spent more time with the players in SliTaz now that I’ve got the sound working. The flexibility to customize players in Linux is disappointing for a Foobar guy, but I must be missing something. I just don’t see mechanisms in the preferences or menus. At a minimum, I’d like to have filters for Genre, Artist, Album, and an additional area that shows the songs contained within the selected filters. Nice to have would be the ability to organize the filters in certain locations on the player, maybe a large box for the album cover and the ability to get rid of everything else. Is this the kind of thing I should be able to do with any of these players on my own? Is it in the Dev packages you do these customizations? I didn’t try these, thinking they’re for programmers.
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Well, with DeaDBeeF it's easy and you can add or remove columns by just right clicking on one of the category columns names. You can then move them around by left clicking and holding on the name while moving it to where you want. Pretty simple really
It's another reason why I use DeadBeef. I can use whatever category types I want and remove the ones I don't use/want. Personally I use the playing (named >), Artist, Title and Time columns types as shown below
[attachment=4605,248]
The thing is that some players are amazing customizable if you know where to look
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Yes, I found that with DB and some of the other players. What I'm talking about is iTunes-style filters where you can click a genre in one filter, an artist within that genre in another filter and so on. You want to be able to drill down to the song you're looking for, from a library of thousands of albums, rather than have to scroll through the entire collection. There are some players that are workable. Looks like Ario or MPC might come closest to fit the bill. However, from what I've seen so far, Linux players all look like they're designed by developers who have about 10 albums in their collection. Foobar will really spoil you; it's about as customizable as Linux is as an OS.
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Explain exactly what you need. Not sure what your looking for... Maybe Ctrl+F or Edit--->Find? Note in Find you can add or remove categories like in the main client too.
Thing about Linux and it's software is that most of them have all the functionality you may need. The trick is to realise that sometimes what you're REALLY looking for is a look or act alike. This might not be the case with feature your looking in another player. It might even be completely different.
Does this make a player like DeaDBeeF crap in comparison to Foobar? Not really. Sometimes what makes it different makes it cool. Nothing can both be a perfect and better than the original. It's a shame most people forgets this fact.
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If you've used iTunes, you click the Rock genre in one filter, then in the filter to the right you only see your rock albums and you select Pink Floyd, then in the filter to the right of that you only see your Pink Floyd albums and you select Dark Side of the Moon. In the playlist area you see just the songs from that album. I'm surprised this isn't how the Linux players are setup. This layout/functionality has been around since the first versions of iTunes and it's much more effective that grouping everything in a giant alphabetized playlist. As I said, Ario and MPC come close, the there's no adjustability to really tweak them much.
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Unlike paid for music (like on iTunes), most mp3s on the internet might not have the genre, track number or album title added in correctly, if at all. So an interface aimed at including them would actually be pretty ineffective in my opinion.
Personally, I have no trouble browsing through my music (even multi-album or multi-directory). Maybe my perspective of what entails "user-friendly" (which in reality should be prefixed with 'aint') owes to having grown up using players like Winamp and refusing to use media libraries or the like. I've seen people with multi-gig and multi-album collections of music use the base Winamp without any trouble. But hey, that's just me
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I’m not speaking from a perspective of buying mp3 from iTunes. Anyone who’s ripping music with EAC, Rubyripper, etc. will get the basic tags of Genre, Artist, Album, year. You can create a huge alphabetized playlist in Foobar as well, but once your collection grows above a few hundred albums that becomes inefficient. Linux really is the tweaker’s paradise, so it’s disappointing to see the players are mostly static and uncustomizable.
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Well, we could always write our own. I know of a pretty awesome media wrapper for python that if combined with pyInstaller can be compiled as a stand alone program. You have to understand that most technical people like me come from a winamp background, so we don't really need more from our players, but that doesn't mean we can't write ones to suite your needs.
Oh and I'm said (bad?) ripper. I rarely include more than the artist and title to my meta tags. But I'm not really a musophile, so I choose something sounding good over it's details
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http://banshee.fm/support/guide/searching/
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Getting_Started_with_Songbird/04_Usage_of_Songbird/4.1_The_Media_Library
http://userbase.kde.org/Amarok/Manual/Organization/Collection/SearchInCollection
I find Banshee's search function seems great if you wish to search and filter different genre or type of music while excluding others. Still, it's a little bit excessive for my taste
Amarok seems similar to Banshee's search function, just less advanced in nature and thus simpler to use.
Songbird however seems the closest in the lot to foobar's style which fork is looking for.
None of them are really very light, but of them, I'd probably use Songbird since it's a little lighter than Banshee and Amarok and it's pretty feature rich itself if your looking for a Media Library player.
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As the gold-standard of player customization, Foobar will allow you to build the player from the ground up, with the only restrictions being the elements you can choose from. The key feature is a layout builder that acts as a grid, so you can insert whatever element you want at any position on the player (filters, playlists, controls, search box, cover art, etc.). You can also choose from a vast array of formatting options for these elements (font color/size, BG color, etc).
Of the SliTaz players, Ario and Sonata are the best fit for me Ario has a set of filters on the top so you can have Genre, Artist, Album, Title and click through those to play. Would be nice if you could position them, but at least it works. Sonata comes up to the edge of usability and stops; you can filter down to the songs on the library tab, but when you double click the track it doesn't play...it just adds the track to a playlist and you have to go to the next tab to play the song. Gnome is also close to usable, but I don't like how it inserts thumb icons with the tag info (such as the Genre view) and doesn't allow you to turn them off. Most of the Linux players are focused on playlist creation. Playlist is an essential feature, but I don't like using them. I'd rather just filter to the song or album I want at the moment and double click it to play.
An ideal audiophile player for Linux would have the ability to build a completely custom GUI, a very light core, and a vast range of plugins for format codecs, VST sample codecs etc. One area of opportunity would be a player that can play DSD files natively (without converting to PCM). DSD may go down the tube, but it's size, sound quality and open source nature make it a format that a lot of expert would like to see rise to the top. There isn't much in the way of audio gear, software or music files out there at this point, but there are some companies working on expensive players for this format.
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