What does it take nowadays to get the most out of your Linux system so that it can be used as a music production power house? This talk will explore the possibilities and hand some guidelines to squeeze out as much headroom your system has for all those resource hungry plugins. Along the way some myths might get debunked and some helpful tools will get introduced.

During the talk I will walk through how to set up your system so it can do low-latency real-time audio. With low-latency I mean round-trip latencies below 10 ms. I will show which tools can help with getting your system to perform better for doing music production. Such tools include rtcqs and Millisecond for finding and fixing possible bottlenecks, jack_iodelay or Ardour for measuring round-trip latencies and xruncounter to do DSP load stress tests.

I will also look backward briefly to 15 years ago when I did a similar talk at the Linux Audio Conference in Maynooth, what has changed since then, what has improved? I will also glare a bit at the future as the Linux Audio Conference will be held in Maynooth again this year and chances are I will dive deeper into this matter during that conference.

After the talk you will hopefully have a better grasp of what the key factors are for getting a better performing machine that has as little of those dreaded xruns as possible!