Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Impressions: Studio 64

Lately, I have been using the Studio 64 Distro for making music on my aging Athlon XP 1900+ based system. Here are some quick impressions:

This distribution uses the Gnome Windows manager, which is clean and efficient. There are not a lot of excess packages here, but the basics are well covered, including internet, office apps, etc. The included music packages are solid, if slightly limited. The essentials are here: JACK, Ardour, Hydrogen and Zynaddsubfx. They all work perfectly out of the box. I've had a lot of good recording sessions in Ardour.

While the limited number of music programs might be slightly frustrating, installing new ones are only a few clicks away. This is a solid, friendly and stable music production environment. The installer is an older text based one, and is not especially friendly, but works well. The advantage of having the packages compiled for either 32 bit or 64 bit systems is a big one though, and if you run a 64 bit system, the optimizations might make this distro worthwhile. Not that it isn't already. I highly recommend it.

Posted by DCZX @ 9:07 AM

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