Psyk's stuff

Sony and Ableton etc. don't support Linux with their major high-end audio applications which is such a damn shame.  Applications such as Ableton Live, Sony Acid Pro and Sony Vegas Pro demand a lot of CPU resources and my system is dual-boot to get the best experience with these apps, but sometimes one needs to do a quick re-edit, re-render and sometimes most of the material is stored on the Linux partitions in ext3/lvm format.... It would be easier if Apple, Sony and Ableton supported Linux... oh well.  The current answer is to run them up in a Windows virtual machine and I've had a lot of success with VMware Workstation.

One of the biggest issues is choppy sound under load within the VM's.  Ableton is extra sensitive and allows you to tweak additional parameters to get the most optimum configuration, since you're virtualized you have multiple layers of tweaking...

Since Fedora (currently on 13) runs Pulseaudio, it's much easier now days to configure and setup the audio parameters. Below are a settings that helped in getting better audio (i.e. without stuttering) in a Vista VM.

1) Run up in a terminal

gedit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

2)Change the following (most of these will be commented out with a ';' just remove the semi-colon):

high-priority = yes 
nice-level = -11
realtime-scheduling = yes 
realtime-priority = 5 
default-fragments = 25 
default-fragment-size-msec = 25 
resample-method = speex-float-3 

3) Bring up a terminal window as user (i.e. non-root):

[psyk@psyk ~]$ killall pulseaudio
[psyk@psyk ~]$ pulseaudio 

The last entry should restart the pulse daemon.

Fire up your VM and you should get trouble-free sound :)