Copyright (C) 1999-2024 by Alexander König alex@lisas.de - https://terminatorX.org
terminatorX is a realtime audio synthesizer that allows “scratching” on digitally sampled audio data (.wav, .mp3, etc.) the way hip-hop DJs scratch on vinyl records.
The GTK+ user interface provides many features, most notably:
This software is designed to run under Linux, FreeBSD and the like.
terminatorX is free software; see the COPYING file that came with this distribution for details.
WARNING: terminatorX comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This software may lock up your machine or cause other problems under rare conditions. It is not recommended to run it on production servers.
The following measures can help to improve the responsiveness as well as the precision when using terminatorX.
DISCLAIMER: Installing a program suid-root is always potentially dangerous. However, a program will require root privileges to acquire realtime scheduling (which improves playback quality signifcantly). Only when running suid-root can terminatorX acquire realtime scheduling priorty to avoid buffer underruns with low latency settings and the mouse motion events can be captured directly from the hardware improving scratching precision.
When running setuid-root, terminatorX makes use of Linux' POSIX capabilities: Right after start-up it acquires the CAP_SYS_NICE capabilty and accesses the Linux input interface before dropping root privileges for good.
While the capabilities based approach seems much more secure than the approach that was previously implemented, it might still be exploitable. So, for 100% security you have to do without realtime scheduling and not install terminatorX suid root.
This issue is covered in the seperate INSTALL file. Setting good optimization flags is a good idea although this step will proabably have the least effect and the defaults should be reasonable.
The default settings for the GUI updates provide good realtime feedback. This may cause problems on slower machines or slow gtk+-themes. If the GUI-thread causes dropouts in the audio-engine you should increase the Update-Delay value in the options dialog.
If you experience issues with the performance of the user interface, consider using a simpler GTK+ theme.