As anon4 mentioned, it's pretty easy now to set up low-latency audio now with jack. The hardest thing is probably navigating through the tons of documentation o

As anon4 mentioned, it's pretty easy now to set up low-latency audio now with jack. The hardest thing is probably navigating through the tons of documentation on it, much of which is outdated (the newer version of jack is a bit different to set up, you call jack_ctl instead of directly using jackd) For best results, you should install a low-latency or realtime kernel. On Ubuntu, it's easy to find low-latency kernels through the repos, and Fedora has a realtime kernel through the PlanetCCRMA repos (although this randomly crashed on my last, approx 5-year old laptop). On other distros you may have to compile your own patched kernel, and there's plenty of documentation on this. There's also some distros specifically for audio work, that are set up out of the box with great low-latency settings (Ubuntu Studio, KXStudio for example) On my current laptop, I'm running jack at 48kHz, with 3 buffers of 64 samples, using a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 interface. I haven't really noticed any significant dropouts so far. This is on Ubuntu with a low-latency kernel. With the Pulseaudio jack sink, pulse is basically piping its output into jack, which is especially convenient if I want to do something like record audio streaming from a browser.