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>> I've been getting into Linux music lately

>So why use Windows tools any more?

The poster's talking about VST plugins. Many Mac / Windows musicians are addicted to these. Linux tools like Ardour will bring a lot more musicians to Linux if they support the plugins people are used to.

Ardour, actually.

Personnaly I find the Gimp to be better for me than Photoshop. Mind you, I'm doing web design and 3-d textures, if I was a photographer I'd most likely prefer PS.

I am a musician, and one of the reasons I switched to Linux was because of greater flexibility in the audio area. Rosegarden, Audacity, Ardour, Timdity ++, Jack, and Stompboxes, along with a few other apps, have more than replaced Cubase for me, and work with significantly less latency.

While Freecraft may have been "cease and desisted" by Blizzard, the source is still out there on various "cease and desisted software" sites.

The samples are AIF format inside the archive (inside a DMG file).

Audacity is a fantastic quick-and-dirty multitrack editor, but you'd have to reassemble the samples, I don't think there's a converter. It's a wxWindows app, so it's gui is the same across unix/x11, mac & windows.

Ardour for linux is more pro-strength, but the same problem exists -- you'd have to convert the tracking by hand.

legacy hardware aside you might get some mileage out of this:

http://ardour.org/ it's about to go 1.0 any day and has served me well. Linux for now, soon OSten.

I believe we will be seeing that Avid is taking over Digidesign soon:

http://ardour.org/

We are happy to announce the recent acquisition of Linux Audio Systems by Avid Inc. The combination of LAS's Linux expertise and Avid/Digidesign's long experience with commercial audio software will be a powerful means of advancing digital audio technology. Development on LAS's Ardour DAW will cease immediately, with many elements from its code base planned for inclusion in ProTools 7, expected for Linux in Q4 2005. Avid/Digidesign, as new owners of the intellectual property of LAS, has also filed for several patents on Ardour-derived technology. Paul Davis, owner and sole proprietor of LAS, has been appointed to the position of Chief Linux Technology Officer, and will also supervise further development of the DigiServe product line, which derive 98.72% of their value from the unacknowledged use of free GPL'ed software tools.

Funny how the Avid site doesn't mention a thing about it!!!

I have built my own DAW recently using Planet CCRMA at home. I'm sure with your kit you can do some cool things, however everything I have read on the subject would indicate that a single commodity 24-bit soundcard isn't really going to cut it for professional work. Dunno. You tell me. Fortunately, in my case I obtained an RME HDSP 9652 for virtually nothing (many thanks to DLS!)...

However, I don't know how to use the software and I don't know much about this killer DSP card either so basically I am not getting anything done with this kit! Fear not though, it will not go to waste. I will learn, because I want to. I have the ProTools manual (which is indicated as a helpful reference for Ardour). I have the DSP manual. The digital recording process interests me so I will learn how to do it...

However, some artists do NOT want to be recording engineers (which is an artform of its own in every respect).

Some people don't want to learn how to master a disc.

They may be world-class musicians but not have an ounce of geek in them. In their case they need someone to handle that side of the equation for them, and that isn't cheap...

I guess I should have said, "not everyone has a DAW in their house--or even wants one for that matter."

ardour is another good free recorder (ardour looks more like protools than cubase)

ardour

The only goal the GPL works toward beyond those of other OSD-compliant licenses is the perpetuation of the FSF utopia, which calls for nothing less than the destruction of the software industry as we know it.

No no no no no. No.

No.

Many people and companies write software on a contract basis, for which no license is necessary. The part of the software industry that would be affected is proprietary software.

The end to this sector of software development would mean a rise in other areas of IT--namely, support and deployment.

Besides, OSD-compliant software is similarly "destroying" the software industry. Sure, proprietary shops can take code from BSD-esqe licensed software, but if their product is in demand, then there tends to be a healthy supply of hobbyists developing a decent alternative.

Ardour is a good example of a Free Software project reaching the quality of proprietary counterparts. It isn't quite there yet, but it's progressing very nicely. And guess what? A lot of people have donated money to the main developer over the years.

It claims to work toward freedom, while it actually works to deny freedom to those who do not share its goals.

Well, if your goal is specifically to deny, or perpetuate the denial of, those freedoms that the FSF is fighting for, it is only logical that they would seek to deny you that "freedom," since said freedom is precisely what the FSF is fighting against.

Ardour is the equal of Windows pro level apps. It might not look as flashy, but it is very powerful.

"Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. Produce your own CD's. Mix video soundtracks. Experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Generate sound installations for 12 speaker gallery shows. Have Fun.

Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-linear, non-destructive region based editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a mixer whose capabilities rival high end hardware consoles, lots of plugins to warp, shift and shape your music, and controllable from hardware control surfaces at the same time as it syncs to timecode. If you've been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Cubase SX or Sequoia, you might have found it."

I just looked at the Pod XT page...very interesting. It shows MIDI in/out, but, also USB port on it. Have you used this to connect to a Linux box running ardour? I'm just a beginner guitar, but like playing around with the idea of recording, and have been looking at open source sequencers and music tools.

Could you expand on what you've done/tried with the Pod XT? I'm really looking for something to quickly hook my guitar into my computer...

Other music software:

• Rosegarden
• Hydrogen Drum sequencer
• Ardour: Digital Audio Workstation
• Audacity Sound Editor
• JACK Audio connection kit (Low latency)
• ZynAddSubFX Software synthesizer

Anyway, these are a few of the things I'm looking at, but, just having a hard way to find to get a guitar into my computer without expensive MIDI connectors and pickups...

Any insight here if the Pod could be used or if you have links or experience with this would be greatly appreciated!!

Ardour multi-track sound editor (not MIDI, I think)

Rosegarden Audio and MIDI sequencer

The smaller Audacity A wave/AIFF/MP3/Ogg/etc editor

Dude, all of the high end sound cards work great with ALSA. The RME Hammerfall, M-Audio Delta series cards, a bunch of USB-Audio stuff for laptops, and a couple of others. The big-name players in audio (well, basically RME) all provide docs or their cards are simple enough to be easily reverse engineered.

I have a Dual AthlonMP box with a Midiman Delta 1010 and it works great as a Digital Audio Workstation. Check out ardour and Jack. Linux Audio is in a way better state than video is. I still have a Radeon 9100 simply because it's the second-fastest (the FireGL 8800 is faster but way more expensive on eBay) graphics card with Free DRI drivers. And they SUCK speed wise. My sound card can do everything the Windows card can do it and it's fairly high end.

I'd like to see this work with Ardour and not cost over a couple few hundred $..

Fulfill my dream of having a Linux based hard disk recorder!

For those that haven't heard of it, it's an audio recording program, similar to Protools, that's open source.

It'd be great to see realtime capabilities in the vanilla kernel - though in the meantime for a low latency Linux multimedia system I recommend the Planet CCRMA low latency kernel based on Fedora/Red Hat - this has a huge repository of compatible software, much of which is of very high quality. See Ardour (Digital Audio Workstation) for instance. Planet CCRMA uses the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) drivers (which have OSS emulation).

JACK uses a callback based API much like Core Audio.

Basically every high-end (e.g. ardour, JAMin, Rosegarden, Hydrogen, etc.) uses it.

You can get really low latency using it if you have good sound hardware (e.g. RME Hammerfall for extremely low latency or even an M-Audio Delta 1010). Something like an SBLive! (what I have) will need a period size of 2048 bytes with two periods to avoid underrunning (I have a Dual AthlonMP 2800+ so I'm pretty sure it's the sound card...). Stuff like QJackCtl and Jack-Rack make controlling Jack easy.

Getting realtime mode working for a normal user can be tricky, but Debian makes it really easy. Just install the realtime-lsm package and build the realtime-lsm-source package for your kernel and all users in the audio group gain the ability to run applications realtime (at least with the default config). It could be made easier (mainly by prebuilding the realtime-lsm modules for the stock kernels) but GNU/Linux pro-audio is still mostly for hackers and adventurous people right now. Stuff like PlanetCCRMA and AGNULA are aiming to make everything work out of the box. I have yet to try either (I use Debian so PlanetCCRMA is useless for me) but it looks like DeMuDi has everything set up for recording out of the box.

Unless, of course, free software can match commercial equivalents.

> anyone know how this compares (quality-wise, cpu-hunger-wise, functionality-wise) to ardour.

You don't have to pay for its manual, like you do for ardour.

Ardour

It certainly looks (and works since I use it) like a DAW to me.

I can't try it out because my pII-233 is a bit weak...

This store isn't too far from where I live, by transit anyway, so I may have to give it a look sometime soon.

The realist in me questions how long this store will survive considering the array of cheapie computer outlets strewn across the GTA that will happily toss in Windows, but getting mentioned in the TorStar may help draw the curious. If the quality of the machines themselves is better than the crap sold by MDG and its ilk, the good reputation alone could help this store ride out the first year.

My greatest concern is that people who have no clue about how Linux operates will walk in expecting a Windows clone, and freak out the moment they can't install, say, DVD X Copy or Farcry. However, I also hope this will be overridden by clueful folks bringing their friends to help buy a new box, people who are willing to help newbies get over the initial bumps and learning curve. It sounds like this store sells Linux-based machines preinstalled, which pretty much eliminates the issue of installation difficulties that many critics still like to point out. For some time, I've thought that Windows preinstalls were the greatest barrier to increased Linux adoption.

Most of all, when I start making a bit more than just-above-minimum-wage, I'll want to get a newer machine than the Pentium II I'm still slogging away on (happily, I might add, with FC2). I'd like to know what I can get for about Cdn$600-$800, since I'd like to use that machine for testing things like Ardour. If I don't have to pay the MS tax, and the machines are guaranteed to work with Linux out of the store, then I won't have to worry as much about playing hardware roulette--someone else did it for me:).

It's interesting that you point out BlackBox, since its creator Brad Hughes, last I checked, worked for Trolltech in Norway. As far as I know BlackBox (and perhaps fluxbox and/or openbox) handles integration with the kde/gnome panels if you wish to use them. I was an avid blackbox user, and still am when memory is a precious commodity (ie hd recording with ardour), but even then, that can be done under kde 3.

From what I've read, it seems that the main problems vis a vis speed are either app specific ( ie OpenOffice.org vs. MS Office (where MS Office relies on already loaded libs and OpenOffice.org is just on its first iteration of integration into gtk/qt environments)) or X11 spec specific. I can't really comment intelligently on the latter seeing as I probably messed up the former already, but clearly the redrawing under X leaves something to be desired. The Xorg crew seems to be taking that up now that they have rightly been handed the scepter, pumpkin, conch shell, whathaveyou, of maintaining and improving X.

Honestly, on a 1GHz or higher machine, I can't complain about kde 3.2 speed, especially if you take advantage of the little things (like its really good window manager, not feeling like you're in another planet when you sit at a windows/mac computer, konqueror (aka safari beta bleeding edge :-), etc.) What I see is that it may not be as fast as windows XP with one or two apps running, but with 10+ XP seems to bog down when KDE is still running along at it's peak speed. Not to mention the speed rot of having an XP machine up for a couple of days.

-Rich

Some programs to help you:

Ardour - A program designed to record edit and mix multi-track audio. Now my use of audio recording/editing experience is strictly armature but this seems to be a pretty good Cool Edit/Adobe Audition like program when comparing feature lists of both(excluding the new additions by Adobe that allow you to work with video).

K3B - this is one of the best CD/DVD burning programs Iv seen on any platform.

Freeamp - a program similar to winamp and XMMS in look and feel.

amaroK - Another audio player, although this player does not shrink to a compact size that can be place out of the way. It does, however, shrink to an icon in your utility bar in KDE.

Do you even know what the fuck you're talking about? Oh, I forgot, you were trolling. My bad.

If you want a simple, relatively small and quiet, two channel recording rig, with equivalent sound quality to this, I highly suggest buying a fucking Minidisc or DAT deck, a decent mixer, and a couple good mics. Then you can dump it to a machine with decent editing tools later.

And the best part? It is silent.

What the hell advantage does this system have over a DAT deck and a computer with editing software worth using? None, because its a two-track system using a consumer-level sound card. Any gains you might make in reducing hard drive chatter will be totally overwhelmed by the crap quality of your A/D subsystem.

This thing is barely suitable for use as a two-track tracking machine, and there's no reason to edit on this thing as opposed to a decent PC which won't run into disk space or flash write limitations.

Ardour is getting there...

Or you can spend $1000 on getting microphones and $0 dollars for the software.

Believe or it not it is possible to produce decent music cheaply. Equipment is another problem...a good eight track sound card (e.g. Midiman Delta 1010-LT) will run you around $250, more if you want something fancy (e.g. the Midiman Delta 1010 which has the connections in a rack mounted breakout box instead of the back of the computer--much easier to use). The cost of a reasonable workstation has gone down a lot--my Dual AthlonMP 2800+ machine cost around $2000 total (including all of the equipment I got to upgrade my old 500Mhz k6-2 that ended up in this box and my used 24" SGI Monitor).

The microphones are what kills me. I use my live sound stuff to record occasionally. An SM58 will run around $85 for vocals, an SM57 $75 or $80, and a set of drum mics...I have a cheap $140 set of Samson drum mics with a pair of weird overheads I got from a guy for $20 and it sounds OK but in reality they suck. A good set of Shure drum mics (for live sound) would cost around ... $600. Add a second kick drum (grr, stupid Brent) or a fourth tom and you'll add another $200. It's cheaper to buy a cheap drum machine than to get mics for a real drum :)

Recording demo quality material is cheap and easy nowadays if everyone in the band has mics for live performances. Recording studio quality stuff is still expensive for a bunch of college kids making subs all day. Sure, maybe the guy with a good tech job and lots of money to waste can do it but the people actually making music all day can't. The important part is that it is a lot cheaper now to maybe record at home and trick your friend in the college music program majoring to be a mastering engineer to master your recordings cheaply and then get some CDs pressed with a small booklet to send to the labels.

There are still labels that accept new music. Even the big five do--InsideOut is an imprint of EMI and carries only progressive rock/metal bands like Symphony X and Transatlantic. Relapse Records consists entirely of Grindcore (well, most people wouldn't think of Grindcore as music...), SPV carries a lot of metal now; everything from Hair to Black to Progressive. Koch records also has quite a few excellent bands (e.g. Opeth).

Lastly, life is not all about records. It is easy to book a tour if you don't care where you will be playing or whom you will be playing with. Hell, I am planning on doing vocals for Recently Vacated Graves on a two week Canadian tour at the end of July. Look at the lyrics...there are a week worth of shows booked so far for three weeks worth of time spent contacting venues. Every band should tour a few times before they release a real record (that's how people get to know who you are when you don't have a huge marketing machine behind you).

The above is based on the experiences of several friends who are in bands which are mildly successful (successful enough to be on tours, one in Europe and to have actually gotten signed to real labels with DIY demos).

P.S. Are you planning on going to a show on the Dream Theater and Yes tour? I'm afraid of how much those tickets will cost.

Warning, its manual isn't free: http://ardour.org/manual.html

• Ardour, a digital audio workstation (DAW)
• JAMin, a mastering program

NIH syndrome exist everywhere, not just in OSS. I think both get darwinistically filtered by the marketplace to some degree.

One advantage of OSS is that the software does not have to be easy to learn. (!) Programming is hard, even before you get to UI. There are many different design tradeoffs that must be made. Proprietary vendors are FORCED to make sacrifices for usability up front, early in the product's evolution. Effort towards stability/security/conceptual integrity, etc. might be funnelled into UI because otherwise the product will fail in the market.

By contrast, OSS projects generally start out to satisfy an immediate need or curiosity. They don't have to "conquer the marketplace". Developers start by addressing the core problem. The result is a tool that does the job well. Then, as the tool becomes popular, other people focus on "making it usable". Some great examples include: cdrecord/cdbakeoven, fetchmail/fetchmailconf, mysql/tora, cvs/cervisia. Notice how these are all split at the CLI/GUI border. This split gives people the best of both the CLI and GUI worlds.

This phenomena seems to apply best when "the tool" is not a GUI application where domain logic and presentation are tightly integrated. For instance, sound editors (like Ardour), drawing tools (xfig, gimp), and 3D modelers (blender) can be very difficult to learn if usability is not given a front seat in development. On the other hand, operating systems, system software, databases, conversion utilities, etc. seem to work better if "easy to learn" is not initially a must-have.

Sun says "make this easy to use," and it gets done.

LMAO... how many years did sun shovel CDE down people's throats? A single driving vision can be a great thing, agreed, but not if people have the wrong vision.

As an owner of a Dual AthlonMP 2800+ rig, I can tell you that the extra $1000 for the SMP would be worth it...once you go SMP you can never go back. And SMP should be an extra $1000 (unless you can only get SMP on the highest end G5 and compare that price against a slightly lower end model). All in all it only cost me about $300 more for the SMP system ($70 more for the board + $100 for the extra proc + $30 for the extra HSF + $100 more for the RAM since the board only takes Registered ECC).

Having two oggencs running at once both chugging along at 14x realtime while the system remains responsive (because, at that speed, it is the speed of my hard disk that is limiting things...14x = ~14 MB/s being processed, * 2 = ~28M per second being pulled from the hard drive after being pulled off of a CD) so I still have enough CPU time left for everything else.

Being able to rip a DVD to XViD + Vorbis and watching that rip while it is being encoded is also really nice. Or playing Quake 2 while running a three pass encode. Ardour and The GIMP love me more too. SMP is just plain cool. I need more RAM though...GCC 3.x eats RAM while compiling C++ so having two copies of GCC both using 700M stresses my system a bit (since I only have 1G of RAM). Otherwise everything is really responsive.

Dear Moderators: Please don't moderate this comment. I turned off the karma bonus because I know it is off topic and wish for it to be ignored by most people.

While I know that this is more of a compositing program--at least from what I read so far...as I have shamefully not RTFA

Obviously. If you had, you'd know that it's not intended to be used for composition.

I'm going to take this opportunity to bitch about the one thing that has been keeping me from making the switch to Linux for all these years: Audio Apps

I have no idea what your requirements are. I don't know when you last looked at the Linux music scene. To me, it seems like the pro audio applications available are progressing at a fantastic rate. But without knowing your needs, I don't know whether it's good enough for you.

I'm no industry elitist that demands ProTools. in fact, I hate protools. The interface leaves much to be desires...granted, i'll buffer that (admittedly harsh) opinion: I'm a huge fan of CoolEditPro.....("eww, PC audio"...I can hear it already),

The hot app for professional multitrack audio recording and editing in Linux is Ardour. But if you don't like ProTools, you may not like Ardour, since its interface is very derivative of ProTools.

The underlying audio subsystems are a far cry from what windows offers. And what I experienced with in my limiting dealings with aRTS leaves much to be desired. (Think: latency) And I'm sure that has a lot to do with it....(why hasn't ASIO or an equiv been implemented yet?)

I don't know any Linux audio folks using aRts for their pro-audio work. Instead, the fundamental infrastructure for pro-audio on Linux these days is JACK. JACK is good stuff, designed from the ground up for professional audio work.

Other people have given you info to look at about specific pro-audio applications: Ardour, JAMin, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, etc. -- all of which can interface through JACK. Regarding plugins, there are tons; take a look at the LADSPA website. These plugins can be manipulated in a rack-like GUI interface, if that's what you want.

Regarding latency, I routinely get sub-ms kernel/software latencies; I'm limited by the soundcard's capabilities at this point. Of course, to get good latency performance in Linux, you have to be willing to do things like patch your 2.4 kernel (see e.g. Robert Love's preemptable kernel patch and Andrew Morton's low-latency patch. The 2.6 kernels are supposed to provide low latency from the start; it's not yet clear whether they do.

Many of the apps above are still in development/pre-release stages. In other words, while they're completely useable (and many people are using them to make good music), you should expect bugs. For the most part, the big ones are gone; but still, saving your work frequently is a good idea.

To me, the biggest problem in Linux pro-audio right now isn't applications. They're not done yet, but they're there, and they're advancing at an amazing rate. To me, the biggest problem is the same one that afflicts a lot of open source projects: lack of good documentation. For one example, the Ardour manual is skeletal; many (most?) people figure out how to use it either from their previous experience with ProTools, or from actually looking at the ProTools manual instead. The situation is the same for other projects. Fortunately, there are lots of mailing lists that

While I know that this is more of a compositing program--at least from what I read so far...as I have shamefully not RTFA

Obviously. If you had, you'd know that it's not intended to be used for composition.

I'm going to take this opportunity to bitch about the one thing that has been keeping me from making the switch to Linux for all these years: Audio Apps

I have no idea what your requirements are. I don't know when you last looked at the Linux music scene. To me, it seems like the pro audio applications available are progressing at a fantastic rate. But without knowing your needs, I don't know whether it's good enough for you.

I'm no industry elitist that demands ProTools. in fact, I hate protools. The interface leaves much to be desires...granted, i'll buffer that (admittedly harsh) opinion: I'm a huge fan of CoolEditPro.....("eww, PC audio"...I can hear it already),

The hot app for professional multitrack audio recording and editing in Linux is Ardour. But if you don't like ProTools, you may not like Ardour, since its interface is very derivative of ProTools.

The underlying audio subsystems are a far cry from what windows offers. And what I experienced with in my limiting dealings with aRTS leaves much to be desired. (Think: latency) And I'm sure that has a lot to do with it....(why hasn't ASIO or an equiv been implemented yet?)

I don't know any Linux audio folks using aRts for their pro-audio work. Instead, the fundamental infrastructure for pro-audio on Linux these days is JACK. JACK is good stuff, designed from the ground up for professional audio work.

Other people have given you info to look at about specific pro-audio applications: Ardour, JAMin, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, etc. -- all of which can interface through JACK. Regarding plugins, there are tons; take a look at the LADSPA website. These plugins can be manipulated in a rack-like GUI interface, if that's what you want.

Regarding latency, I routinely get sub-ms kernel/software latencies; I'm limited by the soundcard's capabilities at this point. Of course, to get good latency performance in Linux, you have to be willing to do things like patch your 2.4 kernel (see e.g. Robert Love's preemptable kernel patch and Andrew Morton's low-latency patch. The 2.6 kernels are supposed to provide low latency from the start; it's not yet clear whether they do.

Many of the apps above are still in development/pre-release stages. In other words, while they're completely useable (and many people are using them to make good music), you should expect bugs. For the most part, the big ones are gone; but still, saving your work frequently is a good idea.

To me, the biggest problem in Linux pro-audio right now isn't applications. They're not done yet, but they're there, and they're advancing at an amazing rate. To me, the biggest problem is the same one that afflicts a lot of open source projects: lack of good documentation. For one example, the Ardour manual is skeletal; many (most?) people figure out how to use it either from their previous experience with ProTools, or from actually looking at the ProTools manual instead. The situation is the same for other projects. Fortunately, there are lots of mailing lists that

The equivalent to ASIO in linux is Jack, but comparing Jack to ASIO is to downplay it's functionality. Jack offers much more and is rapidly becoming the wheel around which all Linux-Audio apps revolve.

There are a number of audio production suites in development in Linux-land.
Some notable ones:
- Ardour, audio only, but pretty much feature complete in that arena.
- MusE a pretty advanced all in one (midi and audio) music production environment.
- Rosegarden-4 which has roughly the same feature set and goal as MusE.

Ardour.

I don't really need to say much more...it is an excellent replacement for a stand alone HDR system.

What you really want then is not Audacity, but Ardour together with Jack and an ALSA-supported soundcard

And don't forget Ardour, an excellent project for a Linux DAW. They're releasing new betas every other week and coming close to the 1.0 release. A great substitute for Cakewalk/Sonar.