Making Music with Linux : Mastering, Bandwidth, and Synthesis

In the first part of Slashdot's 'Making Music with Linux' series, we discussed the possibilities of using Linux as an audio production operating system. While we lamented the lack of a fully-functional audio suite for Linux, we saw the silver lining in the cloud of patience, and witnessed a great number of free sound tools that were well on their way to greatness. In this installment, we talk a little more about high-end audio mastering, low-end sound transport, and using Linux as a tool for sound synthesis. Part II of a series.

Burning a CD under Linux is super-easy, and there are quite a few programs that make it possible under Linux. X-CD-Roast is a popular tool, and is used constantly by Linux enthusiasts to burn their own multi-session content onto a compact disc. The problem is that there is still no Linux equivalent for the huge multi-track mixer you'll find at professional recording studios. If you're hoping to mix down tracks and perform studio-quality takes and 'bounces' of your work, you're going to need an expensive chunk of professional digital audio hardware. Once you've got your finished master, you'll have no problem making as many copies as you want using your Linux machine. Until we have a real-time mixdown utility, the waiting game wins again.

The world of low-bandwidth sound transport is wide open on the Linux platform, except for the glaring exception of not being able to play Windows Media Player sound files on your machine. Although the 'media darling' of sound transport is the mp3 file format, there's no denying the fact that mp3 provides solid sound quality and a small file footprint. Mp3 still isn't the answer to all of our prayers, however. No matter what anyone tells you, mp3 is not CD-quality sound, and tends to boost the mid-range in most tunes.

When you're living with a low-bandwidth target, the sound you're streaming is secondary in importance to stretching that stream over a maximum number of clients with the least amount of lag. RealPlayer suffers from the same mid-range band pass issues as mp3, but in the grand scheme of things, you're a lot more likely to encounter RealPlayer as an option when you're surfing. Producing RealPlayer content is easy to do and easy to host, but the downside is that it's not free. RealProducer will run you $149.95 from RealNetworks.

Joseph Ottinger, Linux-savvy musician, shares his thoughts on streaming audio. "I choose mp3 because of the high quality and decent compression. Real's stuff is nice because it's streaming, but even on a fast connection, that stuff sounds like it's ground up. Microsoft's streaming format is worse, lacking even more of the fundamental sound's depth and clarity. The problem with mp3 is Napster. Napster makes it easy to send and find mp3's. A lot of people trade though, so people rip stuff at low quality just to get their numbers up and their bandwidth down."

Csound is a wonderfully portable and versatile sound synthesis package written entirely in C. Csound uses two files to work its magic; a score file that basically acts as a timed-event trigger file, and an orchestra file to interpret what voices it should use to play the score. This is a classical approach to sound synthesis, and can be used to either generate a sound file or, if your system is fast enough, to send the output directly to a DAC on your system's soundcard. If you like, you can even use a standard MIDI file to act as the score file. Csound has about a bazillion extensions, and nifty gadgets that use it.

For those interested in using their Linux machine as a powerful tool for creating original instruments and sounds, they'll find a friend in Cecilia, a wonderful sound synthesis tool that sits right on top of Csound, without you having to get your hands dirty. Cecilia provides real-time signal processing on sound files, live input, or can work as a software synthesizer on its own. If you're in love with real-time resonance or envelope filters, Cecilia lets you configure the software synth to the limit.

Next time, we discuss Linux sound hardware and support, and we're going acronym-diving! Find out what OSS and ALSA are, and why they've got something to do with those big speakers you bought. We'll also navigate the treacherous waters of musical notation with Linux. If you know of any fantastic audio production programs, please let us know! See you next time...

Comments

Re:This bugs me

[reaper]

Sorry to say this, but I know plenty of musicians who use windows for music production. Live. Even such "Kiddie Grade" programs, like MixMan Studio, are amizingly effective if you use your own samples, and throw a little beat matching with wax on it. Most of the Mac stuff is production quality, and the BeOS stuff is still not too well known.

So why is linux good for this? Simple:

• Multithreaded across multiple processors. Win 98 can't do this, and NT won't support a lot of hardware, or run some of the software.
• Efficiency. Running X with a lightweight WM, and very little other stuff will generally beat out Windows in terms of OS overhead, and available clock cylces to mix it up wit' (,yo!).
• Stability. I have had stuff crash on stage for me. Uncool.

OK, so what does windows have going for it? Glad you asked:

• Lots of software. 'nuff said.
• Support for peripherals. Nothing sucks more than the sound chips in a laptop. Almost any outboard processor would be better. The real high-end stuff like the Event Layla, won't run on Linux. Forget USB devices.

So if I wuz going to sit down and write my ultimate appz for live performance, what would I do? 1] KeyKit for MIDI support. 2] Something like TerminatorX for loops, but with the ability to sync to a clock. 3] a software synth like re-birth. Add some turntables, and my board, and life will be good.

opinions? Am I wrong? Better ideas?

Why Linux ain't gonna cut it for DAWs yet.

[dragonfly_blue]

DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) have to fit specific needs to be interesting to many musicians. There are a few serious obstacles for home studios and pro studios before Linux as a DAW operating system can be a viable choice.

Aside from the fact that I can't get Linux drivers out of Event (actually Echo Audio) for my Gina/Darla/Layla cards (strangely enough, I can get BeOS drivers and even NT drivers now) here is a short synopses of why I, a lowly amateur musician, won't be looking at Linux as a Music OS for a long time.

I am not a big MS fan, but music composition/ sequencing/ sampling/ recording/ effects software (lots of categories here) for Windows 9x is pretty decent. I've played with a lot of them, and they work. Doesn't mean I won't look at other choices though, primarily because Windows crashes frequently. The plugins architecture is an excellent touch. (i.e. a reverb plugin becomes available in all DirectX-compatible recording programs when it's installed.)

Unfortunately, I think a lot of energy that could have gone into interesting Open Source music projects has been used by programmers writing music shareware/freeware for Windows. AudioMulch, Anvil Studio, and many others, are good examples of excellent, innovative (especially AudioMulch) software written for poor working musicians without high budgets. And, yes, they are only for Windows, sadly. I'm not sure why, except that for a long time it was difficult to get sound cards working under Linux.

Why do most of the projects I see on Linux just copy other software? Why can't somebody write some audio software for Linux that just blows my socks off? I've seen some pretty freaky, damn cool programs come out for Macs, hell, even Windows, in the last year or two. They were innovative. They weren't knockoffs of software on other platforms. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place, but it is not enough for Linux to ape whatever MS and MacOS does.

Even if some cool audio programs were written for Linux (and I know there are some available), I don't think I would use Linux for my multimedia stuff yet. Why? The desktop environments and GUIs are (how can I put this without getting flamed) not quite comfortable to work in yet.

Fonts are aliased, widgets are inconsistent, etc; maybe it's just the fact that I use KDE (should I switch to Gnome?), but it just plain doesn't do it for me yet. And yes, I know, "but that's what I love about Linux, is it's totally customizable." Well, not everyone wants to have to customize every damn thing on their system just to get it to work, Spunky.

Even Netscape (a universally available browser under Linux) looks like crap compared to certain Windows browsers. Why is this??? It's not like it's a 1.0 release or something. And please don't tell me to copy my Windows TT fonts into the appropriate system directory in Linux; that is just another in a long line of things I shouldn't have to do to make Linux work out of the box. If I won't do it, you better believe most musicians (no offense to pro musicians out there) won't even know where to start.

I don't know how the latency issues are compared to BeOS or Windows, and quite frankly I don't think I care. Even under a high latency system like Windows 9x I have been getting acceptable results, probably because I don't use MIDI stuff.

Please don't misinterpret this to read that I think MS RULEZ! or that LINUX SUX! because hopefully we are all intelligent enough to realize that is not what I am saying at all. If I thought that, I wouldn't have multiple boxes running multiple OS's and wouldn't be hanging out at Slashdot in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see somebody come along and fix these things in the next generation of Linux distros. But the fact is, I need music software/hardware support in 1997, not in 2003 (it has been around in one form or another for 20+ years now). I love Linux for my servers, but for a DAW it needs a serious, or maybe just a whole bunch of tiny tweaks ;-) makeover.

Let's Be Honest to Ourselves

[Listen Up]

Here is what the real problem is with audio and Linux. I am not going to be taking sides on this issue, so please don't flame me as such. Linux, as far as I know, cannot process realtime audio. This has do with really, really bad latencies in the kernel (especially)and underlying subsystems with prevent realtime audio from working in Linux at all. This is the same story with WinNT. I purchased BeOS because of its incredible audio applications and its ability to do things with audio and video that I have never seen before. So being curious I decided to do some research on the subject of why other OS's cannot do things such as realtime crossfading and realtime input/output/mixing. If you do some honest research you will discover a lot of things that will really open your eyes. Most notably that although everyone here loves Linux, it was never meant to be or designed to be a realtime audio processing OS. Has anybody else done real honest research into this topic like myself?