Posted by
emmett
on from the it's-hot-it's-cool-it's-jazz dept.
lactose99 writes: "For all you musicians, head over to Jazzware and get Jazz++ v4.0. It's free, it's GPLed, and it looks like a nice improvement over v3.2. You can download versions for Linux (.RPM and .tar.gz), Windows, and the source code." You like music? You like MIDI? Go get this right now.
Re:Good, but not good enough
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
Yet another piece of open source "wishware" which claims to be the equal of any commercial offering on the market
Actually, it's an yet another ex-proprietry piece of software that has gone Open Source because it can't hack it against the big boys.
However, I think you're missing the point of Open Source (like alot of busineses do). Open Source means that that users can make improvements that they need, and the software gradually improves over time. You want VST plug-in support? code it instead of whining. If you want a professional music suite to fill your needs now, pay for one and be at the mercy of the company that coded it.
I've been too busy to follow the last few months of development. My copy seems to be a variant (custom mail merge) from 1.0.4pre7 . ..
Tables are not LyX's strongpoint; this is inherited from LaTeX (yes, it can do some wonderful things, but most word processors have had it beat for years). I don't use many other than simple supply/demand tables I put in homwork sets and tests.
Equations, though. . . WOW . . . that was what sold me on LyX, and got me to buy an x86 box instead of expanding my fleet of Macs.
He shouldn't be too surprised by a 1.1.x, though--the odd minor indicates a development branch where anything can happen . . .
> LyX may be OK for somebody with just a few equations to typeset,
I did an entire dissertation in computational economics with it . . . *editing* without a display of the equations becomes a problem forr me; just too bloody many braces, parenthesis, etc. for me to mess with.
My natural inclination would certainly be raw LaTeX, but the editing and matchig gets extreme. And perhaps as importantly, lyx takes less keystrokes (though I'm not yet to where I was with word4/5, typesetting commands, and external macros . . .
Does anyone know if you can use this (or any other open source option) for noise reduction / pop & click removal.
I wanna move LP collection to CD, but need a way to clean up the WAV files and get rid of clicks etc. Do I have to go commercial on this ?
I'm also wondering about writing my own. If I took 2/3 recordings from an LP, then used the 2nd copy to repair the waveform at clicks rather than guessing or manually drawing it in, it seems like pretty decent results should be possible (of course, this won't help with scratches, but it would help with random noise). Has anyone tried this ? I would like to try coding this myself, but I'm kinda busy right now - one for the backburner.
That's just the ticket. When I have time I'll integrate the dual-sample processing idea into gramofile, the source looks respectable.
-- http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Don't assume musicians can't figure it out...
by
makohund
·
· Score: 2
Not implying that you are, but I am starting to get a little irked about the number of posts about the aptitude of the average musician. (Not just your post, or this article. I'm talking about the past couple of weeks.)
The majority of musicians may not be incredibly computer literate. But then again, neither are the majority of computer users.:)
Most of them (non-literates) don't tend to hang out here very much, either.
I may do computers for a living, but I've been a musician for much longer. And so has my drummer. And quite a handful of other techies I know. (If fact, I can only think of one person in our whole IS department who ISN'T a musician on the side.) Not to mention the sound-engineer types. Ever play with multitrack recording, mixers, and all of the wacky electronic gadgets around nowadays? They're not exactly "point, click, and drool" (If it is, you're doing it wrong, and it probably sounds like crap, too.)
Even if a musician doesn't start out as some form of geek, many turn into one eventually. Or at least one person in every band will. (Someone has to figure out the equipment.) Unless, of course, they do absolutely nothing but bang on instruments, and never record anything unless a pro studio is doing the work for them. Which pretty much guarantees that they won't be sitting here reading Slashdot instead of solving peoples problems. Or trying to run Jazz on any *nix (or other) system.
Besides, what is a computer? Other than a really complicated instrument to be mastered, and to do/produce wonderful things with?
Isn't that what musicians like to do?
Isn't that what programmers/techs like to do?
You see where I'm going with this, right?:)
Gsynth is dead. There are similar live projects...
by
Serf
·
· Score: 2
... mostly along the same lines, including BEAST/BSE (sorry, don't know the URL - should be linked from the GNOME site), GNU OCTAL (http://www.gnu.org/software/octal/octa l.html - the Gsynth guy is now working w/ this project), and Buzz under WINE as a stopgap until one of the others gets usable.
I should note, though, that none of the things I mentioned, or Gsynth, for that matter, are quite the same thing as Rebirth, ReCycle, or Reason. The ones I mentioned probably share more of a common heritage with trackers, though they're also based on modular soft synths and effects processors.
Believe it or not, the whole legal system does not revolve around software. I know this comes as a surprise to those who wonder how people lived before the Intel 80386.
Now THAT is just uncalled for. We all realize that computers are just a small piece of society; there's no need for sarcasm here.
The point of my question was that new technologies force society to re-evaluate some old perceptions and precedents. Source-as-speach is one example of this. Knowledge workers are another... We MAKE nothing, yet are higher paid than most professions.
Another interesting result of modern tech is the government mandate that health insurance can not discriminate or deny coverage to people who have a genetic pre-disposition to certain chronic or terminal disease...
Computers, bio-tech and space exploration, althogh very recent and small in the grand scheme of things, have had a HUGE impact on modern society, culture, and {wait for it}... law.
--
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
This is old news. jazz 4 has been out for about 2 weeks now and I sent in this same post then. Well enough griping.
I showed it to a friend of mine who uses windows (I use Linux) and he is into music composition and playing the violin, and he liked it. I told him I could help him install the windows version of the software, he said he was fine using my Linux box;-).
I originally had a few problems setting it up. It looks for/dev/sequencer2 and for some reason my Redhat 6.1 did not have it. I looked at MAKEDEV and uncommented it out and it fired right up. Course it took me a little time to figure this out.
I like the drum machine. It is nice to be able to give custom drum tracks to music. The only issue that I do have is that the GUI is not the most intuitive interface. I could figure it out and get it to work, but I wonder what kind of study they did on usability and if any. I often wonder how many studies are done on this. I know MS and MAC does studies on this and many software companies do. But I also know that many don't. hmmm
send flames >/dev/null
--
Only 'flamers' flame!
Re:what the software does?
by
CodeShark
·
· Score: 2
Starting at the very simplest level: Jazz++ is first and foremost a Musical Instruments Digital Instruments (MIDI) Sequencer. MIDI is essentially a protocol that allows computers and digital musical instruments to communicate with each other.
What the protocol enables me (amateur musician only BTW) to do is to connect a number of different sound modules --including one which is actually a card in my PC-- to a musical keyboard, then use that keyboard to tell all of those modules when to put out an audio signal, and a little bit about how.
A "sequencer" captures a "sequence" of midi events (those key presses, etc.), so it is essentially like a digital multitrack recorder -- except that instead of recording sounds, it is recording the "you pushed middle c on channel 1 which is assigned to voice piano" event
The sequencer essentially lets me become a whole band, orchestra, etc. and write music for a wide variety of instruments that I otherwise cannot play.
Although I don't know of an sequencer + integrated printing package on the Linux side, there are "musical notation" programs that essentially allow me to print out my own sheet music of stuff I've composed on the sequencer.
Anyway, Jazz++ seems to be the best solution available for MIDI right now, and the fact that they GPL'd the code is great because others can stand on their shoulders, or work from the ground up to create *nix stuff that can compete with the WinTel/Mac hegemony in the musical arena.
-- ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Free Music Public License
by
James+Ensor
·
· Score: 2
I don't think GPL is quite the right copyleft license for music. Releasing the source just isn't that important -- you can listen for lyrics, play along with the music, and even filter drum tracks and what not out of a finished recording. Unlike for a computer program, "wrong" interpretations of the music can lead to new works themselves.
I am slowly putting together a copyleft license for music called the Free Music Public License. When I have time (sometime next week), I'll have the terms up at http://gamh.cx/fmpl, and ask for comments from musicians, then turn it into a real license with the help of a lawyer. My band (God Ate My Homework) will be using this license. We hope others will follow us.
Well I'm not so sure about open source, but there are plenty of freeware/shareware tools at MAZ Sound Tools which might be of use. You can get Cool Edit from there, which has a noise reduction option IIRC, and support for very large files.
As for writing your own, you'd better get a book out on statistical sampling and analysis and prepare for a long reading session...:)
Lack of VST plugin support is bad
by
spiralx
·
· Score: 2
The loss of DirectX plugins may be a downer on the Linux front, however.
Yeah, especially since Jazz++ doesn't seem to support VST plugins, which are pretty much the de facto standard, especially since Steinberg opened up the specifications last year(see here for some VST stuff). If they were supported then the lack of DirectX plugins wouldn't be so bad, but as it is it puts a serious downer on the audio side of Jazz++.
until he has a solid sequencer and soundforge type app he can't consider it (unless vmware).
Yeah, but a sequencer doing a full hard-disk recording of both MIDI and audio tracks with effects/plugins is one of the most processor and IO intensive things you can do on your PC. I wouldn't dare to do this using a virtual OS running under VMWare, and I doubt he would.
And it's not really suprising that BeOS will get more support as an audio platform, especially now it's freely available. It was designed with multimedia as one of its primary goals, and succeeds brilliantly, whereas Linux and Windows include audio as an afterthought. Given the performance requirements of serious audio tools, making the move to BeOS rather than Linux is the obvious move for Steinberg et al. It's not about Linux at all, it's about BeOS's audio performace.
Warez have too many limitations
by
TuRRIcaNEd
·
· Score: 2
Sorry to tread on your '733T attitude, but for some of us, warez aren't an option for various reasons.
1. It hurts developers as well as consumers. Developers write software for a company, software is cracked. Company loses money on software due to proliferation of cracked copy. Do the suits in the boardroom lose their bonuses? Hell no. They hike the price of the software and keep developer pay down, using piracy as an excuse. They get off scot-free nad can afford another year at the golf course.
2. It hurts platform development. If a platform isn't as globally entrenched as MS-DOS/Windows (Like Atari and Amiga back in the day, and Linux and BeOS now), and a lot of software is cracked, the companies don't develop for the platform anymore, and Bill gets richer.
3. Cracked versions are usually pre-release, despite all the FINAL!!!! and 100%!!!!! crap. It therefore has a tendency to *crash*. Especially with software like SoundForge and VST, which do a lot of direct writing to your HDD, a BSOD is not a good thing to have to deal with. Not only do you lose your work, but you tend to have to do a lot of HDD restructuring afterwards (Unless you can afford a RAID-5 solution at home, which, let's face it, is unlikely.)
We all know that software is overpriced, but using warez wholesale isn't the answer. It hurts us, and people like us more than the software companies. Using warez is a useful way of deciding whether to buy software, but let's face it, unless you want your platform to disappear, or your descendants paying even more astronomical money for software (the honest ones at least), warez are not the way to go.
TuRRIcaNEd - A former pirate atoning for his sins by living in a Microsoft world.
-- - "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
Yes, check out the Free Music movement. There is also the Open Content license. IIRC, Richard Stallman is working on a similiar license.
But music differs from source code in one aspect. It can be performed. If I play your GPLed song in a place where people pay to get in, is that commercial use? (Or is it considered a service?) Do I have to acknowledge everyone who contributed to the song from the stage? Do I have to put all the rest of my songs in the same set under the same license? Do I have to tape the show and make it available for modification?
Re:Good, but not good enough
by
soxhlet
·
· Score: 2
You obviously have no idea what your talking about as to call VST "the latest proprietary gimmick" and that it only has to do with audio effects. VST is effects plugins plus virtual instruments that synch perfectly with cubase or logic. Check out native instruments Pro Five. VST is a great idea.
Re:Good, but not good enough
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3
Where is the moderation here at Slashdot? I tried Jazz for Windows years ago and found it difficult to use (compared with some other midi software), but if there have been any improvements + open source this is great news for Linux. Jazz++ does have some nice features and does do what it promises to to - provide a way to create midi tracks (not necessarily the latest audio effets) either with real time input through a midi device or with score or piano roll tracks plus some nice tools for composition. You dumbasses who whine because this lacks the latest proprietary gimmick found on Win or Mac - which has only to do with audio effects and not music composition - know nothing about music composition. What is needed is a way for a musician to quickly input and record midi tracks which are not the same as audio cuts (although these can optionally be mixed in or be synched to a midi track). A great musician or any creative person wants to COMPOSE, not produce sound effects only for immature persons who don't understand the difference. I will certainly give Jazz++ another try - this time on the Linux side.
In the words of my father, shortly after I explained to him the current problems with mp3s and dvds, "Why don't you people who are making open source software start making music and movies the same way?"
The future structure of entertainment will be decentralized. The artist on the street will be able to be an artist, and the suits will go on building factories to manufacture suits.
Hey, if this is going to be freshmeat.net, that's fine, I understand, but can we get a little more info on what the software does? This posting reads like all the spam e-mails that clutter my in-box.
Take a look at the article posted about Lego today, and notice how descriptive it is while still maintaining the same length. It's just a matter of exchanging one sentence of hype for one sentence of description about what the software does. Can we pull that off? Thanks!
GramoFile is built exactly for removing clicks and pops from digitized LPs. Here's the homepage for GramoFile:
http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/~costar/gramofile/
GramoFile will not only remove clicks and pops, but it does so on the fly, and it will also automatically split the tracks for you... it's a neat program. Unfortunatley, it doesn't do noise reduction. You can check out:
http://www.sci.fi/~mjkoskin/
For dnr and denoi, two command-line denoising programs. I've used them a little, and they seemed okay, but I haven't gotten around to really testing them out.
You can also apparently use Broadcast 2000 for noise reduction, but I couldn't get it to work. It's homepage is:
http://heroine.linuxave.net/bcast2000.html
-- To within half a percent, pi seconds is a
nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
Lets make some mirrors before their site is/.'ed (Server located in Denmark/Europe)
http://www.iot.dk/~laursen/jazz/
Re:Music as source code: Off-topic
by
spiralx
·
· Score: 3
Hmm, a tricky question, but I'll give it my expert IANAL opinion:) MIDI files are simply a method of encoding instructions for playing a piece of music - they are a digital equivalent of a musical score. Since a musical score is protected as free speech, so really should a MIDI file - it allows the musician to "express" the ideas they have about music.
But an MP3 cannot be used to exchange information or express anything about music in that way - its only use is for playing back a *finished* piece of music. This is the key difference between the two formats - one can communicate the idea behind the music, one can only play a finished product. So MIDI files would count as free speech, and MP3s wouldn't.
Re:Good, but not good enough
by
guran
·
· Score: 3
Yet another piece of open source "wishware" which claims to be the equal of any commercial offering on the market...
Isn't the point of Open Source that someone else can turn A Good Start into KillerApp 7.2?
If [program X] is Open and [standard Y] is open... well what is keeping you (or someone else) from releasing Y-enabled X?
--
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Re:What's up with music apps on linx????
by
bfree
·
· Score: 3
It's simple, linux is a viable platform for most things, but NOT audio....yet I have a friend who amongst other things even sells linux boxes but he doesn't run it himself as he is a audio artist primarily, until he has a solid sequencer and soundforge type app he can't consider it (unless vmware). We need to plug this hole in our software soon otherwise the support Be is receiving as an audio platform (from Steinberg et al) will mean linux will never be acceptable as an audio platform. Not everyone needs high power audio capabilities, but if every home can use there PC with a simple midi controller as a piano type tool (with free software) thats yet another reason why joe bloggs will go there.
--
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Has anybody gotten this to work?
by
Holger
·
· Score: 4
I see a serious problem with the "free music software helps free music" point of view. Musicians are not usually the most computer literate people around, and Jazz is still kind of difficult to install (this is not the first version I tried to check out). OK, so they have a rpm now - guess what it does? It contains the single file/tmp/jazz/jazz-bin-4.0.0.tar.gz and installs from there, then deletes the file. rpm deinstallation is of course not possible that way.
Then it complains about ALSA missing - well, I am using OSS, but that should be supported too. No problem - just a quick look in the documentation (no man page, btw, just some html) to find out that there is a.cfg file with options that can neither be altered from the program nor from the command line. So I configure the program for OSS there. Then it looks for/dev/sequencer2 or/dev/music, neither of which are standard linux devices according to/dev/MAKEDEV. And when I simply link/dev/music to/dev/sequencer, it asks me if I want to use my AWE64 as Midi output (so it kinda works), but when I try to play the demo song jazz.mid, it keeps spitting out errors ("sndctl_tmr_tempo: Invalid argument ioctl time_base: Invalid argument ioctl speed: Invalid argument unknown sequencer status 08" and so on). I stopped here. I doubt the average musician would even have gotten so far without help.
So now I am asking for some - is anybody able to enlighten me what I might be doing wrong?
If music was GPLed, and you released it with all samples and scores etc. (including Licence Agreeement...), forcing other people to do the same if they used your samples, etc.
Just a thought - does this trend exist someplace?
My Minor $0.02. Domini.
Reasons for music on Linux
by
TuRRIcaNEd
·
· Score: 4
Point No. 1: The generally agreed (stereotypical) musician is usually not very high up on the financial food chain (especially so if said musician is unsigned). OK, so the prices of Windows PC's (and usable Macs to a certain degree) is coming down. Unfortunately, the price of musical software on these platforms (At least musical software that is stable and is actually useful) is unacceptably high, bordering on extortionate. A good *free* (even as in beer) system would be a serious boon to those budding musicians who can't afford the overheads. With a free OS and a free package, the offer is seriously inviting. (This point is slightly negated by the fact that Jazz++ is also available for Windows, although Windows 9x's inherent instability could cause a problem, and most home musicians won't fork out for NT or 2k. The loss of DirectX plugins may be a downer on the Linux front, however)
Point No. 2 It is a documented fact that many computer freaks are avid followers of music too (Maybe the combination of form and artistry makes music appeal to them as much as programming). Many of these people (myself included) are not avid Microsoft fans, so the opportunity to have a usable music program on the OS of choice is a very cool idea.
The only worry is that RMS will inflict on us ever longer versions of the Free Software Song, with him on lead vocal;-)
-- - "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's an yet another ex-proprietry piece of software that has gone Open Source because it can't hack it against the big boys.
However, I think you're missing the point of Open Source (like alot of busineses do). Open Source means that that users can make improvements that they need, and the software gradually improves over time. You want VST plug-in support? code it instead of whining. If you want a professional music suite to fill your needs now, pay for one and be at the mercy of the company that coded it.
and yes, IKIHBT
I've been too busy to follow the last few months of development. My copy seems to be a variant (custom mail merge) from 1.0.4pre7 . . .
Tables are not LyX's strongpoint; this is inherited from LaTeX (yes, it can do some wonderful things, but most word processors have had it beat for years).
I don't use many other than simple supply/demand tables I put in homwork sets and tests.
Equations, though. . . WOW . . . that was what sold me on LyX, and got me to buy an x86 box instead of expanding my fleet of Macs.
He shouldn't be too surprised by a 1.1.x, though--the odd minor indicates a development branch where anything can happen . . .
> LyX may be OK for somebody with just a few equations to typeset,
I did an entire dissertation in computational economics with it . . . *editing* without a display of the equations becomes a problem forr me; just too bloody many braces, parenthesis, etc. for me to mess with.
My natural inclination would certainly be raw LaTeX, but the editing and matchig gets extreme. And perhaps as importantly, lyx takes less keystrokes (though I'm not yet to where I was with word4/5, typesetting commands, and external macros . . .
Does anyone know if you can use this (or any other open source option) for noise reduction / pop & click removal.
I wanna move LP collection to CD, but need a way to clean up the WAV files and get rid of clicks etc. Do I have to go commercial on this ?
I'm also wondering about writing my own. If I took 2/3 recordings from an LP, then used the 2nd copy to repair the waveform at clicks rather than guessing or manually drawing it in, it seems like pretty decent results should be possible (of course, this won't help with scratches, but it would help with random noise). Has anyone tried this ? I would like to try coding this myself, but I'm kinda busy right now - one for the backburner.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
That's just the ticket. When I have time I'll
integrate the dual-sample processing idea into gramofile, the source looks respectable.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Not implying that you are, but I am starting to get a little irked about the number of posts about the aptitude of the average musician. (Not just your post, or this article. I'm talking about the past couple of weeks.)
:)
:)
The majority of musicians may not be incredibly computer literate. But then again, neither are the majority of computer users.
Most of them (non-literates) don't tend to hang out here very much, either.
I may do computers for a living, but I've been a musician for much longer. And so has my drummer. And quite a handful of other techies I know. (If fact, I can only think of one person in our whole IS department who ISN'T a musician on the side.) Not to mention the sound-engineer types. Ever play with multitrack recording, mixers, and all of the wacky electronic gadgets around nowadays? They're not exactly "point, click, and drool" (If it is, you're doing it wrong, and it probably sounds like crap, too.)
Even if a musician doesn't start out as some form of geek, many turn into one eventually. Or at least one person in every band will. (Someone has to figure out the equipment.) Unless, of course, they do absolutely nothing but bang on instruments, and never record anything unless a pro studio is doing the work for them. Which pretty much guarantees that they won't be sitting here reading Slashdot instead of solving peoples problems. Or trying to run Jazz on any *nix (or other) system.
Besides, what is a computer? Other than a really complicated instrument to be mastered, and to do/produce wonderful things with?
Isn't that what musicians like to do?
Isn't that what programmers/techs like to do?
You see where I'm going with this, right?
... mostly along the same lines, including BEAST/BSE (sorry, don't know the URL - should be linked from the GNOME site), GNU OCTAL (http://www.gnu.org/software/octal/octa l.html - the Gsynth guy is now working w/ this project), and Buzz under WINE as a stopgap until one of the others gets usable.
I should note, though, that none of the things I mentioned, or Gsynth, for that matter, are quite the same thing as Rebirth, ReCycle, or Reason. The ones I mentioned probably share more of a common heritage with trackers, though they're also based on modular soft synths and effects processors.
Believe it or not, the whole legal system does not revolve around software. I know this comes as a surprise to those who wonder how people lived before the Intel 80386.
Now THAT is just uncalled for. We all realize that computers are just a small piece of society; there's no need for sarcasm here.
The point of my question was that new technologies force society to re-evaluate some old perceptions and precedents. Source-as-speach is one example of this. Knowledge workers are another... We MAKE nothing, yet are higher paid than most professions.
Another interesting result of modern tech is the government mandate that health insurance can not discriminate or deny coverage to people who have a genetic pre-disposition to certain chronic or terminal disease...
Computers, bio-tech and space exploration, althogh very recent and small in the grand scheme of things, have had a HUGE impact on modern society, culture, and {wait for it}... law.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I showed it to a friend of mine who uses windows (I use Linux) and he is into music composition and playing the violin, and he liked it. I told him I could help him install the windows version of the software, he said he was fine using my Linux box ;-).
I originally had a few problems setting it up. It looks for /dev/sequencer2 and for some reason my Redhat 6.1 did not have it. I looked at MAKEDEV and uncommented it out and it fired right up. Course it took me a little time to figure this out.
I like the drum machine. It is nice to be able to give custom drum tracks to music. The only issue that I do have is that the GUI is not the most intuitive interface. I could figure it out and get it to work, but I wonder what kind of study they did on usability and if any. I often wonder how many studies are done on this. I know MS and MAC does studies on this and many software companies do. But I also know that many don't. hmmm
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
What the protocol enables me (amateur musician only BTW) to do is to connect a number of different sound modules --including one which is actually a card in my PC-- to a musical keyboard, then use that keyboard to tell all of those modules when to put out an audio signal, and a little bit about how.
A "sequencer" captures a "sequence" of midi events (those key presses, etc.), so it is essentially like a digital multitrack recorder -- except that instead of recording sounds, it is recording the "you pushed middle c on channel 1 which is assigned to voice piano" event
The sequencer essentially lets me become a whole band, orchestra, etc. and write music for a wide variety of instruments that I otherwise cannot play.
Although I don't know of an sequencer + integrated printing package on the Linux side, there are "musical notation" programs that essentially allow me to print out my own sheet music of stuff I've composed on the sequencer.
Anyway, Jazz++ seems to be the best solution available for MIDI right now, and the fact that they GPL'd the code is great because others can stand on their shoulders, or work from the ground up to create *nix stuff that can compete with the WinTel/Mac hegemony in the musical arena.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I don't think GPL is quite the right copyleft license for music. Releasing the source just isn't that important -- you can listen for lyrics, play along with the music, and even filter drum tracks and what not out of a finished recording. Unlike for a computer program, "wrong" interpretations of the music can lead to new works themselves.
I am slowly putting together a copyleft license for music called the Free Music Public License. When I have time (sometime next week), I'll have the terms up at http://gamh.cx/fmpl, and ask for comments from musicians, then turn it into a real license with the help of a lawyer. My band (God Ate My Homework) will be using this license. We hope others will follow us.
It was released for the Amiga as well. I had no MIDI equipment whatsoever back then, but it could use the internal audio, too.
Later on, the Amiga also had "Bars&Pipes", which was pretty cool for its time, too.
Well I'm not so sure about open source, but there are plenty of freeware/shareware tools at MAZ Sound Tools which might be of use. You can get Cool Edit from there, which has a noise reduction option IIRC, and support for very large files.
As for writing your own, you'd better get a book out on statistical sampling and analysis and prepare for a long reading session... :)
The loss of DirectX plugins may be a downer on the Linux front, however.
Yeah, especially since Jazz++ doesn't seem to support VST plugins, which are pretty much the de facto standard, especially since Steinberg opened up the specifications last year(see here for some VST stuff). If they were supported then the lack of DirectX plugins wouldn't be so bad, but as it is it puts a serious downer on the audio side of Jazz++.
until he has a solid sequencer and soundforge type app he can't consider it (unless vmware).
Yeah, but a sequencer doing a full hard-disk recording of both MIDI and audio tracks with effects/plugins is one of the most processor and IO intensive things you can do on your PC. I wouldn't dare to do this using a virtual OS running under VMWare, and I doubt he would.
And it's not really suprising that BeOS will get more support as an audio platform, especially now it's freely available. It was designed with multimedia as one of its primary goals, and succeeds brilliantly, whereas Linux and Windows include audio as an afterthought. Given the performance requirements of serious audio tools, making the move to BeOS rather than Linux is the obvious move for Steinberg et al. It's not about Linux at all, it's about BeOS's audio performace.
1. It hurts developers as well as consumers. Developers write software for a company, software is cracked. Company loses money on software due to proliferation of cracked copy. Do the suits in the boardroom lose their bonuses? Hell no. They hike the price of the software and keep developer pay down, using piracy as an excuse. They get off scot-free nad can afford another year at the golf course.
2. It hurts platform development. If a platform isn't as globally entrenched as MS-DOS/Windows (Like Atari and Amiga back in the day, and Linux and BeOS now), and a lot of software is cracked, the companies don't develop for the platform anymore, and Bill gets richer.
3. Cracked versions are usually pre-release, despite all the FINAL!!!! and 100%!!!!! crap. It therefore has a tendency to *crash*. Especially with software like SoundForge and VST, which do a lot of direct writing to your HDD, a BSOD is not a good thing to have to deal with. Not only do you lose your work, but you tend to have to do a lot of HDD restructuring afterwards (Unless you can afford a RAID-5 solution at home, which, let's face it, is unlikely.)
We all know that software is overpriced, but using warez wholesale isn't the answer. It hurts us, and people like us more than the software companies. Using warez is a useful way of deciding whether to buy software, but let's face it, unless you want your platform to disappear, or your descendants paying even more astronomical money for software (the honest ones at least), warez are not the way to go.
TuRRIcaNEd - A former pirate atoning for his sins by living in a Microsoft world.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
Many musicians already do this sort of thing.
For example, check out Dennis Bathory-Kitsz.
Yes, check out the Free Music movement. There is also the Open Content license. IIRC, Richard Stallman is working on a similiar license.
But music differs from source code in one aspect. It can be performed. If I play your GPLed song in a place where people pay to get in, is that commercial use? (Or is it considered a service?) Do I have to acknowledge everyone who contributed to the song from the stage? Do I have to put all the rest of my songs in the same set under the same license? Do I have to tape the show and make it available for modification?
You obviously have no idea what your talking about as to call VST "the latest proprietary gimmick" and that it only has to do with audio effects. VST is effects plugins plus virtual instruments that synch perfectly with cubase or logic. Check out native instruments Pro Five. VST is a great idea.
Where is the moderation here at Slashdot? I tried Jazz for Windows years ago and found it difficult to use (compared with some other midi software), but if there have been any improvements + open source this is great news for Linux. Jazz++ does have some nice features and does do what it promises to to - provide a way to create midi tracks (not necessarily the latest audio effets) either with real time input through a midi device or with score or piano roll tracks plus some nice tools for composition. You dumbasses who whine because this lacks the latest proprietary gimmick found on Win or Mac - which has only to do with audio effects and not music composition - know nothing about music composition. What is needed is a way for a musician to quickly input and record midi tracks which are not the same as audio cuts (although these can optionally be mixed in or be synched to a midi track). A great musician or any creative person wants to COMPOSE, not produce sound effects only for immature persons who don't understand the difference. I will certainly give Jazz++ another try - this time on the Linux side.
An open source application that sucks people away from its commercial competitors in droves.
Sometimes it pulls so hard that they switch hardware platforms to run a *nix so that they can use it.
In the words of my father, shortly after I explained to him the current problems with mp3s and dvds, "Why don't you people who are making open source software start making music and movies the same way?"
The future structure of entertainment will be decentralized. The artist on the street will be able to be an artist, and the suits will go on building factories to manufacture suits.
Hey, if this is going to be freshmeat.net, that's fine, I understand, but can we get a little more info on what the software does? This posting reads like all the spam e-mails that clutter my in-box.
Take a look at the article posted about Lego today, and notice how descriptive it is while still maintaining the same length. It's just a matter of exchanging one sentence of hype for one sentence of description about what the software does. Can we pull that off? Thanks!
What's your damage, Heather?
http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/~costar/gramofile/
GramoFile will not only remove clicks and pops, but it does so on the fly, and it will also automatically split the tracks for you... it's a neat program. Unfortunatley, it doesn't do noise reduction. You can check out:
http://www.sci.fi/~mjkoskin/
For dnr and denoi, two command-line denoising programs. I've used them a little, and they seemed okay, but I haven't gotten around to really testing them out.
You can also apparently use Broadcast 2000 for noise reduction, but I couldn't get it to work. It's homepage is:
http://heroine.linuxave.net/bcast2000.html
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
Lets make some mirrors before their site is /.'ed
(Server located in Denmark/Europe)
http://www.iot.dk/~laursen/jazz/
Hmm, a tricky question, but I'll give it my expert IANAL opinion :) MIDI files are simply a method of encoding instructions for playing a piece of music - they are a digital equivalent of a musical score. Since a musical score is protected as free speech, so really should a MIDI file - it allows the musician to "express" the ideas they have about music.
But an MP3 cannot be used to exchange information or express anything about music in that way - its only use is for playing back a *finished* piece of music. This is the key difference between the two formats - one can communicate the idea behind the music, one can only play a finished product. So MIDI files would count as free speech, and MP3s wouldn't.
Isn't the point of Open Source that someone else can turn A Good Start into KillerApp 7.2?
If [program X] is Open and [standard Y] is open... well what is keeping you (or someone else) from releasing Y-enabled X?
All opinions are my own - until criticized
It's simple, linux is a viable platform for most things, but NOT audio....yet
I have a friend who amongst other things even sells linux boxes but he doesn't run it himself as he is a audio artist primarily, until he has a solid sequencer and soundforge type app he can't consider it (unless vmware).
We need to plug this hole in our software soon otherwise the support Be is receiving as an audio platform (from Steinberg et al) will mean linux will never be acceptable as an audio platform. Not everyone needs high power audio capabilities, but if every home can use there PC with a simple midi controller as a piano type tool (with free software) thats yet another reason why joe bloggs will go there.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I see a serious problem with the "free music software helps free music" point of view. Musicians are not usually the most computer literate people around, and Jazz is still kind of difficult to install (this is not the first version I tried to check out). OK, so they have a rpm now - guess what it does? It contains the single file /tmp/jazz/jazz-bin-4.0.0.tar.gz and installs from there, then deletes the file. rpm deinstallation is of course not possible that way.
.cfg file with options that can neither be altered from the program nor from the command line. So I configure the program for OSS there. Then it looks for /dev/sequencer2 or /dev/music, neither of which are standard linux devices according to /dev/MAKEDEV. And when I simply link /dev/music to /dev/sequencer, it asks me if I want to use my AWE64 as Midi output (so it kinda works), but when I try to play the demo song jazz.mid, it keeps spitting out errors ("sndctl_tmr_tempo: Invalid argument ioctl time_base: Invalid argument ioctl speed: Invalid argument unknown sequencer status 08" and so on). I stopped here. I doubt the average musician would even have gotten so far without help.
Then it complains about ALSA missing - well, I am using OSS, but that should be supported too. No problem - just a quick look in the documentation (no man page, btw, just some html) to find out that there is a
So now I am asking for some - is anybody able to enlighten me what I might be doing wrong?
Wouldn't it be great if...
If music was GPLed, and you released it with all samples and scores etc. (including Licence Agreeement...), forcing other people to do the same if they used your samples, etc.
Just a thought - does this trend exist someplace?
My Minor $0.02.
Domini.
The generally agreed (stereotypical) musician is usually not very high up on the financial food chain (especially so if said musician is unsigned). OK, so the prices of Windows PC's (and usable Macs to a certain degree) is coming down. Unfortunately, the price of musical software on these platforms (At least musical software that is stable and is actually useful) is unacceptably high, bordering on extortionate. A good *free* (even as in beer) system would be a serious boon to those budding musicians who can't afford the overheads. With a free OS and a free package, the offer is seriously inviting. (This point is slightly negated by the fact that Jazz++ is also available for Windows, although Windows 9x's inherent instability could cause a problem, and most home musicians won't fork out for NT or 2k. The loss of DirectX plugins may be a downer on the Linux front, however)
Point No. 2
It is a documented fact that many computer freaks are avid followers of music too (Maybe the combination of form and artistry makes music appeal to them as much as programming). Many of these people (myself included) are not avid Microsoft fans, so the opportunity to have a usable music program on the OS of choice is a very cool idea.
The only worry is that RMS will inflict on us ever longer versions of the Free Software Song, with him on lead vocal ;-)
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.