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DeMuDi Linux
Sleen writes: "DeMuDi stands for Debian Music Distribution. This is the first distribution of GNU/Linux whose sole purpose is to create a stable OS for Multimedia. The project is led by Guenter Gieger who is the developer of the Linux low latency driver for the RME Hammerfall 96xx series. Combined with realtime kernel patches, the Hammerfall card in Linux can achieve hardware level latencies. Though many are already using Linux to make music, Guenter has started this project to consolidate the decentralized resources needed for setting up a linux system for multimedia. Drivers, applications, a realtime kernel and many other things are missing from the typical linux distro. If anyone wonders what is available to work with, take a look at the packages page. They include multitrack hard disk recording software, physical modelling and virtual analog synthesizers, beatboxes, midi sequencers, processors, and Advanced Open Architecture Synthesis systems such as Csound. For more information such as project details, a mailing list and contact info visit DeMudi.org."
It would be good if there was a dedicated linux distrobution for all computing tasks. For a firewall there is trinux, for a good all round server there is redhat, and now for multimedia there is demudi, all we need now is a dedicated distrobution for business users, and for gamers.
"Musicians are very, very rarely computer jockeys, and being weaned on the MacOS and Win32, most of them will shit a brick when if they have to deal with the CLI or edit a .conf file."
On what do you base this? It would seem that there is a lot of evidence to the contrary: musicians were the first artists to really embrace computers, there is a long history of musician-hackish tendency crossover, modern electronic music gear requires loads of tinkering that people who do music on computers are often drawn to. Have you ever used a modern keyboard? It's ridiculous. Open a KB magazine and the articles are all "OS patch this, Driver revision that". Very computer-techy.
Have you ever used an old keyboard? OO design before CS had it, exactly. Modular/old-analog synths (esp. machines like the Korg MS-20) had the whole OO pattern down with data/functionality hiding, modularization, message passing, many musicians are quite fluent in these concepts.
I'm not trying to argue with you or "set right a common misconception" or anything, I just see this a completely different way from the way you and many /.'ers seem to. Why do you think musicians aren't technical. I'd argue that of all artists, they tend to be the *most* technical, and if you had to draw any subgroup of society but CSers, programmers, and engineers, I'd think the group best able to deal with a computer would probably be musicians. Yes, even over other scientists like physicists and biologists.
Have you ever seen Max or MSP? I've seen some shitty code by engineers and physicists, but the code some of those musicians are basically writing in Max is pretty good.
These types of developments excite me because of the good things they say about the flexibility of linux, but I think that there may be a drawback to this level of specialization for linux as a whole, and an alternative that can avoid this drawback.
:D
Maintaining a distribution requires a lot of overhead beyond its primary focus. Things like updating system packages, maintaining compatability lists of entire systems of packages, documentation, and etc. fall into this category. This overhead is present in all distribution development alike, and uses up precious developer time. What this means is that if there are distros for every single specific task from pr0n viewing to juice-carton designing, then this overhead will take its toll on the the linux development community for every single one of those distros. The work that must be done to take care of the overhead is work that has already been done by every other distro.
To put it mathematically, suppose the overhead in maintaining a distro needs the work of 10 dedicated people, and suppose there is a total of 100 developers for linux. If you have one very flexible distro, you will have 10 people working on the overhead, and 90 people working on the good stuff such as web browsers, editors, GUI toolkits, etc. But if there are 5 distros total, you will need 50 developers to work on the overhead altogether. They will all be duplicating the work done by the other overhead-workers. This would only leave 50 people to work on the good stuff. We need good stuff more than duplicated effort.
The only solution I see to this is simply for people who want to roll their own specific linux distro to try instead to modify existing distros, building ontop of the existing infrastructure. Does apt-get install task-audio-studio or task-ipmasq-firewall or task-thinclient sound good to anyone else?
-helo
The point of this distro is not to solve the age-old mysical problem of linux: no apps.
The point of this distro is to put linux in a *much better* position to become an architecture for development of *hardware-based* music systems using open source tools.
This distro should be at the *end* of the MIDI chain, not trying to drive the front of it.
(In my opinion, software sequencing is held in too high regard by musicians. try playing synth music *live* as much as possible, and see where that takes you for a while... but I digress...)
I'm excited by this distro because it means that with the right tools, and good MIDI *input* capabilities, I could write a pretty fucking amazing hardware sampler system...
Better than Emu. Better than Akai. And yes, even better than the Yamaha samplers.
:)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Get a soundcard that does hardware mixing. The Trident 4DWave NX series of cards do this quite nice and cheap. You get 32 audio devices to play with (i.e. you can open up to 32 audio apps simultaneously). Of course you can run esound as one of the 32 to increase this in software. The Live! cards supposedly do this too. All this with ALSA drivers of course.
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
Too bad linux is still stuck with single threaded X.
.
:)
:)
That's not the problem, your videocard is not threaded so a multithreaded X server will not buy you any significant speed increase.
A good multi-threading windowing toolkit is whats needed. Qt 3.0 is supposed to fill this gap, However I've had very good results with GTK+ too. I ported some code over from BeOS and it runs beautifully under Linux/X. Unfortunately GTK+ uses one big fat global app lock for GUI threading but with careful design you can get impressive results
And I don't think musicians will be happy with the idea that they need to install a patch in order to get low latencies. It should be default so that developers can just assume everyone will have it.
That is coming in the 2.5.x kernel series. But don't let that stop you to start experimenting
-adnans (who just recorded another 2 hours of video + audio under linux, without dropping a single frame
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
Would it be a reasonable task to cull the pachage list to act as a stereo component-style MP3 player? (attractive component-looking case not included)
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
VST support would probably be the easiest to achieve, as VST plugins are already cross platform (Mac and Win) although I don't know the details of how painful it is to port one. DXi would be a little more difficult but having seen Windows avi codecs interfaced to in Linux, ActiveX controls and the WINE project, I wouldn't be surprised to see wrappers for the Windows DXi plugins and VST instruments.
Oops, reading Ardour's features page bears my point about VST but introduces some IP stupidity on the part of Steinberg.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
Not to point out the glaringly obvious but I hardly think something named (expanded) *DEBIAN* Music Distrobution is a "start-from-scratch" proposition. And completely replacing your kernel, and (probably) other major software with real-time versions, as well as a different orientation (probably easier setup, we all know musicians aren't techies ;-), etc, does constitute a good reason for forking the distro, at least for a while. Maybe once they get it all shaken out and the bugs worked out they will merge back, but at least for now it is a wise idea.
Sheesh.....
(Note that since the site is EXTREMELY slow I can't browse the list of packages, so maybe I'm missing something).
.conf file.
This reminds me a lot of BeOS. Be is very, very well suited for music and other media production. But the hardware and major software support never materialized, so it didn't catch on. Unless companies like Cakewalk, Steinberg, and Logic start porting their apps to this new distro, it really won't matter how kickass the OS is. Maybe if VST or DXi support was available in the OS, things might be a little more attractive to potential developers.
I suppose that you *could* see some pickup in use if tools in the same league as those released by the companies above is developed for this distro. On the other hand, the Gimp is available for Linux, and I still don't run into many serious graphic designers who use it instead of Photoshop. Most folks are gonna stick with what they know unless there is a compelling reason for them to switch.
I'm also a little worried about the issues of useability that normally pop up with Linux distros. Musicians are very, very rarely computer jockeys, and being weaned on the MacOS and Win32, most of them will shit a brick when if they have to deal with the CLI or edit a
-Ed
www.funkatron.com
I thought EMACS was to text editing what a howitzer is to precision shooting:)
(I use emacs, so don't get all pissy)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
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"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
So many of us have had problems setting ardour up. This is definately a godsend to anyone looking to do professional audio work, which is consistently overlooked when people are designing operating systems and environments.
I wonder how long until this story is overrun by "Linux audio SuX! Use BeOS!" or "Mac RuLeZ!" posts...
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"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
I believe that both are included in this distribution (check the package list if you're not sure).
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"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
I don't know what to think about these specialized distros. If someone makes a distro for this, and someone else makes a distro for that, when what do I do if I want to do both? Do I need two computers?
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
This will definitely give us a good solid dedicated multimedia box, but what I for one really want is my current distro - which is is running a fairly lean, fast kernel - with all these applications added. I'm quite happy to shut down any resource hogging processes while I record/mix/edit etc, but I can't really be bothered setting up a whole new box just for this, or wiping my one as it's quite happy right now.
I'm sure other users are the same - it'll only be the dedicated music makers who will go to these lengths. Of course, maybe us part timers have no need of such low latency, I mean I use Cubase on my Windows partition pretty successfully, but aside from that and Unreal Tournament I would rather dump that partition completely.
Of course, at the moment I have no sound support at all:) A 1.2GHz Athlon, 500Mb RAM, 1.2Tb disk, Voodoo3 all supported, but my SBLive! card...damn!
Frog51
This article suggests to me that Linux is to OS kernels what Emacs is to text editing, too. Or it will be very soon.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Will someone please point me to the line I have to add to my source.list?
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python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
What about Jazzware's Jazz++ midi sequencer / audio editor? (http://www.jazzware.com) I used it, and (once you get past the interface...RTFM and you get it) it worked great. It does midi sequencing and audio editing (like what CuBase does), and it is under the GPL (it used to be proprietary IIRC).
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HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Is anyone working on this? I've considered it, but the MIDI spec is pretty daunting looking to me....
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
also unlike standard midi instruments, csound can take an unlimited amount of time to render :-)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
CSound is to music synthesis what EMACS is to text editing.
If you are a developer working on or interested in Linux audio software, I also encourage you to check out the Linux Audio Development web site.
--pif you read their site, they haven't built a distribution from scratch. DeMuDi stands for Debian Music Disttribution, meaning that they're working to add more multimedia drivers, applications, and capabilities to an existing distro (which, i might add, is the distro you're using).
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
GNU DeMuDi au rutti
GNU DeMuDi au rutti
GNU DeMuDi au rutti
GNU DeMuDi au rutti
GNU DeMuDi au rutti
Wop-bop-a-loom-bop-a-bop-bam-boom
Thank you.
--
In an earlier /. story, an animator from ILM explained that the reason they dumped Windows for Linux was not the cost, but that they could customize Linux to meet their needs.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I have to admit, even though a specialized distro is not really a new concept I'm quite intrigued. Imagine that instead of selling a card that plugs into a PC (as it's sometimes done now), a company could sell an entire PC with a home brewed Linux distro. Obviously the price would be higher but that kind of custimization could lead to some really interesting setup from a professional perspective. Kinda like the embedded concept but scaled a lot higher!
BOSTON SUCKS!
As a huge fan of electronic music and occasional dabbler in writing it with my Mac and MIDI gear, I hearby announce that if Linux and Free software can replace a Mac running Cubase with VST plugins, Reaktor, Reason, the new Absynth, and other staples of electronic music, with MIDI and low latency, I will SHIT MYSELF LIKE AN INFANT IN DIAPERS!!
i.e., I would really be impressed and would install it straight away. :-)
You can happily roll your own, or let them roll it for you. The applications are probably mostly in unstable already, the main thing is the low latency patches and possible driver additions to their kernel.
I guess the reason they're not included in Linux releases is that they aren't suited for a server, which doesn't need low latencies. However, if you're running a desktop system, you should definitely look into these patches. I think Mandrake should include them by default.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
As opposed to Midi, a csound instrument can have an unlimited number of parameters. This distro could become the most powerful music creation platform ever.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Why not just work with a current distro (debian) instead of doing a whole new distro from scratch? I run debian, I would want multimedia capabilities --- so I should give up debian for this distro?
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
That sounds a lot like linux, right?