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European Commission Sponsors Linux Audio Distribution
krez writes: "Lately I've been looking for info on open-source audio recording & processing software. Not an easy task really: Suites like Brahms for KDE, and GLAME for Gnome are a good start, but I've yet to find a program - or a series of programs - that even approach something as comprehensive as Cubase or Cakewalk on those other platforms. Anyway, here's something that might just prove to be a good start. The European Commission is sponsoring a distribution called AGNULA (A GNU/Linux Audio distribution). The distribution will come in two flavours: Debian-based, and RedHat-based. You can read about the project and it's goals at http://www.agnula.org." The Debian side of this project is called DeMuDi, and it's been mentioned here before.
Anyone doing high end audio work is probably capable of procuring, compiling, and using the available tools. Even in the Windows world (even in the *Mac* world, for chrissake), people who need SMPTE, notation, and Csound are typically fairly knowledgeable.
This is like creating an "Desktop Publishing Distribution" by including LaTeX, PDF support, a bunch of printer drivers, and emacs.
Maybe it's just me, but I really don't see the point.
Cheers
-b
i have an audiomedia III and a digi 001 from digidesign - pretty much designed for pro tools - which rocks - and which are the only reasons i still use mac os (9). osx doesn't even have support for them yet - (and the audiomedia III has been out for _years_).... anyway, would love to see these supported by a linux audio package (and i guess that means kernel support).
I've read in a bunch of places that the European Comission has all but decided to create their own version of the dreaded DMCA. If/when that goes through won't this have to be completely crippled?
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Well, call me a heretic (and some will!) but I've recently moved back to Windows XP from Mandrake for almost exactly this reason; I could find no way to run any sort of decent sequencing/audio recording package on Linux. And I tried them all, every single OSS program I could find via Google, via Freshmeat...
It seems that lots of people appreciate the basics of audio work, (I'd hate to give up sox, even under Windows) but when it comes to:
* support for a *decent* soundcard, with multiple channels and digital I/O.
* low-latency audio monitoring during record
* sync of MIDI and audio
* up to 24 tracks
* plug-in realtime effects
* automation
...etc, there's nothing that comes close to Logic Audio. So reluctantly, I now have a completely XP-based desktop.
Now, another possible response to me is; "don't send complaints, send source code!". First, I'm not complaining, just observing. Second, yes, I could probably write such a package BUT, I'd need to work around the myriad of Linux audio systems, to research low-level drivers for the specialist hardware that decent cards use... it would take me years. By the time I had something usable I would have forgotten how to play guitar!
ben
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
There are a couple of points I'd like to clear up since I am a musician. Music software needs to be easy to use. Musicians don't like to spend weeks learning an OS when they could be spending that time writing music. Musicians like me also won't switch from tried and true platforms unless something BETTER comes out. Not equal but BETTER. I use logic audio in winXP and that works very well for me. If something equivalent came out for linux I wouldn't use it since I wouldn't get anywhere learning new software that did the same thing as the software I use. It would be difficult to code a software studio program that was comparable to ones used today on the windows and macintosh platforms. These are serious, large programs that take the combined effort of a group of hired programmers to create. They have good interfaces and are standard. Many open-source programs that I have seen lack in the interface area and in the standards area. There is a reason why programs like cubase or logic audio cost so much, creating them is a huge endeavor and creating a realiable environment and good interface is not an easy task at all.
I could see linux based distributions being used by linux users and hobbyist musicians, but I doubt that intermediate musicians would use it and pro ones would deffinately not use it (they are too attached to their MACS and protools!)
I believe music software is an area where we NEED large well-funded companies to create the software.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
I think making special-purpose distros are a good idea. If I can borrow a disk from a fiend, install it on a box and have everything I need to start creating music, this is a tremendously hassle-free to put their hardware to good use.
One of my friends is a composer and a musician - he's also a programmer, but he has *no* Linux/Unix experience at all - could a distro like this help him get started? Sure.
How about a music teacher at a highschool? Don't count on him/her having much computer experience at all - given teacher salaries and the typical equipment in schools, he or she would probably welcome something like this.
I just don't see how focusing an effort on specializing a distro has any bad effect on other, more general distros. It takes nothing away, just adds...
Look at the demand for Firewall distros like IPCop. (My personal favorite!) With that, I can dl a 20mb iso and have a working firewall in 20 minutes - I don't have to go in and disable a lot of services the way I would if I had started with any of the standard distros.
Just my opinion...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Must take this moment to endorse Ardour.
While it isn't finished, it is quite an attempt to provide a professional quality hard drive recording program. Perhaps a little $$ twords finishing the developement of ardour would be worthwhile; I don't believe there is any free software close to what it is doing.
If we want linux to be taken seriously in multimedia production then we need some way to get around the proprietary format/codec problem for media. This is actually one of the key reasons why I'm opposed to DMCA-like laws (and patenting of compression algorithms), since they create barriers to entry for free software. Free software authors can't pay the licencing fees.
Morally the right thing to do would be to create free alternatives, but this is probably not a feasible option (lawsuits for patent infringement, consumer acceptance of alternate formats, etc.). As it stands now even watching DVDs on linux is illegal (afaik css is being automatically descrambled by a non-licenced program). Clearly some solution for this is needed.
As for the infrastructure, linux audio is doing pretty well (ALSA+lowlatency works wonders). All that's missing is the production apps... a good sequencer (cubase/cakewalk-workalike) would do wonders. All of the GUI audio apps I've seen for linux are crap compared to professional windows apps. It's about time to do something about it, but is the community of linux-using music-making dsp-coding geeks too small ?
"The good stuff, like Cubase and Cakewalk, is unlikely to ever happen on Linux I think. Mainly because all the good audio software engineers are happily employed by the likes of steinberg, emagic, digidesign, apple etc."
While I'm afraid you might be right, you might also be interested to know that Nuendo (Steinberg's flagship high-end audio editing app) is coded on *nix boxes. There's no PORT for *nix OSes, of course, but to do so should be trivial since that's where the app is written.
I've talked to them about this and they're completely uninterested in making a Linux version. No market, they claim.
They're right of course. But there's no market because there's no apps. And there's no apps because there's no market.
What's the solution? Keep stuff free for a while, stop releasing things before they're done/work (Ardour), and stress the importance of stability.
There's ONE serious professional audio app right now and it's marketed at the one market that can't afford to not be stable 100% of the time: DJs.
It's called Final Scratch. Check it out.
Are you sure you're not equating Microsoft loss to Linux win?
Can't Linux win sans hurting Microsoft?
I have been pwned because my
from the EU website
European Commission The European Commission embodies and upholds the general interest of the Union. The President and Members of the Commission are appointed by the Member States after they have been approved by the European Parliament. The Commission is the driving force in the Union's institutional system: It has the right to initiate draft legislation and therefore presents legislative proposals to Parliament and the Council; As the Union's executive body, it is responsible for implementing the European legislation (directives, regulations, decisions), budget and programmes adopted by Parliament and the Council; It acts as guardian of the Treaties and, together with the Court of Justice, ensures that Community law is properly applied; It represents the Union on the international stage and negotiates international agreements, chiefly in the field of trade and cooperation.-- ribbit
but, i think the biggest problem is that it isn't easy to use for a musician. On Mac/Windows just start some downloaded setup tool and your new drivers are installed. same goes for audio-software updates. Even this seems to be a problem as the FAQ pages show on most manufacturer pages.
Installing Alsa drivers isn't that easy. I mean there's a 40KB text file that explains howto install them, you need at least 6 steps. Also you must know which chip your audio-card is based on. Then there's 4 different things to get off the alsa page (Driver, Library, Utilities, OSS Compat. Library) but you actually need all of them to get audio software going - why isn't this one package? For my card using the ice1712 chip i currently must use OSS emulation for most audio-tools (except Ardour).
speaking of Ardour - If i were a normal pc-using musician and i want to try out some new software i heard of, I'd try to get some demo version of it and test the tool. to get Ardour i must know howto use CVS and of course howto compile under linux. I know Ardour isn't finished yet, but this is another point that keeps joe average off linux-audio.
for me it's fun to try out howto tweak my linx box and to see linux have super-low latency with some kernel patches (approx. 2ms). A lot work and time is necessary to get these things going (time a professional musician can't afford). MacOSX can provide similar latency and much better usability. Recoding some tool like Samplitude Studio which has a usability level that i never saw with any other software is nearly impossible. I once put a friend of mine in front of my machine running Samplitude - he is a musician only knowing something about his hardware like mixing-desk, compressors, amplifier... - he figured out howto use the most important functions within 5 minutes, and actually made the mixdown himself w/o needing my help afterwards.
That's the actual difference between opensource apps and professional apps (which are sadly not available for linux). So its usability not features, there shouldn't be a distro for audio, there should be some foolproof system for drivers and software installation.
Congratulations, you just defined why we have such a thing as patents. Patents protect an invention so that the inventor can enjoy a limited amount of time of exclusivity. If the author wants to let others use his invention for the cost of a license, great. If the poor free software developers can't afford the license, tough. The alternative of not having patents at all would seriously hinder the inventive process, and we'd see much less advancement (don't get me wrong, I think there are plenty of silly patents out there, but just because the system can be abused doesn't mean the original intent is wrong).
Morally? By whose set of morals? Yours? What makes you so special that the morals you hold are the morals everyone else should hold as well? Morality has no place in business, politics, or education. Leave morality to religion. (note that "morals" != "ethics".)
Right. The solution is that someone (company, group of individuals) needs to pay for a license, develop a player, and distribute it legally (whether they charge for it or not is up to whoever builds the player). Then and only then will playing CSS-encoded DVDs on linux be legal. (Okay, so a legal alternative would be a complete clean-room reverse engineering of the CSS encryption, but that's likely not even a possibility anymore with the proliferation of the DeCSS code, not to mention the DMCA itself.)
Apart from Brahms there is another nice Sequencer/Note editor for KDE -- Rosegarden: http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/rosegarden/index. html
It is based upon the old (ugly, Xaw) Rosegarden 2.1, which is also available on the above site.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
a distribution called AGNULA (A GNU/Linux Audio distribution).
Looks like RMS got his way with this one :-)
The big problem with sound program on linux at the moment is OSS. What is currently the most stable and supported(barely passable).
OSS has a number of limitations that make it very hard to get high quality sound programs. From what I was told it's like the clasic unix sockets. So you have to do a loop until the socket is free BUT this means you have a small period of time where there is nothing. This is what with XMMS, etc. you get clicks when the songs change.
Alsa uses call backs instead(an OSS compatable api is included which simulates OSS) which means you don't get that pause. This makes writing high quality audio programs much easier.
The long and the short of it is that I doubt we'll get really STABLE high quiality audio programs until Alsa is included in the Kernal in the distros (It has been included in 2.5) Which won't be for at least a year(this is a guess). The other thing that happens when the new kenal comes out is that it is supposed to have a lower latancy(VERY important from real time video/adio programs).
That combined with GStreamer and the like means that in about one or two years we should have some very nice audio programs.
That being said heres the best program I've found so far:
A Good Audacity Multiplatform Audio Program
Your entire perspective is so heavily screwed, it's difficult to begin criticizing it.
It boils down to one simple thing. Linux does not need to prove jack shit to anyone.
Linux succeeds when people like it and use it. It does not fail when people decide not to use it.
I have been pwned because my
The VST plugin standard has some design flaws. Basically it wasn't designed to do the things it's currently doing (whole app as plugin) and many plugins use the native windows api calls for the guis, so the only option would be to use wine for emulation. Personally I'd prefer a new API designed from the ground up correcting the mistakes of VST/VST2. IIRC Yamaha actually proposed something that uses Microsoft's COM. In the linux world something based on CORBA or even shared libraries might work, but the design is tedious, because you never know what new ideas people come up with. For instance there are plugins with thousands of parameters and the parameters are all different types and plugins that load other plugins (meta-plugins).
and you do need a kickass MIDI sequencer, I suggest BeOS + Sequitur. It does not have all the features of Cakewalk (I miss expecially the score) but it does have other special features of it's own, like for example processing filters and filter editing (for new filters), but there are many more.
There are many more good audio tools on BeOS. One more recommendation is XRS, a groove station, similar to FruityLoops. I composed this song completely in XRS, using just the built-in software synths.
Sigged!
One thing that I don't dislike in the European Union is the sense that they seem to have regarding information technology. It seems like they are making decisions which really could benefit the European Union and not a single company. This shows for example through the IST (information society technologies programme coordinated by EU).
:))
This gives you a glimpse to some open source based / utilizing projects they are supporting:
51 records found.
I don't know if opensource is the magic for getting EU money, but atleast it does not seem like it closes your opportunities. Just as it should be. But atleast it should be easier to get rational decisions in here than in US, in which I assume the elections are more strictly based on how much marketing support the candidate gets from selected corporations
When we have programs like reason, things will be good on the music side.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This kind of thing won't appeal to real professional musicians as there is absolutely no professional grade multitrack recorders / sequencers available on Linux - not even ONE. And dont suggest SLAB/whatever - they just dont cut it. It's a start I agree, but you're not going to get the user base over until there is a decent killer application that can compete with ProTools or Logic.
Having recently bought Logic Audio myself, I am quite happy with Windows 2000 as a platform. It's not linux but its perfectly stable and allows me to get decent latencies via my card's ASIO drivers.
Unlike others, I'm interested in music, not politics...
--- And on the 7th day, God created Windows. He must have been tired by then.
A somewhat rambling rant:
/.ers when it comes to music and sound software that runs under Linux. I've written a book about the subject, I've maintained a focused Web page on the subject for more than six years, and I've published more than 16 articles on Linux audio issues in the Linux Journal, on the O'Reilly Network, on Freshmeat, and in the Linux Gazette. I've even indicated where you can actually *hear* music made by people using Linux audio software such as SpiralSynth, Pd, Csound, and many other apps. Linux sound support now includes the Hammerfall and Hammerfall DSP cards, the MIDIman Delta series, and a host of consumer-grade cards (including the SBLive and Audigy cards). ALSA brings a very high-quality audio and MIDI API to the kernel sources. Audio performance latencies can be brought down to the under-2msec range by simple kernel patches. Software such as terminatorX, SpiralLoops, Ceres3, and RTCmix may not fit the average Win/Mac user's idea of what constitutes music software, but that doesn't mean it's not usable (i.e., musical) software ! I've said this so many times it's becoming a litany response: Cakewalk and Cubase have been in commercially-supported production since the late 80s, years before Linux even existed. And as Paul Davis (Ardour developer) points out, absolutely *no* source-code models exist for learning how to achieve designs similar to those commercial packages, so almost everything has been learned from scratch. Yes, it takes time to write a professional-quality hard-disk recording system, a lot of time. AGNULA's time-span extends over a 2-year period: Last year at this time Ardour wasn't even usable; this year I'll be lecturing about it to students in Barcelona in June. So what will the situation be like in two more years ?? Okay, I understand clearly when someone says they must have Windows in order to create their music *now*. That's fine, but judgments upon software they have *not* learned to use are irrelevant. So go ahead, stick with Win/Mac: meanwhile we're the ones who are working to bring something better to Linux users who want pro-audio software. Helpful support is always welcome, and you can find links to such groups as the Linux Audio Developers and Linux Audio Users mail lists by following the URL in the title to this post.
;)
I'm consistently amazed at the ignorance of so many
Honestly, reading some of these posts makes me think of what the responses were like when Linus announced his intentions to the world. "Oh, you'll never be able to [favorite Win/Mac activity here] on Linux". Ten years later a lot of those posts read like they were written by some rather short-sighted whingers...
Wrong, wrong, wrong... Sure, the officially stated goal of the patent system is to protect the inventor (especially the "small inventor" who does not want his hard work to be stolen by a large company). Unfortunately, there is a big difference between theory and practice and we all know that in the end, the patents are disputed in courts where the companies sue and counter-sue each other. In many cases, the one who has the deepest pockets wins because the "small inventor" is forced to drop the case or to settle for something that less than ideal. Of course, eliminating patents completely would not be a good solution either, but at least the current patent system should be updated
Regarding the license fees, there is another (bigger) problem: the free software developers cannot pay the license fees because the licensing terms are almost always incompatible with the free distribution of the software. Most of the licensing mechanisms are based on royalties or on some variable fees that depend on the number of copies sold or distributed. This is not compatible with free software because the authors have no way to know how many copies of their software will be distributed. This does not work either if someone takes an existing software package and modifies it to create something new: who pays the license fees in this case? The original author who is not even aware of this new software? The new author? But then, when should the new software be considered "different enough" from the original package?
-Raphaël
Please excuse me if this doesn't make much sense since I haven't really looked into sequencing with Linux.
Anyway, I'm wondering whether the situation with GUI sequencers isn't similar to IDEs or typesetting, in that a large part of Linux users are happy (happier, actually) with using an editor, compiler and some command line tools, and not a GUI.
So, does an appropriate language for defining a piece of music exist, a LaTeX for musicians? Or are the features that musicians need that can't reasonable be implemented in such a version?
It seems strange that the distros the European Commission (presumably based in Europe) aren't utilizing the major European Linux distribution. Namely, SuSE.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
This kind of thing won't appeal to real professional musicians as there is absolutely no professional grade multitrack recorders / sequencers available on Linux - not even ONE.
You have obviously never heard of Ardour.
Well for the desktop anyway.
Talk about bloody ridiculous, you need a differeant app depending on whether you are using KDE (Brahms) or Gnome (GLAME). Ontop of that you need a bloody different PKG format depending on whether you are using a Debian based distribution or a Redhat based distribution.
This is ridiculous.
If bloody MS can come up with a common development API/PKG format for 2 completely unrelated OSes, DOS based Win9X & VMS inspired WinNT/2K/XP (out of the hundreds of apps I've used on my Windows partitions, on 'n off, I've only come across 2 that didn't work in NT/XP, ontop of that my version of StudioMax says it'l will only work in NT/2K yet it works fine in 98SE), then there's absolutely no reason that all X86 nixs (QNX, SCO, linux, Solaris, etc) can't have a a common API/PKG format, let alone different distributions of Linux.
The fact is that Linux will never be a success on the Desktop with this mess.
Ontop of that there's people out there who I s'pose who expect their grandmas to recompile all the software they download or purchase, before they use it. Give me a break.
Don't lets start on dependency hell.
I have a page with several popular GPL VST Plugins ("Destroy FX"). If someone were to port VSTGUI to linux, we'd definitely compile our stuff for linux users as well.
VST is cross platform. The only obstacle to porting VST plugins to linux is the lack of a VST GUI lib (and of course the lack of VST hosts there!).
We've got some good, free VST plugins at Destroy FX (win32, os9, osx)...
One thing I've found interesting is that they talk about Libre Software.
I find this quite nice and could end endless references to speech or beer.