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Reborn 1.0 And The State of Linux Audio
Eugenia writes "This is great news for the Linux audio users! Reborn, a clone of the legendary ReBirth, has just been released. It provides software emulation for three of Roland Corporation's most famous electronic musical instruments. Also thrown in are four audio effects, individual mixers, a programmable sequencer and is fully compatible with the ReBirth .rbs song file format. To celebrate this release, OSNews runs an article presenting the most advanced professional, or semi-professional audio applications available today for the Linux platform." Most of the article consists of a list of audio software that can currently run on GNU/Linux systems. It's a pretty good list, but things like Cubase aren't there yet.
JMAX and PD (pure data), which are probably the most professional audio solutions for linux are not on the list, I wonder why. They are simply linux ports of previously mac software. Both of these are damn good rivalry to MAX.
x /en/ind ex.php3
You can get JMAX here:
http://www.ircam.fr/equipes/temps-reel/jma
PD Here:
http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html
Photos.
I can finally play 'baby elephant walk' on my linux box with a samba beat in the background.
oh joy...
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
insotracker aims for IT compatibility, and seems to be there already. Try that one.
Dave Phillip's linux audio page should cover most of linux audio software. Check it out.
The problem with ReBirth, and with any clone thereof, is that the user gains nothing from a flashy raster imitation of a 303's physical interface (or that of any real gear), while losing a great deal of usability.
A physical knob isn't so bad out here in the physical world, but you're manipulating it with your fingers. A mouse pointer is not a pair of fingers. I've played with ReBirth, and while there's some great functionality in there, it's just hell trying to get at it through all those tiny, poorly-labeled knobs. That interface makes sense on a plastic box. It's got real drawbacks, but it is what it is because of simple necessity. It's the best you can do with a thing made out of plastic. Okay, that's fine when plastic is the medium you're stuck with, but you can do considerably better if you're making your interface out of zeroes and ones instead.
By all means, let us duplicate the functionality of analog gear in software. That's a noble undertaking. But let's not fuck up the GUI with gratuitously flashy nonsense at the expense of clarity and usability. It's a gimmick. The Microsoft Paper Clip is a gimmick.
If your software is actually meant to be used, gimmicks are bad.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
Seeing that these days the only I time I am rebooting into Windows is to run Cubase and various other music apps this is good news. I have been desperately trying to bring my music production over to Linux, in fact I'm picking up my copy of "The Csound Book" today. Over the years I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to run many of the freely available sequencers (Jazz), software synths, etc. Although I have never been a huge fan of ReBirth I have a friend who uses it and sends me ReBirth files once in a while. It will be interesting to see how they function in ReBorn.
ReBorn comes only as a Intel binary - so much for running it on BSDs or PowerBooks. Too bad, I'd love to see that ported to BeOS or MacOS X.
Reborn, a clone of the legendary ReBirth
So it's a clone of a clone of a box that was originally built to simulate a bass guitar?
What happens when we get linux clones of the Windows port of this program? Oooh, my head....
And then somebody will build this into a hardware box, with a little TFT on the front and a few rotary encoders....
and then somebody will program a software simulation of THAT box....
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Since Cubase was mentioned, I really doubt that Steinberg will ever shift in the direction of open source OS's in regards to their marquee products (Cubase, Nuendo, Wavelab, etc.) simply because they are moving towards a hardware based solution in the future, following Digidesign.
Steinberg (or any other sequencing software company for that matter) aren't moving to hardware replacements for their products. What they are doing is coming up with some pretty rad hardware to control the software.
It's an odd thought, controlling a software program with an outboard piece of hardware but if you think about it, it makes sense. As computers get more and more powerful, only the software that records,renders,manipulates,and,masters the audio needs change. Virually replacing an entire studio's worth of gear is a matter of a:\install.exe. Steinberg, Cakewalk, Logic, et al, all know this and will continue to push for a software-based studio.
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
I'm not a musician so I'm not familiar with all the hardware tools. I've been looking at Windows and Linux audio software to get started with. Programs on both platforms are complex, but the user interfaces on the shareware/demoware Windows programs are vastly more polished and visually appealing that the UIs on the open source programs.
The Windows programs are at least accesible to the beginner musician, while the Linux programs are only an option for an experienced musician. The problem is, most experienced musicians probably already have a substantial investment in Windows software that the Linux software can't match.
It comes back to the old observation that the open source community has lots of good programmers, but few people who have the talent and time to design an efficient and attractive GUI. (That's not to say there aren't any, just that there aren't nearly enough.)
The program I've been playing with most (since I'm not able to tackle the serious music creation programs yet) is CoolEdit Pro. It's amazing how much functionality has been packed into such an attractive, efficient, and most importantly easy to use interface. There are Linux apps with some of the same functionality, but the GUIs are years behind and may never catch up.
I can't see Jazz listed...
There's going to be a lot of work to catch up with software such as Cubase SX or Reaktor...
Especially I saw no standard for plug-ins, like VST, for example (which already is multiplatform so could probably be ported to Linux, after all it's just API specs). I didn't see any software that gives audio and midi multitrack integration either.
Another huge problem is going to be the drivers for the many professional audio cards (none of them has drivers for Linux, as far as I know)
To reduce the server load for those guys, the tar.gz is als available here: reborn-i386-1_0.tar.gz Tom
Comment removed based on user account deletion
SF offers a 'free' ver of acid that will do 8 tracks (don't forget Protools Free, which also gives you 8 tracks (or 32 if you know where to look) Sadly, SF doesn't port to mac or linux, and Be died before they got to far with that port.
Acid is a multitracking loop-based recorder that also supports video. It has come a long way since ver 1, in ease of use and power. If there were linux or beos versions of Acid and Sound Forge, I would make the switch.
Don't respond with, "If you want it, code it up, you lazy bitch!"
Im a musician, not a programmer. I don't ask programmers to write a chorus, so don't ask me to write a program.
freebirth (http://www.bitmechanic.com/projects/freebirth/) was co-written by a coder/musician. pretty sweet, does some things that rebirth can't. You can hear it in use if you listen to Gold Chains: (http://www.epitonic.com/artists/goldchains.html). He's that co-author guy. Anyway, check freebirth out. F'in sweet.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Nope, Steinberg won't do Linux because they feel Linux isn't able to deliver the performance they want. Before you start yapping 'low latency kernel', consider the direction Steinberg's been taking off late, with VST, VST2 and now VST System Link, not to mention their ASIO standard that aims to whack latency down to almost nothing: Steinberg is interested in real-time computing. Linux may be good for a lot of things, but real time virtual studio work isn't one of them.
BTW, claiming that Steinberg is 'moving towards a hardware based solution in the future' is pure FUD and has no basis in reality whatsoever. Steinberg is, after all, the company, that continually thinks up new standards and protocols for making studio work on a computer a better experience. Oh, and just for the record, no, I don't work for them, nor do I own any of their software as I can't afford it.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
So it's a clone of a clone of a box that was originally built to simulate a bass guitar?
The TB303 simulated a bass guitar by sweeping a resonant filter over a sawtooth wave.
Since then, better guitar synthesis methods have come to light, specifically the Karplus-Strong plucked string modeling algorithm. To implement KS, feed a click into a delay line for each string that's plucked. Set the length of the delay line proportional to the length of the string, determined by finger position. Then filter the output of the delay line (make sure to use a FIR filter so that you won't get too much harmonic distortion from phase shift nonlinearity), send it to the amp, and feed it back into the delay line.
If you have Cool Edit or a similar audio editor, you can do this with the "Echo" delay effect. Generate a short burst of noise. Then pull up Echo and set the echo period to 1000 divided by the frequency in Hz of the note, the echo feedback to between 95% and 99.5%, and the filters to all maximum except the highest frequency one. Tweak the Echo parameters until you have a sample you like, then paste it into your tracker.
Why wasn't KS used in the 303? Analog synthesizer parts were much cheaper at the time than the 16 KB or so of memory KS takes.
So why is 303 style synthesis still used? Easy. Changing the filter's center frequency while playing a repeating bass pattern gives the stereotypical "acid house" bass effect. That's what Rebirth and clones are for.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Most of the article consists of a list of audio software that can currently run on GNU/Linux systems. It's a pretty good list, but things like Cubase aren't there yet.
Yeah, it really is too bad that there isn't anything like Cubase for Linux. I miss getting that instant blue screen of death every time I tried to record from SPDIF-in during the wrong phase of the moon. Or the fact that it would crash and you'd lose all of your work if you gave it a wav file that was mistakenly named ".aif". And its anti-piracy authentication method which forced me to find the original disk every time it got confused - wow, that brings back memories.
We need Cubase for Linux about as badly as we need a native port of SirCam.
The phrase to remember here is "When it's ready...
Ah yes, the familiar mantra of coders everywhere.
With Reason and Fruityloops, or clones of these programs, linux will be on its way as a musicians choice OS.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
And you think Windows is? Are you a damn fool? have you used Windows XP? Have you looked at statistics?
You might be right if you mean OSX, but Windows?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I think you are confused. CUPS is a printer API, it has nothing to do with sound. In fact, there is no need for an ASIO equivalent as Linux with the kernel pre-empt and low latency patches has far lower latency normally than Windows even with ASIO. I don't know if they are sample accurate, but I know you can get extremely low audio latencies with this sort of setup.
2) Inconsistent platform. We do not have a uniform development platform. Each distro ships a different version of GCC with its own inconsistencies, different GLIBC, same issue, and so on down to GTK or QT, XFree86, etc. With a product like Cubase taking at least 6 months to port, no doubt the platform will keep changing underneath them. What solution would they have other than supporting ONE distro only or shipping their own?
I don't understand you. Currently Linux is going through a switch of the C++ ABI. If your audio app is written in C++ then you will need to provide 2 binaries for the duration of the switchover. They do not require porting, just a recompile. The widget toolkits only break compatability every few years, and you can always use compatability libs as they can be installed side by side. Moonlight for instance uses its own version of Qt 2.2. X has been backwards compatible for over 10 years. They can do what all the other Linux companies do, and write their software to be distro neutral. It's not hard, the biggest challenge is the installer.
3) Lack of hardware support. Yes, vendors like my personal favorite, Echo, aren't releasing enough specs to the community for a free driver. But on the other hand, the community isn't providing them a stable platform to develop on, see #2.
NVidia manage it. There are even drivers now for WinModems (which use proprietary drivers). It's more work to support all kernel versions, and I agree that Linus should stop breaking compatability, however it is perfectly possible to write drivers that will compile on any kernel version. If Echo don't release the specs, or write their own drivers then yes you are locked in to Windows. Congratulations.
4) Lack of unchanging commercial plugin standards. VST works. The API doesn't have a million tiny revisions, and any VST plugin works great on anything from Logic to Fruity Loops to the latest Cubase SX. The API was published WHEN IT WAS FINISHED, and NOT CHANGED.
VST plugins are the standard because of the popularity of Cubase. This is hardly the fault of Linux - if one sequencer gets more popular than the rest then I'm sure we'll see something similar. How often the plugin API changes is entirely up to the developer: remember that APIs change more frequently on Linux because most stuff is open source, so changing the API to get a better system is less painful than on a closed source system.
I hope that they got permission from roland to mimmick their hardware, I know someone who wrote a 909 emulator once and was forced to remove it because he did not have permission from roland to copy their design.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
OSX is a particularly crappy performer, unless apps are specifically written to take advantage of it.
Windows XP may be slow(ish), but it's a damn sight faster for real time computing than Linux (except, possibly, Linux-with-Alan-Cox's-low-latency-kernel). The price you pay for stability, I suppose.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
Really not sure what you mean: Alsa? Jack (same architecture as CoreAudio, oh, and PortAudio does the same thing BTW)? MusicKit? LADSPA?
There's also people using completely unsupported stuff (Ensoniq PARIS) because it sounds better than the current 'standard' (DIGI!). The audio world is really ripe for stuff that will genuinely sound better. Unfortunately, it's hard to find.
Although this is a cool program (esp since I'm into electronic music creation), we should not be getting so excited about this software. It seems that the OSS Modus Operandi is copied software ideas from many years ago. Why not post an article about something NEW from the OSS community?
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips