Slashdot Mirror
Turn-Key Linux Audio
gmaestro writes "The Turn-Key Linux Audio project at the Eastman Computer Music Center has released it's first instant linux audio workstation package. Simply download onto your Mandrake workstation, untar and type # ./install.sh."
So, just one question... what does this package do any different than what I have with my regular distro's?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I'll be waiting for Turn-Key Linux DRM next :)
That's great that we have something like that for music and audio.
Now if we could only get a system like that for video, with firewire included.
(I know Demudi claims to be multimedia, but it's only mono-media -- audio/music only.)
I understand Cinelerra is great, but I'm not a programmer and I can't get it to work on Mandrake or Redhat. If Linux could create an easy to setup video workstation, I know a lot of video people (like me) would jump on it.
Well not really.
But it is for linux.
GO LINUX! You're almost there, little buddy!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If only they would add decent wavetable synth support to Linux I would ditch Windows without thinking about it twice.
Alejandro Abreu -- Composer http://listen.to/Ollin
It'd be cool to have packages like this for different things. A complete graphics package with Gimp, blender, driver install, and a collection of scripts would be cool. It'd be cooler if it was a deb package.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Here's thje info off their main page and a list of everything it contains for when it gets slashdotted.. Its basically an easy install of everything they use in the labs at the school..
/snd/'whoami'). All audio applications are aliased to open ready to access the current working soundfile directory. Ideally, a separate partition is used, optimizing this disk/space for large contiguous blocks such as sound or analysis files.
.aif .wav .norm) and strip .norm extensions
.tp...Ex. "chordmapper.tp" to access templates)
.fmh (Furse-Malham Higher Order Format) ambisonic spacialization files.
Turn-Key Linux Audio is a scripted installation package for the core set of linux audio applications used at the Eastman Computer Music Center (ECMC). It contains among its many tools over a decade's-worth of powerful shell scripts, smart aliases, tutorials, documentation, shell level environment variables for multi-media linux/unix workstations, and a library of powerful templates and macros (Csound, Score11, SMS, PVC, Rt, Vspace, etc) created by composer, teacher, and ECMC director Allan Schindler.
It is therefore a kind of ECMC 'mirroring' package, inclusive of open source applications from nearly all categories of music production such as editing, mixing, recording, dsp fuctionality, Csound helpers/front-ends, real-time applications, sound utilities, and many others(1). See the explore page for a complete listing. Each individual application is the result of the dedicated hard work and imagination of developers and users whose ongoing efforts continue to expand and improve linux as an audio platform.
The entire package installs from within a fully installed linux distribution (currently Mandrake 9.0) with the execution of a single script, saving users hours of dependencies footwork and versioning troubles, ensuring a virtually transparent initiation into linux as a mutimedia platform.
Nearly all applications, including their respective dependencies, build from source code on the local system, creating maximum compatibilty and performance, and providing users with access to the packages' lowest levels, either for custom configuration, or for development. Source-code level access is one critical benefit of using linux, and providing users with code-level exposure broadens the base of informed user-contributers, leading ideally to better feature suggestions and better apps.
The Turn-Key package shares its model with other all-in-one installs for audio, such as Demudi/Agnula, and PlanetCCRMA. It is similarily directed at a broad audience of home users, but has a particular place in its heart for students and the many under-staffed/under-funded computer music studios in institutions around the world.
In fact, the Turn-Key package began as a way to provide students at ECMC with the same tools used in the studio for use on their home systems (something only linux and open-source software can make possible), but the full installation is now being made available to the larger community.
- Kevin Ernste
Alternatively, each application (with dependencies and a TKLA install script) may be download individually (see the explore page for details.
Editors *
* Audacity - a fast multi-platform editor, includes multi-track capabilities.
* DAP - Richard Kent's port of the classic SGI version.
* MiXViews - a powerful editor from Doug Scott, includes editing tools for analysis data.
* Snd - Bill Schottstaedt's wonderful everything editor.
* Sweep - a very nice, newly updated editor from Conrad Park.
* Wavesufer - one of the best editors for Linux, from Kåre Sjölander and Jonas Beskow.
Analysis/Resynthesis and DSP *
* Ceres3 - the latest, greatest incarnation of the ceres spectral editor.
* Cecilia - more than just a graphical front end to the csound engine...a rich sound manipulation environment.
* LADSPA - a plugins package, including the CMT set, and a number of others.
* Mammut - a fun and useful analysis/resythesis tool with limited features but often suprising results.
* PVC - Paul Koonce's phase vocoding tools with ECMC templates/scripts/docs.
* SMS - Xavier Serra's Linux incarnation of his Spectral Modeling Sythesis application.
* Vspace - an excellent tool for ambisonic encoding/decoding and soundscape creation.
Sythnesis/Composition *
* Csound(1) - the composition app, richly expanded with dozens of scripts and templates.
* ngen - Michael Kuehn's powerful new event preprocessor for Csound.
* PD - The venerable MAX-like tool from Max''s own author Miller Pucket.
* RTCmix - The Columbia/Princeton extension of its Cmix music composition "language".
* RTMix - Ivica Ico Bukvik's exciting performance/real-time tool.
* Score11 - Alec Binkman's very flexible Csound score preprocessor, powerful and easy to use.
o TKLA includes a library of Score11 macros, templates, and examples
Players/Recorders *
* Alsaplayer - a very nice player with some added functionality for visualization and playlisting.
* Real Player (downloaded at install time) - a widely used streaming audio app, now for Linux.
* xplay - very handy, very simple, no frills player.
Mixing *
* Ardour (2) - Paul Barton Davis' impressive hard disk recorder/mixer.
* Mix - the venerable NoTAM 9 channel mixer, with some welcome additions.
* Ecasound - a rather deep hard-disk recording and playing/routing tool from Kai Vehmanen.
* MixMagic - a GNOME mixing application with some useful features.
* Rt - Paul Lansky's scripted mixer, ported and updated for Linux by Doug Scott.
Utilities/Other *
* ALSA - An advanced audio API for Linux with support for the venerable OSS in emulation.
* JACK - the Jack audio connection kit for professional audio under Linux.
* xsox (old version)- a graphical front end for the ubiquitous audio conversion utility "sox".
* Shorten - a program for lossless compression of audio files.
* Normalize - a command line utility for batch production of normalized levels.
* RipperX - a nice GUI front end to cdparanoia for ripping CD tracks to audiofiles.
ECMC scripts, utilities, macros, templates and examples * (downloads as a complete set)
* Environment variables and program aliases for audio
o soundfiles are stored, accessed, and manipulated in a separate but simultaneous directory tree (the users "working soundfile directory"-- pwdsf). Most common unix commands have a soundfile analog (i.e., cd has cdsf, ls has lsf, cp has cpsf, pwd has pwdsf, and so on). Applications which open, output, process, or create soundfiles do so to and from this directory (default is
* Soundfile utilities
o bounce - convert stereo files to mono
o cpsf.aif - convert/copy any format to
o cpsf.wav - convert/copy any format to
o fixaiff - repair broken aiff headers
o mkcaltones - outputs -15 dB calibration tone soundfile
o pitchshift - shift in semi-tones, or multiplier
o sfcheck - check and report soundfile header information
o sfinfo - display soundfile information: format, duration, etc
o sfnorm/stripnorm - normalize soundfiles (renamed
o sfpeak - find maximum amplitude value
* Playing, listing, and searching soundfiles
o findsnd - find soundfile by character string (-p will play them as they are found)
o playsnd (p) - a command-line player (batch tool)
o lsf - list soundfiles in current working soundfile directory
o players - opens soundfiles in separate graphical players for quick mix auditioning
o playlist - plays from a text file list
* Playing, listing, searching personal soundfile library (/sflib)
o findsflib - find soundfile in library by character string (-p will play them as they are found)
o playsflib (psfl) - play file in soundfile library
o lsfl - list soundfile in sflib
o sflibinfo - find file info for file in sflib
o sflibloops - finds loop points in files with extension ".loop"
* Csound tools, extentions
o chorus - for creating chorsused Score11 files
o lsexamples (lsex)/getexample(getex) - list and get tutorial examples
o lsscore(lssc)/getscore(getsc) - list and get ECMC score examples
o lsmidifunc/getmidifunc - list and get ECMC MIDI functions
o mkkeymap - creates keymaps for Csound functions
o mkmidikeymap - generates a MIDI keymap
o mkmidisffuncs - creates function definitions for use with MIDI and Csound
o mko - m4o expand macros into an orchestra from ECMC library...see below
o mksffuncs - make function tables for soundfiles
* Csound orchestra library--m4o expandable instrument macros (type lsins and mko)
o "sampler" instruments (transposing and non): samp, sampST, tsamp, tsampST, bigsamp, bigsampST, bigtsamp, bigtsampST, samplerpxsyn, samplertxsyn
o modeled instruments: bsn, carillon, cbsn, celesta,chorbsn, chorcarillon, chorcbsn, chorcelesta, chordrums, chorfmod, chormarimba, chorplunk, chortrpt, drums, marimba, plunk
o synthesis (granular, cross, etc): gran, xsyn, gxsyn, fmod
o anaylsis/resynthesis: phavoc, resyn
o global instruments and utilities: sf1to2, sf2to1, sfpan, sf, sfs, sfvpan, rev, rev2, delay
o Allan Schindler's Eastman Csound Tutorial examples (includes orchestra and Score11 files for each tutorial example)
* Score11/Csound score examples and templates (type lsex or lssc respectively)
o templates which write corresponding score files for all above orchestra library instruments, as well as multiple examples for each
* PVC (Paul Koonce) front-ends/templates (type pvcex)
o useful templates for each Phase VoCoder program (chordmapper, plainpv, harmonizer, etc), as well as musical examples (type
* SMS (Spectral Modeling Synthesis) examples and scripts (type lssmsex)
* Vspace ambisonic templates/scripts (type vspacetp or lsvspaceex to list examples) -- available for sampling rates to 96k
o for generating ambisonic B-format, as well as 9 channel
o Can be decoded to stereo, quad, etc with ambidec
* Help and musical information
o ecmchelp (a variety of help pages and charts for music and audio...Ex. ecmchelp pitchratios displays a table of interval ratios for the diatonic system)
o man pages for most tools
o utilities display usage statements when typed without arguments
* CD burning, copying
o mkaudiocd/burnaudiocd, mkdatacd/burndatacd, blankcdrw, cpaudiocd, cpdatacd
Trying to get first post - that's a paddling.
Imagining beowulf clusters - that's a paddling.
Questioning the sexuality of Slashdot personalities and linux users in general - that's a paddling.
Pouring hot grits down yer pants in front of a naked and petrified Natalie Portman - oh, you better believe that's a paddling!
Well, their server is getting hammered pretty good. I've watched my download speed from their site drop by more than half between the time I started (0 comments posted) and now (10 comments posted). YMMV
Simply download onto your Mandrake workstation, untar and type # ./install.sh."
Type? Doesn't sound too "turn key" to me buddy!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
I've been waiting for a package like this for 4 years. I can't believe someone actually did it. Just one more application needs to arrive and I'll leave Windows behind forever. What is that application?
Does it really matter what my particular missing app is? Everyone that can't migrate yet has one. I suppose my point is this just goes to show that eventually all the missing apps will be there and then:
IT'S A FREE SOFTWARE WORLD BABY!
Mostly mirrored page at:
t urnkey/
:)
http://209.152.2.3/lulu.esm.rochester.edu/kevine/
now play nice with my server
Linux has nothing to compare to Finale, Sibelius, or Score. This is the gaping hole in Linux audio software, and the reason most musicians cannot switch completely to Linux.
Lilypad, etc. are not professional quality notation tools.
WINE has trouble with non-text fonts like Maestro which Finale uses.
No turnkey sandwich for the poor drummers then...
Simply download onto your Mandrake workstation, untar and type # ./install.sh."
:)
wow, this is awesome! my machine functions just like it did before! i can't feel any differences yet, but i'm sure i'll notice them.
oh, wait, it might work even better if the installation command weren't a comment
I don't have a # key on my keyboard, you insensitive clod! I can't find the key for my computer, either! I'm so insulted!
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Mostly because it was ready a couple of weeks ago when I was looking at Dave Phillips' page. This is where to find it. It runs on Red Hat 8 and everything seems to install well - I'm still casually working out some things here and there but Snd, Rosegarden and a few other things are working - haven't had a chance to try everything. One thing I've noticed is that other software packages I've downloaded elsewhere don't always get along with the libraries, probably because they were written with older distributions in mind.
One of the advantages is a special low latency kernel with ALSA built in. I've installed this and it's working.
I'll probably download the Turn-Key Linux Audio disc and see what I can get to work on my current installation - I downloaded and installed Red Hat 8 so I could check out Planet CCRMA, and don't really feel like switching to Mandrake.
It seems they have been given the /. effect. I keep getting connection refused. Doh!
website for a Linux Audio project gets slashdotted in the middle of the day, does it make a sound?
---
I still haven't found the "any" key.
Has Mandrake signed a top secret monopolistic agreement with turkey breeders? Will turkey breeders only breed turkeys for Mandrake? How will slashdotters react to this flamebait? Find out NOW! Only on Slashdot! Every day, every flame - LIVE!
1) What would you use to convert (english) sentences to speech samples (in real time, if possible perfomance-wise). ..and to stream combinations of these samples with a modified pitch per sample to the client.
2) What to use to alter the pitch of the samples in "real-time".
3) merget these samples together with a base beat/rythm (basic jazz, techno, whatever)
4)
Talking about a set of command-line tools or a easy to use API.
This is great and all, but does it come with drivers that will let me play my Dolby Digital (AC3) DVDs and AVI files, in full surround, using my 4 channel soundblaster live? So far, I haven't found any linux drivers that support all four separate channels on this very popular sound card.
No audio
After all, it's their board, and if they want increased market share, either write their own drivers, or include subcomponents that have decent driver support.
Mind you, we bought a couple of cheapie boxes last month, you know the kind, all sorts of integrated shit, and ... surprise ... all the stuff works OK under linux. Mind you, we put in GeForce video cards, so it's not a fair comparison (and we took the video out of one box after anyway - I just telnet into it as needed).
The only solution I see is to ask the sales staff if the board works ok under linux, and, after they tell you "yes", if it doesn't, return it. If they say "I don't know." - offer to test it for them, in-store (did that once - it was fun watching the store staff going - wow! that's linux? I thought it couldn't run Windows programs! Then I had to explain that Gnome, KDE, et al aren't Windows).
nt
Could it be that the executable permissions aren't set? Ie, did you try chmod 777 install.sh first?
Ceci n'est pas un post
# indicates a root shell.
oppose $, the typical user prompt.
I know that the large frothing masses LIKE to worry about libraries and dependancy, but there are also a lot of us who like ease of use. With bandwidth and high capacity media so cheap these days, I believe most if not all programs should be self contained non-dependant entities. Just like Office for Mac's, one folder drag it over and run. Or even better, the Phoenix browser... fully self contained AND small. I think this is the future of software, and Linux should really jump on this if it wants to be a player in the desktop market. (not trolling, just looking for some discussion)
www.GamezCore.com For Hardcore PS2 Gamerz : By Hardcore PS2 Gamerz
means "at the prompt, type
But then, I'm going going on the assumption that you know that - perhaps I should revise that.
Thank christ you pointed that out! Imagine what could have happened if you didn't warn us!
Useful information like that is why I read slashdot comments.
BUT, don't many of these applications overlap in functionality? Personally I use Audacity and Sweep, and these do the same thing to some extent. Both have their tweaks, but anyway. While this is good for me, it seems like a potential source of grievance for some people.
It would appear that what would really be useful is putting alot of energy into one program to do most of the things users want, instead of many that each do one of these things.
I can't seem to parse this sentence: "ECMC has released it is turnkey .." This makes no sense.
Wait a minute, did you mean "released its" (note: no apostrophe)? I know that grammar-correcting posts are lame, but for Pete's sake, the difference between "its" and "it's" should be well-established by the fourth grade. Do you have any idea how simultaneously funny and sad it is that we Americans are often out-spelled and "out-grammared" by people who don't even speak English as a first language?
Sorry. Mod me down, but I am honestly stunned at the atrocious spelling and grammar that I continually see on Slashdot (and all over the rest of the Internet, as well.) I thought we were supposed to be smart? When I (and I am not alone on this) see errors like this on a resume or in some other form of correspondence, I form an immediate impression of the person making these errors; namely, that the person possesses a lower-than-average intelligence. Unfair? Maybe. But if people could write correct English, it wouldn't be an issue, would it?
much "better" to use chod +x install.sh
But then, the world likes read,write,exec privs...
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The moment I see cuss words I do assume they really don't have anything legitimate to say.
I don't give a rat's arse about such stuff. There are some really strange dependencies out there and package managers should sort themselves out without bugging the user.
Nah it will never happen, the readme files like to boast about "This requires Library 2.3x".
Linux types GO STRATJAKT!
Brought me back to the good ole days of DRSBAITSO from my 8-bit soundblaster card.
IBM has a suite of programs called ViaVoice that allow you to do text to speech or vice versa. It has a full API and is fully programmable. You can emulate an adult male or female voice, and you can also do children's voices. It works remarkably well. Unfortunately, it's not on the IBM site anymore, but you can still get it here . I'm not sure how long it'll stay there, so I'd get it now... It allows you to set the spacing or cadence of the speech, but it has no facility to merge with a base beat. I suppose you could do that by saving a .wav and bringing it into your audio editor. For general TTS, you may just want to check out festival. I've never tried it, but I've heard good things.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
It's really not that hard to build a package.
Thanks, I think this is it :) Expect to see something very bizarre to be published in near future...
I can't find the "turn" key!
Bzzzt!
I want to buy hardware that has the features I'm looking for. Hardware manufacturers build that hardware (because there's about a million other people looking for the same stuff I'm looking for).
Then, I want to run some software on it. Unfortunately, just about nothing except windows will actually work on this hardware because NOBODY IS WRITING DECENT DRIVERS FOR THIS HARDWARE except the OEM's, who target windows because that's what %95 of the planet uses.
I'm pretty tired of waiting for hardware manufacturers to support linux. I think the world would be a better place if Linux "market leaders" started supporting hardware instead of just packaging&supporting the same old crap.
But back to your comment: even if I select hardware that is known to fairly well supported, the drivers are still mostly going to suck and I have no doubt that there will still be some part of the hardware that will be unusable.
The guy in the basement has no interest in writing a quality driver that exploits all the features of a given component. In the case of audio drivers, the regression test seems to be "cat foo.wav > /dev/audio". Nope that ain't gonna cut it.
Sooner or later somebody is going to have to pay some engineers to write some quality drivers. And it doesn't look like it's going to be the OEM's in the short term. So who does that leave us with?
and a library of powerful templates and macros
(Csound, Score11, SMS, PVC, Rt, Vspace, etc)
created by composer, teacher, and ECMC
director Allan Schindler.
But nobody saw the funny side... Does humour belong in computing? ;)
-M.
1) Festival
can also translate that to
At a moment of my chosing, I will be a hypocrite.
Who honestly cares if there are "cuss" words. The general idea of it gets across, doesn't it?
Come on... This coming from a uber-geek club member who joins the "Natalie Portman" bandwagon whenever it comes along?
I always considered the first person to resort to swear words in a flame war as losing a point or two... But, I always read the responses... And swore back in a different language.
krystal_blade, with fucking Karma to Burn...
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Not everybody markets to the same market. The only ways to increase market share are:
- Price
- Features
- Promotion
- FUD
If you are a board manufacturer, and you can move an extra 100,000 units by making sure that your components are linux-compatible without increasing your cost, you're going to do it.It's nice to walk into a store and see motherboards that list linux as a supported OS. This wasn't the case 5 years ago. Watch what happens in the next 5 years.
Besides, 95% of the planet doesn't use Windows. 90% of the planet don't own a computer - and they are the prime breeding ground for linux. As for what you might have meant - "95% of computers run Windows" - that's never been true either.
I think sometime in the future chipset manufacturers - not motherboard manufacturers - are going to produce decent drivers.
Of course, these same anal-retentives get all pissed off when you point out that the word "piss" or "pisseth" occurs 7 times in the King James Bible.
So tell me to piss off, already!
"Penguin's Liberation Front...bah! We're the Penguin's Front of Judea!"
/. zen: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters...
no # is used because you need to be ROOT to install software packages.
It's laziness on the editors and the person writing the article that put that statement there. Pure laziness is all.
- MIDI workstation: logic audio | cubase | or even (puke) cakewalk
- Powerful trackers: buzz | FT2 | IT
- Easy to use authoring tools: fruityloops | rebirth | reason
- Advanced outboard softsynths: reaktor | absynth | Q1 | grainlab
- Mastering tools: tracktor
- Powerful sample editing tools: cool edit/96/pro | soundforge
Basically, Linux has nothing to offer someone who does audio, as far as I know, besides playing CDs.I know there are some authoring tools in the works, but, also afaik, they're not moving fast, octal for example. My guess is, Linux is at least 5 years away from general purpose authoring, if it ever gets there.
Btw, I'd be glad to be wrong, if someone would only point out the links to *stable* and *feature-filled* tools.
_khl
Is there anything out there for linux similar to Sonic Foundry's Acid???? I haven't seen anything like it yet....
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
Where does anybody get off expecting Slashdot to be "professional"?
Honestly, I'd just settle for "literate".
Perhaps even better would be if they just switched to Debian and made sure that all the stuff they wanted to install was in Debian. While Debian and RedHat packages are technically a toss-up, in practice, automatic installation and dependency maintenance works much, much better with Debian because of the large number of maintainers. Using Debian, all their students would need to type is "apt-get install turnkeyaudio".
I pulled a bunch of CCRMA stuff recently, and it has worked out very well. Most of this is probably due simply to using apt-get, but their package selection is good. I got the patched LL kernel, updated alsa drivers, jack and all associated programs installed with no problems whatsoever. Highly recommended for RH users, particularly if you only want select packages.
Again, I would like for somebody to prove me wrong about this and link me to 'sensible' compositions that were made in CSound (ie - not 5 minute drones of stretched out cello notes.)
_khl
The install script will try to download stuff off the net as required, so make sure your connection is up. And monitor your connection - it knocked mine down several times, & had to restart it manually (sigh)
Except for the fact that when a hardware manufacturer lists the hardware as linux supported, only a miniscule portion of the time was the linux support written by an engineer who was paid to do a decent job... The situation is the inverse of the windows world. When a box has the windows icon, either the OEM or the respective component manufacturers paid one of their engineers to write the driver.
Hardware that "Supports Linux!" is, right now, just riding on the coat-tails of a freebie driver that somebody wrote to itch a scratch they had.
And drivers written under those circumstances usually suck (i.e. they do what the author needed, not what the driver should do).
Get back to me when you've got parity. Otherwise shutup.
Or instead, how about this: they keep on doing whatever they please, you go on using your software, and in addition, you shove it. Why does anyone need to get back to *you*? If you have what you want, that's great. These people want to make something else. No need to attack anyone for that. I mean really.
Type what? who? where?
This is exactly the sort of thing that will enable Linux to become a viable alternative for audio production. This statement may be anathema to many Linux masochists, but as a producer and musician I want a product that installs with a mouse click (or single, simple command line statement)and works. No hours of reseach and piling through newsgroups trying to find what little dependecies are unresolved. No having some uberuser tell me that all I need to do is write a device driver real quick and I'll be ready to go. Dealing with pro audio on Mac and Windows boxen is still troublesome now, even for those of use that know what the hell we're doing. On Linux, it simply is not an option unless you are highly skilled with the OS to begin with, and 99% of the musicians, producers, and audio engineers out there are not. Whatever failures it might have, whatever it might lack right now, however much you might want to bitch about it, Eastman's work here is exactly what Linux Pro Audio needs if it is EVER going to be a viable alternative to M$ or Apple. I'm looking forward to being able to type format c:. This brings me one step closer.
Don't Panic!
Radio sucks. A layer of music stretched impossibly thin over the ugly protrudances of some corporate life support system.
A macabre display of what passes for art in the sterile minds of the centralized networks of entertainment. Non-stop dogshit up and down the band. The FCC has no taste.
Oh, so we're talking about mainframe motherboards then?
wooho!
Heh. There's a good reason why *nothing* is included on the motherboards (are you reading this, AC from a prior post?) I use. I just shop based on the number of PCI slots, supported CPU(s), and max RAM size. After all, it's a *lot* easier to upgrade your audio/video by swapping cards instead of desoldering chips. That said, it would be cool if there were more OEM drivers, just don't expect them to be Open Source or anything. I've had the best luck overall with low-end to mid-level server boards. Doing multimedia on them has nothing to do with the hardware for me - it just works.
C|N>K
I donno, donald's network drivers work better than anything from the windows world IMHO. And some manufacturers are including linux drivers on floppies or CDs. There's progress being made.
Does it try to download stuff from that server? This is important because I'm sort of the netadmin (more like network liaison) for the subnet the server is on and the Slashdot Effect has wiped out the whole subnet. We're going to have to talk to them if the package pulls stuff from their server.
BTW, I'm not sure what their server's hardware is but from loooking at it, I'd guess no better than a Pentium MMX.
But they didn't write them, and they won't stand behind them (well... they don't stand behind their windows ones too well either, but you get the point).
They're just giving you the same junk (and often older junk at that!) which you could get off the net. These drivers aren't feature complete, and they're rarely well-tested / robust. It's junk. It's all junk.
And I wish it wasn't.
Yes, and I know that often the easiest way to a happy system is to hand pick every single thing and make sure it's known-good before you buy it. I, too, have been playing that game for the better part of the last decade.
But this only makes sense in a handful of situations, and if your budget is anyhow constrained, it's out of the question.
In other words, how much extra do you pay for hardware so that Linux (which has $0 cost) will run, as opposed to what you would pay to get Windows ($100) to run. Not to mention space / heat considerations.
Well I might as well come out and say it: we were buying the boards to fit in a custom chassis and space was at a premium as was cost. The i845 boards with everything were like $70.
Except the linux drivers totally didn't work or were non-existent, and in the end I was very unhappy to use windows.
I just wish one of the major market leaders would pony up the cash and start writing Drivers That Don't Suck.
Of course, the degree to which people insist on releasing packages that depend on development/CVS versions of other packages is most of the problem. Somehow, given the 'typical' linux developers, I don't expect that to change any time soon.
Play with PRAAT's PSOLA functionality. It's...odd...but interesting.
It's also scriptable.
--Dan
I've been hear'n some things about an advanced interweb technology called "P2P" that might make this magic possible! It's amazing to think that I could download from a dynamically updated LOCAL cache some day! wow! (too much sarcasm?)
--
Power to the Peaceful
Do you know how many YEARS he has been tuning/tweaking/bugfixing those things?
For all of those years, someone somewhere has been running into bugs.
I'm not saying that an engineer paid to write and test the driver would have written bug free drivers, but I have a feeling the level of polish on day one would have been higher.
Yes, the network drivers are often things that work "out of the box" now. Maybe that's because it's mostly linux servers out there as opposed to desktop, or maybe it's because network drivers are simpler / more entertaining to write, or maybe it's because benchmarking the network stack was very much the "in" thing to do in years past? I don't know.
But it seems like video, audio, and even SCSI/IDE are just plain lacking. And it's not even worth talking about things that dangle off of USB.
Ha!
they don't stand behind their windows ones too well either, but you get the point
Yeah, I do get the point: Drivers suck period, and the only chance we have at making things work the way they should is if everyone pools together -- manufacturer engineers _and_ open source hackers.
Oh, BTW, the server went from 330 K/sec to 60K/sec while I was doing my d/l, but it did complete even though a bunch of other /.ers were connecting, so I guess it's decent.
Question: Why is the drummer drooling out of one side of his mouth?
Answer: Because the drum set platform isn't level.
Anyone have anymore good ones? I used to hear a lot back when I played (not the drums :), but I've forgotten most.
- chunk the file into 5-meg pieces
- store the various chunks on different freebie servers all over the place
- write a script to fetch the chunks from each server and reassemble them locally
... no, I'm not going to say profit -- oops!
This would work, reduce the load on any one server, and people could also p2p just the chunks as well, also saving server load. What do you think?Did someone say gaping hole?
I'm a composer and sound designer with four Windows PCs and a Mac. I would love to switch to open source, but the features needed for professional audio work just don't exist yet, or if they do, they are 5+ years behind their Mac and Windows counterparts. Here's what is missing: 1. A comprehensive MIDI/Audio/Video authoring app, the equivalent of SONAR, Cubase, Nuendo or Logic. It must support industry file standards, such as OMF and BWF, so that a user can interface with Avid, ProTools, etc. 2. A plugin standard like DirectX, MAS or VST. LADSPA is a start, but there are very few plugins available. 3. Robust software sampling/synthesis apps like Gigastudio, or anything from Native Instruments. Until these tools are available in Linux, the grass is greener on the Windows side of the fence.
Sorry, but I have to say "so much for that theory"...
I keep typing
./install.sh
#
and nothing happens?
Simply download onto your Mandrake workstation, untar and type # ./install.sh. :)
Mandrake... Mandrake... nope don't see one of them, wait isnt that the guy from Lexx that had all the drones eating the light universe? I much prefer my debian & fbsd boxen to some ugly one-armed drones
Yeah, I'm downloading it now from one hop away and getting 30KB/sec. I shouldn't try to judge a computer, its case but the case is a Gateway P5 mid-tower. I'm sure it's not still the Pentium 133 or 166 that was originally in it but I think it has to have an AT motherboard.
The package is 116MB?! we'll see what tomorrow is like but I'm thinking it's not staying there for long. We *do* have to pay for the bandwidth.
have you ever used his realtek driver?
i would say, no, you havent.
... hi bingo
Debian Multimedia Distribution. If you don't run Mandrake.
I've had more trouble with 3com, dlink, smc, etc.,
Good points, thanks for responding. I *do* wish there were a few more OEM drivers since I've had problems in the past, especially with older CD-ROM drives and local printers. I guess my situation is one of the rare "handful".
I honestly don't know if I paid anything "extra", since I got it at cost, not retail. Space/heat were not a consideration, and my chassis were standard off-the-shelf for ATX/MATX.
Up-front cost is very difficult for me. I figure that my costs are compensated by easy upgradeability in the long term (dealing with small servers and mid-level workstations). I define long-term as greater than every 18 months.
I think that your wish for "one of the major market leaders to start writing drivers..." points to a huge hole in the market, and it needs to be addressed. I'd bet there's a few business opportunities there, to create linux drivers for OEM's who can't be bothered with it.
For What It's Worth: I prefer the Gigabyte and SuperMicro SMP motherboards. Never a problem with them, and they have power to spare. Kind of expensive though, but like I said I save in the long term on upgrades. In other words, I use the motherboard *forever*, and just swap cards.
Works for me, anyway. Our situations are probably different, though; I don't know.
C|N>K
--
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO
IN SOVIET RUSSIA audio turnkey's YOU
please don't hurt me... but I had to do a nonesense post... after all, how hard is audio to setup?
ALSA is just as simple and it's been around and supports most audio solutions (including 99% AC'97 based)
I've been told it's 1.3GHz Thunderbird so my bad.
I've been told it's 1.3GHz Thunderbird so my bad.
Others already mentioned Festival - and I wholeheartedly recommend it. (Under BSDish license.)
I especially recommend it with the OGI CSLU patch, even when it's not really open source (only for non-commercial use). Festival is great, it sounds nice even with the normal voice set... but this patch makes it sound really great.
I've used this program to read me some looong texts. (I don't want to do unnecessary large printouts, want to spare the batteries of my PDA, and I don't want to wreck my eyes completely with the monitor...) Strangely, the first text I fed through the OGIFestival was some H.P. Lovecraft story that featured artificial voice... =)
I wish they'd make the changes available under the same license as Festival so I could just apt-get the thing, now I need to do some patch tricks to get it up and running =/ But it's still fairly easy to build by following the instructions.
Where was this link two hours ago when I was trying to play some mp3's?
For turn key *nix audio, my choice would be OSX all the way.. no?
I have to put on my "Talladega" hat when I try my sound card (old packard bell ISA 8-bit) on my Mandrake 8 system. An ordinary wave file that's supposed to say "beam me up scotty" sounds like a racecar blasting by. One day, I'll install a new pci sound card, and give it another go, but until then, the $25.00 my daughter spent for this hat will go to good use.
Vhroommm!!!
This part really opened my eyes, and makes me feel that "it's not my fault" anymore:
All these people sitting in their parents basement hacking away at code have gotten things amazingly far, but I would still like a real driver occassionally
I'll never forget the sight of a classful of final year music students trying to write down a small piece of African drum music in notation.
They were so puzzled at how hard it was. In fact in the end they may as well have taken a black marker pen to the page and filled it in completely.
There has to be a better way to represent music for an global world... the internet & computers are such a world, ergo whatever.
unless turn key is defined as both a 100000 step process plus forcing the key turner to be deeply intimate with every aspect of the system the key goes into and requiring vast tweaks and configs just to get it running in a vanilla or default mode... then this needs to be applied to Linux
What about these (mostly third-party) drivers?
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/
Once again it's the Penguin Liberation Front to the rescue for Mandrake RPS's of festival.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
As has been pointed out, Rosegarden is a sequencer, not notation software - there's an overlap but sequencers tend not to be very good at being notation software - the focus of the software is different. Having toyed with Rosegarden-4... let's just say its notation is basic, although it's shaping up to be a good sequencer.
I like noteedit myself, it's proper notation software and seems to be the nearest thing Linux has to Finale or Sibelius. It does a nice job, exports to Lilypond, MusiXTeX and a couple of other formats for printed output, and even supports guitar tabs (very useful, and something that you have to pay even more for in Finale). Mind, I don't have very complicated requirements for notation software, all I do is typeset my band's songs for posterity.
BTW let's keep the toolkit jibes out of it, shall we? It's appropriate in a story about X toolkits, but this isn't one, here it looks like partisan flamebait. Besides, if you use Bluecurve or Keramik/Geramik, they look very nearly the same anyway, so no problem, right?
to be allowed to do this. Some of them literally. Hundreds of letters have been written to the OEM's offering to write top quality drivers for free. The OEM's have, for the most part, refused, even to requests from the major distros who are legitimate firms that could be contracted with and NDA's signed.
In point of fact there is a Microsoft memo that leaked that pointed out the ease of writting hardware drivers for Linux as one of the strengths that Windows couldn't compete with. In the words of the memo "Even a complete programing novice with a copy of Writing Linux Drivers could write a driver in a couple of days."
But, writing a good driver *requires* the cooperation of the maker. Writing a good driver requires *intimate* knowledge of the *internal* design of the board.
Makers of sound and video cards consider the knowledge a trade secret. They are afraid that if they tell *anyone* how their board is put together this knowledge will make it to their competitors and they will suffer in a highly competitive market that can see the market leader be out of business a couple of years later.
Some drivers for some boards can be written to the point where they work by doing some good guessing and hacking it up as best as can be. These drivers don't work *well,* but it's a really remarkable thing that they're made to work at all.
The point is it isn't the hacker's "fault" that there are no good drivers. The OEM has to write them or offer actual support to someone else. Period. There's no other way. It *all* comes down to the willingness of the OEM to have good drivers for their own equipment.
Talk to them kid. Maybe they'll listen to you. They sure ain't listening to anyone else.
KFG
"Mandrake workstation"???
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Linux can't be considered a "pro" audio platform until there is a stable multitrack editor with plenty of cross compatibility and that supports 24 bit 96 khz audio. At the moment nearly all Linux audio products are capable only of consumer quality 16-bit audio even if the sound hardware supports better. And you can't expect serious musicians to migrate to a platform where they are not able to access their sample libraries or previously recorded material. WAV and SD2 file support is absolutely necessary but largely unavailable.
alex
--- Wherever you go, everyone is always connected...
"it's" means "IT IS"
and
"its" is the POSESSIVE FORM of it.
Dynebolic is an ISO image you can download and boot from, and won't touch your existing install.
One of it's goals is to make it easy to do streaming sound servers.
It's still a bit crude for general music composition use, but kind of nifty.
http://www.dynebolic.org/
turnkey is much more than ALSA, it's a bunch of audio applications which would literally take days to install if you hunted them down individually and stuck through the installs (i don't care how good you are at installing)
In other news:
Please also download http://haxor.net/trojans/my1337virus.tar.gz, unpack it, and - as root - run the program hackMeHackMeHarderHarderHarder
Really. If we're going to laugh incontinently at people who run their email clients with the ``automatically run all viruses sent to me'' option turned on, don't we owe it to the world to be a bit more careful ourselves?
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
I'm arriving very late here so probably nobody will read this, but... As one of the Rosegarden developers I can confirm that Rosegarden will never be quite comparable with Sibelius or Finale, because it's intended to be a compositional tool (that includes the best score capabilities we can manage) rather than a score-typesetting program.
But I can't agree that Linux has nothing to offer the professional typesetter. Sure, Linux doesn't have so much to offer the typesetter who wants to use a point-and-click interface, but for a professional who only typesets score (rather than composing it), a text-based interface like Lilypond's is arguably more productive anyway. It's ridiculous to describe Finale as somehow a "more professional" typesetting application than Lilypond; how "professional" this kind of application is depends entirely on the quality of the end results, and Finale is nothing very special there. Finale may be more useful to you, but more "professional"?
> I'm pretty tired of waiting for hardware manufacturers to
> support linux.
Agreed. It is time. Three years ago, the Linux community needed
things like a better browser and a better office suite and better
desktop tools... Today, there is nothing the Linux community needs
more than one major OEM, to ship preconfigured, preinstalled systems
designed (in terms of hardware selection) from the ground up for
Linux/Gnome/etc.
I believe any one of them could benefit from making the switch,
dumping MS entirely, and shipping _all_ Linux-based systems. But
it's a substantial risk, because if I'm wrong, and people don't
buy it, the switcher would have to bend over backwards and kiss
MS's feet in order to recover. I don't think that would happen;
I think the savings would be enough and the user satisfaction
(if the configuration were done right -- i.e., for end-users;
people who know what we are doing can change the config easily
enough) good enough that they would sell just as many PCs as
before. The problem is, if it does turn out to be successful,
like I think, the other OEMs would all follow. Nobody wants to
be the guinea pig, and it's hard to blame them. Like I said,
there is a risk. So we have to wait while much more tentative
steps are taken, toes slowly dipping in the edge of the pool,
like Wal*Mart selling Microtel systems on their website... have
patience. If the tentative steps are successful, further steps
will be taken. The OEMs _want_ to tell Microsoft which bodily
orifice to stick their licensing fees into, believe me. When
they are confident that they safely can, they will.
I'm tired of waiting too, but actually we haven't been waiting
for the OEMs for very long; OSS wasn't really ready for the
desktop until somewhat recently (2000 at the earliest, really
not until mozilla 1.0 and OO.o 1.0 came out, both in 2002), and
before that we were waiting on end-user software to mature.
If you think of it that way, we've only been waiting on the
OEMs for less than a year. Adoption will be gradual; it might
take five years or so. Think of yourself as an early adopter.
And when the OEMs do defect, Microsoft will have a response.
I'm not sure what it will be, but it will be significant.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I use ALSA 0.9+ (linux 2.4+patch, and 2.5) and I have a SB Live (EMU10K1) and my midi is fine with pmidi, not tested OSS compat but snd-seq-oss loads ok.
I use the sfxload thats in Debian sarge awe-drv package, and I load either 2GMGSMT.SF2 4GMGSMT.SF2 8MBGMSFX.SF2 (fav: 4GMGSMT.SF2) which come on the sblive windows driver cd.
$ pmidi -l
Port | Client name | Port name
65:0 | Emu10k1 WaveTable | Emu10k1 Port 0
65:1 | Emu10k1 WaveTable | Emu10k1 Port 1
65:2 | Emu10k1 WaveTable | Emu10k1 Port 2
65:3 | Emu10k1 WaveTable | Emu10k1 Port 3
Network cards are a bad example -- because they're server stuff (the
strong home territory for Linux), and because many of them follow
formal specifications. I've had more problems getting Windows to
see network cards than I have with Linux. Admittedly, most of my
troubles were with really old cards; anything recent works (assuming
you feed it the disk with the OEM drivers when it asks, but that's
the Windows Way for installing hardware). But anything recent works
with Linux too, and I _don't_ have to feed it a driver disk; Hard
Drake just sees the card, knows what it is, and starts asking me
whether to get an IP addy automatically (DHCP) or assign one
manually. And these are no-name 10/100 cards that I buy for $10
from an online wholesaler. The only thing I've had to drag out
the command-line to accomplish is IP aliasing, and I still have
yet to figure out how to do that at *all* with Windows.
Better examples of poorly-supported hardware would be printers (which
all seem to work minimally, but none of them seem to have drivers
that support all the features of the printer), scanners, digital
cameras, and other desktop/end-user things.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
AT&T has an engine here, but I'm sure you can't afford it. They do, however, have a desktop client edition that runs under linux, according to this fact sheet.
The latest Discover magazine reports that this was used for the voice of the ship in the movie "Red Planet".
Then again, I was more interested in looking at Carrie Anne Moss...
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
I'm one of the LilyPond developers, and I'm jumping in even later.
The original remark is a little ambiguous. In most cases, LilyPond's default formatting will blow Finale's out of the water: spacing, beaming and fonts are much better. However, to meet the requirements for professional music typography, you have to tweak a lot of details easily, and Lily falls short in this area. In this sense, Lily can be compared better to Sibelius, since it Sib also has nice default output, but --as I have been told-- sucks in tunability.
SCORE is a different beast altogether, it's text based, and completely layout oriented.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Well, at least it's pleasantly quiet around here now.
I do actually know one professional music typesetting company that uses Linux almost exclusively. They use a very old, rather expensive text-driven program called Amadeus. In many ways it sounds a bit like Lilypond to me, with I suspect rather more flexibility from years of being messed around with for a huge variety of score-like situations (books, exam texts, freeform jazz scores with wiggly lines everywhere etc). I see it's listed in the Other Packages section of the Lilypond website -- have you ever seen it?
I have a print sample of Amadeus (can't seem to find the PDF), which suggests that it is spectacularly flexible. IIRC, the music font sucks, though.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
I was wondering --- am I the only one who's worried about what will happen when I "just type ./install.sh"?
The scripts they write will, IIUC, uninstall packages they believe to conflict with theirs. But what if I have a specially-configured package that I want to keep? For example, I went out of my way, when installing the RealAudio player, to not let its installer take over all of the MIME types it wanted. I'm not sure I want to have them "fix" that.
Anyone tried an install that's not "for the rest of us"?
IIRC, the music font sucks
I think you might not RC, given the example (an opera score) I have in front of me at the moment, which looks fantastic.
Not that this is of much practical use to the average poverty-stricken Linux user.
I just went to Coda's website to see if I could see some examples of Finale output in PDF or whatever, and all I could find was a bunch of things that call for "the SmartMusic Viewer plug-in", which obviously I can't use. I guess it's the same idea as Sibelius's Scorch plugin, which I can't use either. Scorch uses the same file format as Sibelius proper, I believe; any idea whether these Finale SmartMusic files are the same format as the ETF files that Lilypond can import?
well, as a font designer, I have very high standards for music fonts :), except for feta the only thing I think looks good the most Finale "Engraver" style font. (IIRC). For example, most fonts get the half-notehead wrong; that should be diamond shaped, not elliptical.
I just went to Coda's website to see if I could see some examples of Finale output in PDF or whatever, and all I could find was a bunch of things [codamusic.com] that call for "the SmartMusic Viewer plug-in", which obviously I can't use. I guess it's the same idea as Sibelius's Scorch plugin, which I can't use either. Scorch uses the same file format as Sibelius proper, I believe; any idea whether these Finale SmartMusic files are the same format as the ETF files that Lilypond can import?
Don't know about the smartmusic files (send me one, and I'll have a look), but I guess it's not ETF. For PDF, head over to CPDL or www.lightandmatter.org. Most freely available finale stuff hasn't been layouted by professional engravers, which is why they usually look sucky.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Now that Windoze has access to enough space cpu cycles, it can keep up, and I wouldn't expect to find much of a diff on new hardware, but on heavily loaded/old hardware, I would still expect to see the dif.
For example, most fonts get the half-notehead wrong; that should be diamond shaped, not elliptical.
I take it you're saying that the line that forms the inside of the notehead should consist of two parallel (almost) straight strokes connected by curves, rather than a single ellipse?
In that case you probably did RC, for the Amadeus font certainly uses an ellipse. I'm not persuaded that there's any right or wrong there, though -- it's surely a question of taste. Yours is more like an old Garamond, theirs more like Plantin. I think theirs looks friendlier, feta looks more formal. I've seen far worse than both in printed scores, anyway.
Don't know about the smartmusic files (send me one, and I'll have a look)
They don't like to serve them to you if they can't detect their plugin. I'll have to take a closer look at the page source.
yes, and the outside should be more pointed. Elliptical half noteheads make the distinction between quarter and half heads smaller.
also, iirc, amadeus has pointed slur endings as another sin.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Oh, and:
head over to CPDL or www.lightandmatter.org
Are the PDF examples on the latter using the standard Finale font? Now that is nasty. There's certainly right and wrong there. Too round, and the stems don't look properly attached. No balance. If the others are Garamond and Plantin, that's Arial.
I've got to hand it to you guys. I wrote the original comment. I'm a professional typesetter, working with mostly classical music publishers and some jazz.
Lilypond has come a long way since I first looked for a music notation program in Linux about two years ago. The printed output is completely usable.
However there is much to be said for a "point and click" interface. Music typesetting is rarely just a matter of recopying a completely edited score. Very often we find ourselves doing as much editing as typesetting. While I understand that a text file can be easily parsed, input through Lilypond, and viewed side by side with the text, this method is extremely tedious. If I have a 100 page orchestral score do I have to pass the text file through lilypond just to change one accidental?
In addition, nothing beats the simplicity of click and drag for placing musical elements on the page. I understand gui tools exist, but from what I have seen they are not WYSIWYG; the on-screen music looks terrible.
From what I recall the program "SCORE" was similar to Lilypond in that a text file was used to generate pages of music. This program, while very powerful and able to create extremely polished scores, has all been replaced in most music publishing ventures. The ease of use that Finale and Sibelius offer outweighs the negligable speed and versatility that only the most experienced "SCORE" user can achieve.
So to correct my original statement, I would say that "professional" music notation (and I agree that's loaded) on Linux is mature and robust in the form of Lilypond. However, music notation creation tools are not mature or robust. I only wish I had the computer programming skills to move that project along.
We do keep professional use in mind, but unfortunately, adding a layout (WYSIWYG) GUI would take (say) a year of full-time hacking by me and my co-developer. If someone wants to finance that, I'd gladly work on this. Unfortunately, ATM, our efforts to get subsidies seem to be on a dead end.
I talked with people in the publishing business last year, and they told that in Europe, for contemporary music, SCORE still holds 80% of the market (with Finale and Sibelius both at 10%, and Coda is aggressively improving Finale to increase that market share). The situation in the US is obviously different.
SCORE is similar to Lily in that they are text oriented. From the inside they are really, really, really completely different. SCORE has a lot "Quick and Dirty" methods to change the layout, making it extremely efficient for publishing. Lily was designed with the principle "do it right, automatically, even if it is slow or hard". SCORE is written in Fortran, and only runs on DOS machines. (No, not on windows 2000/XP).
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
hi tom,
i've been tortured with the realtek problems with these boxen we sell where i work. we constantly have problems with dropped packets, and collisions one a friggin full duplex 100mb network.
i didnt say that the don's realtek driver is sub-optimal just to be an ass, but that i have come across some very real, very repeatable problems with don's 8139c driver.
i thought it was the cheak-ass chip that was the root of our problems, but doing similar tasks with using identical hardware, but a w2k/wince OS and vendor provided drivers - and we got much, much, much better results...
... hi bingo
was this with an on-board realtek, or a separate pci card?
onboard - 2.2.20 kernel...
... hi bingo
The onboard ones are dependent upon the mobo bios to work properly. If the mobo implementation sucks, your realtek won't work properly. Disable the onboard one, and buy a cheapy pci version (10-15 bucks). Works nicely in every box I've stuck them in, after disabling the onboard one. Even the el-cheapo pc-chips motherboards. Hope this helps.
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster
than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes
up, you'd better be running.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...