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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."
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.
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
No midi software? I'm surprised.
XML causes global warming.
I don't know because I'm also too lazy to click the link, but I would hope that it replaces all the stock audio drivers with ones that don't suck.
I am totally amazed how the linux "market leaders" maintain the status quo when it comes to shipping total pieces of shit for drivers, in particular as far as audio goes.
Why can't someone pay an engineer to write good drivers from scratch for most commonly used equipment. 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.
In other words: until the OEM's start writing their own linux drivers, why can't major distros pick up the slack? I don't care about the quantity of drivers produced, I care about the quality. I don't want a huge list of "supported" hardware, I want a set of Recommended Configurations, and if I buy that hardware it's going to work as well as if it were running Windows.
I recently had the misfortune to use an i845 based motherboard with onboard video, audio, lan. The LAN worked. The audio driver sucked. The video driver was non-existant. The board was a year old.
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.
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).
The moment I see cuss words I do assume they really don't have anything legitimate to say.
Tangent:
.NET, DRM, portable nonsense, Xbox
I think we're seeing Free Software catch up because of a few reasons. One of the biggest is that the innovation around the internet is drying up. Everything that could be done (easily) has been done. Nobody wants a Big Investment for websites anymore without a cash model.
So, MS is a "value-added" portion of the industry. They take ideas and *sell* them as more convenient and supportable, but the ideas are free to begin with.
With the death of new (useful) ideas, MS has to race against the free world for adding value and making their own ideas:
You'll see MS with their hand in everything just to see what sticks (remember MSWallet?). Now we simply have beat this race to prove them a plent of programmers is way smarter than the MS payroll. Not hard.
mug
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?
the reason they are not is that the developersthat are writing them are not interested in doing so.
the Loki installer is available for everyone. it works in any X or text setup, will auto install icons even in Gnome and KDE and is pretty dang nice..
does nayone use it? nope... they don't want to be bothered with installers and making binaries that work across distros.
funny how windows developers make sure they have a working installer but in linux you are flamed for even asking for one.
it's apathy that is holding us back in seeing linux apps that install nice like OO.o, mozilla andall the loki games..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
why wait? buy another inexpensive computer (even a walmart one for $200)
start surfing the web ad-free, virus-free, pop-up free
send email through far more secure clients then outlook/express
then there's just a gazillion little apps at various levels of usefulness...there's something for everybody.
sure i still have one XP workstation, because i'm like you, i have a couple of apps that i need.
but my four other computers are redhat & freebsd.
e
Ha... these packages are from the creators of the the heart of every technology used by modern studios. The names who developed the software in this list are the same group of university folks that developed the tech behind FM and Physical-Modelling. And who are developing in universities the new music technologies.
Csound among the other packages allows for live MIDI processing and its codebase has inspired most VST plugins.
This is an appropriate Linux package for the university that distributed it. It may not be a package that would be useful for the typical electronic music hobbyist who wants a free Acid or Fruity Loops. Not the announcement many might think... but it is very cool and significant for the hard core Linux computer musician.
Isn't that the Linux way? Support the hard core musician, (in this case the contemporary academic computer musician) and then add the cool interfaces for the hobbyists and the semi-pro specialists later.
Maybe you're a bit naive about the history of computer music and who actually invented the tech behind music tech?
idealord music
People do pay for quality audio drivers. They are the turnkey drivers from 4-Front. They work with most any card (autodetencts) and uses a simple install program. Aside from that, they have loads of other cool features like real-time mixing (works like DirectSound). Many people that I suggest them to online, however, won't buy them because "they have a problem with paying for sound drivers". I use them, and they are well worth the $25-$30 to get those features that you commonly only see in Windows. I even have more advanced recording capabilities and control over each channel's playback with a simple, low cost driver upgrade.
You won't, however, get a lot of the same features out of ALSA or standard OSS drivers. There are certain NDAs that the 4-Front guys probably had to sign to write their closed-source drivers.
Check out a demo at www.opensound.com if you are interested.
"It may not be a package that would be useful for the typical electronic music hobbyist who wants a free Acid or Fruity Loops. "
So, what about the electronic music hobbyist (or even the professional) who is waiting for a linux answer to Cubase, Reason, Acid, Samplitude, or Logic? Something that runs on
our favorite platform, perhaps retailing for a couple hundred
bucks?
The deal is, such applications are not available for ANY price, and no such thing appears to be coming down the pipe.
Well, perhaps a distribution of these tools will get the attention of someone -- we need someone to do for the DAW what
Miguel did for Gnome. In the case of music production software, it's not so much a problem that the interface needs to be "user friendly" as that it needs to be efficient enough for a musician or a recording engineer to use without having to give up music or recording to learn how to use it. (Cubase does fail somewhat in this regard, IMHO).
I'm sure some misunderstandings in this topic come from the fact that there are millions of people consuming audio and/or sampling from consumer audio sources, and so on; while the people who are looking at the PC as a means of entry into the horribly expensive world of digital audio production have a whole different set of issues.
I don't expect my PC to do everything that a fully-accessorized Neve console can do... But it *CAN* do 16 tracks of 24bit digital audio, unencumbered by the intentional crippling that every other piece of consumer recording gear is bundled with, and for a whole lot less cash than ANYTHING else capable of doing 24bit at all! So, the promise of the PC is, liberation from the entertainment industry's syste that decides who does and who does not produce work that sounds professional.
I hate the fact that Sony and Phillips don't want me to be able to make lossless copies of my own work in a mixing process. Digital audio on the home computer is our best weapon right now -- and free software could make that weapon into something REALLY powerful.
Totally. The whole subnet is thrashed, its 10Mbit uplink is maxed out The whole package is 116MB, I'm thinking someone is going to get a pound^H^H^H^H^H talking to.
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.
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
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/
I'm hoping to get up and running on MacOSX in January, and undertake the fairly major task of porting the software and revising it to the new environment. If I can do that, the resulting still-GPLed software will be more easily ported to Linux.
One of the Linux DAW projects (I forget which) once asked me to teach them about dithering and why it mattered. I can only say that if the tendency of Linux audio software to be consumer-level 16-bit stuff bugs you, I can't do anything about that directly but I will say this again- I'm always ready to drop everything and help out a Linux audio project with this stuff. I know what the professional studios and mastering houses require, in terms of resolution handling, and what kind of internal bussing and processing are required. For instance, Pro Tools suffers badly simply because all internal processing involves repeated truncation to 24 bit linear, and the 2-buss requires submixes that themselves involve more truncation. You wouldn't be able to hear any of it as just one stage (maybe sense it vaguely) but it's cumulative.
I can say that and expound about how TPDF decorrelates additional moments of distortion but I haven't got a clue how to code GTK interfaces or anything like that :) it's all a matter of what you devote time to doing, I guess. But I wanted to take a moment to say again that if anyone wishes to add dither and noise shaping to their Linux audio project, I'd love to help teach this stuff...
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?
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
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.