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Linux Audio Developers Conference
paulbd writes "This weekend sees the first Linux audio developers
conference at
ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Gathering together many members of the
Linux Audio Developers mailing list and others, the conference will feature 2 days of in-depth technical presentations and demonstrations of many
cutting
edge Linux
audio and
MIDI
applications." Desktoplinux.com has a related story about using Linux in a professional recording studio.
This all appears to be text, are they streaming the presentations, which would make sense at a conference like this ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I think they should be renamed "Linux Audio Realtime Developers And Sound Symposium".
Sound support is one area where Linux has consistly trailed more important Operatin Systems such as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh OS. Where those systems have had Professional quality support for Professional quality hardware that works well, Linux has been stuck in the background.
Perhaps this Conference can identify and deal with such issues as:
1. High Latency when performing other tasks such as opening windows or moving windows around. This leads to stutters in Audio and MP3 Playback.
2. Poor compatibility with Professional and New hardware. Realistically, although most people use SB AWE64 and SB Live! sound cards, most Professionals use newer cards and many new computers have other cards. Linux is not compatible with hardware that is newer, cheaper or more expensive.
3. Poor feature support for Linux, because it is good support for features such as 3D Sound and MIDI Music playback.
4. Best Stability on Linux audio drivers. Other Operating Systems have drivers that crash less for Audio Hardware. Linux is a very much more stable Operating System in most respects, but the lack of stability in audio drivers is Irritating.
If these issues can be addressed then Linux could be a top quality audio platform!
In related news, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture has just released its newest stable version, 0.9.1.
The linux sound community has been waiting for this for a long time. Congrats guys!
Audacity is pretty good, and for linux too. Can't believe it missed the cut.
- Cloud
But how many hardware manufacturers are actually putting out low-latency ASIO drivers for Linux?
(On the plus side, Linux does have CSound and PD, which are excellent progs for electronic musicians.)
I can just see it now: a thousand geeks walking around talking into their cell phones "Can you hear me now?"
Sorry if that was too much of a self-serving plug.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
The future for linux music is looking bright, indeed. With jack for audio and alsa for MIDI and the hardware side of things, there's great infrastructure for a very Unix-y way of tying separate applications together. This allows "simple" programs focused on small tasks, like freqtweak, which is a very addictive effect box, or software synthesizers like amSynth.
I know for a few migrations I've been asked about, the show stopper has been lack of tools like those provided by Sonic Foundary and other music maker tools. Vegas and Fruity Loops are the two that have lost me converts in the past and neither work in WINE. I'm not a music man so I didn't have anything to counterpoint with but this is one area where Linux apps (not the OS) need to play catch up since Win and Mac apparently have many good music composition apps available for them.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I recently installed Gentoo Linux with modest optimizations for my processor (athlon-tbird 1GHz at -O2), expecting some pretty snappy response. Every app and driver was compiled from source with compatabilities built in for ALSA and OSS. I though it would be better than pre-compiled binaries.
:)
I've been quite disappointed. Maybe I layered in too much.
Noatun plays MP3s with only modest smoothness. mpg123 suffers similar problems. Skips are common when switching or redrawing windows. Real users stick to command lines, I guess.
I haven't tried recording from a live source, but I'd be wary -- is that weird pause in the music because of the recording skipping, or the playback skipping? Which system do I trust?
Anyway. Perhaps I tried stuffing in too much compatability, and instead should have picked one system over the other. But then who knows which apps would work and which wouldn't?
Please please please -- can we have a standard layer that's easy to install?
GMFTatsujin
I hope they do something about the audio issues in Linux. When playing an mp3 is a frustrating, skipping nightmare on even high-end systems, something is wrong.
Even a PentiumII 300Mhz running Windows has better audio capabilities than my P4 2.4Ghz running Linux.
Maybe the new patches the kernel developers are comming up with will help?
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Wow. I've never read such a vague article in my life.
Here's the synop:
We used Windows. It crashed and got viruses. We didn't want to upgrade to XP.
We played around with Linux. We decided on Mandrake. We went Ogg Vorbis. Life is grand.
Nothing on the implentation, nothing on what programs/hardware they used in Windows or Linux, nothing in regards to performace of said hardware and/or ported software.
Linux is great for them, but being too vague doesn't help small time studios understand how to use it in their shop, or how best to go about it.
Why not get a little more in-depth, such as what utilities they used, what hardware settings needed to be tweaked (if any), and how difficult it was to train for.
For example:
What was the hardest part to train/learn?
What features are you hoping Linux audio programs will add in the future?
What advice would you give to a small, struggling studio in regards to using Linux in a studio?
Do you know of any other studios who have utilized Linux?
The list goes on.
Try gdam, I havn't seen it in any distros yet.
GDAM is a digital dj mixing software package. It aims to be a powerful, professional-quality music mixing and remixing system, suitable for live performance. It was conceived on some beautiful summer morning (in 1998), and developed with drive and enthusiasm that seemed completely unnatural. Over four years later, we have achieved many of our goals; yet, development continues. Here is a list of features:
client-server architecture based around glib
streaming and mixing of any number of mp3 files
dynamic filter insertion and removal
multiple sound device support (see the faq)
plugin support
cacheing / playing loops
contiguous queueing - plays albums without gaps between songs, regardless of output buffer size
dj turntable-style interface
assisted beat matching
waveform viewer / beat calculator
sequencer
record from any point in the stream, to disk or another process
gtk gui's, with simple skin support
flexible command-line interface
gdam123 - an mpg123 clone that talks to a gdam server
Users Guide
hardware input support (midi and other)
support to use LADSPA plugins
support to create LADSPA plugins graphically
online help
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
a) it's great to see the various specialized summits and meetings that have happened in the last few years especially (distro-based, or "Desktop Linux" or kernel summit, or ...) -- it's impressive that the various subsystems are independently good enough (and independent enough, if that makes sense) that improving one system does not (usually) kill the others.
...), I tried q -1, and am shocked at how good it is! I ended up with a compression ratio of about 35-to-1 (350-some MB total WAV files; approx. 10MB squashed to -1) and sound that in non-critical listening environments would be jes' fine, thanks. I should try compressing to q -1 and making it *mono* first, too.
b) Speaking of Linux sound, a nice thing: the other day, I compressed some music (passengermusic.com is the band's site, though no music is on the site) for a musician I know, because I'd like to convince him to post some music in ogg vorbis format on the band's website.
Usually, I have used grip to do such compression (nice interface, easy), but this time I wanted to try a wider range of qualities without going in an changing grip's preferences several times, so I started up oggenc instead.
Compressed at q6, the sound was predictably good, and my tin ears on my low-end equipment could not tell from the original. Sadly, same is true at 3. Probably most of the other available integers, too.
For kicks (and since this is for web use, and since most people are still on dialup, and since long downloads are a pain in the tuchus
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
What? What does the software used to master the tracks have to do with the choreography of a music video and style of music? I mean I know you're just trolling but come on man, you're taking up valuable real estate that could've been used a REAL troll. One with skills.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
I would be using Linux on my machines if there ANY decent audio applications for it. There has been an effort to create drivers for some decent cards...but that is about it. I wish I could attend.
Linux audio is still hellish.
/dev/dsp is no good, lets have a standard api that can do proper positional mixing, fading, and whatnot.
It reminds me of the DOS days when you had to pick your soundcard from a list of 6 for each and every app/game you'd install.
I dont want to configure each seperate app for my hardware. This is the 21st century for crying out loud! So make some rules about how linux makes noise. Just writing to
I know such libraries/sound servers exist. Just pick one that works and run with it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If that's what you are waiting on for more drivers... good luck. Apple's purchase of EMagic shows they are serious about pro-audio dominance to continue on the Mac.
In particular, while Ogg is great, it doesn't have any part that I can think of in a Pro Studio, except perhaps for archiving material that you're never going to use again. FLAC would be an option for storage if you're really low on space, though I don't know whether it supports non-CD bitrates.
Anyone who has ever worked in radio knows that radio production is not the same as a professional recording studio. In addition to that, the article is very vague, it appears like they are encoding files to Ogg Vorbis and burning CDs, nothing groundbreaking there.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Most comments here are discussing the lack of quality professional sound apps for Linux.
Well fuck that. I just want to be able to listen to my MP3s and still be able to know when I get an e-mail or IM like I did when I was in Win2k.
OK, I CAN do that right now, using ESD, but it's a kludge that I'd like to see going away.
I'm looking forward to see the kind of sound quality we'll have at kernel level on 2.6.
Yes, I'm a happy user of a desktop Linux, after years using it on servers. But boy did I have lots of trouble trying to get the same desktop experience I had with Win2k...
LADC is the Latin American Symposium on Dependable Computing, the most important event on Dependable Systems in Latin America, in cooperation with IFIP wg 10.4
If you're interested in linux audio, especially on the making music side of things, consider subscribing to the relevant lists. And check that graph again in a few days...
What is the audio equivalent of graphics' X11?
Ardour is a great app that's pr0gressing fast. That said, it doesn't even come close to the functionality of my-5-year old copy of Cakewalk Pro Audio 9. Professional DAWs have a niche user base and therefore a niche developer base. Unless a company sees some potential in Linux for a selling product, no one is going to take up the huge development task of filling in all of the holes necessary to provide the base for a solid DAW. $7000 for a base ProTools setup or $600 for Cakewalk or Cubase or whatever is a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things. I'm an avid Linux user and I do film music work - from what I can see, Linux will never, in the foreseeable future, combine video, audio, MIDI, full hardware support and the host of other things necessary for a useable workstation. It sucks, but it's a fact. Of course, this doesn't keep me from using Ardour whenever I can :O) everyone should just drop what they're doing and help out with that project - it's the only hope.
No only the purchase of Emagic, but the development of CoreAudio and CoreMidi at the kernal levels augmented by a simple to develop for interface in the form of AudioUnits, means Apple's OS is more than ready for pro-audio dominance. Hell I was bitching about this over on my forum just today -- Sonikmatter Emagic Forums I love Linux and I run a box in my own studio, but it won't be running ANY audio applications for a LONG time. Right now, its a file server to pass info between Studio A and B (ok, Studio B just happens to be my bedroom -- but since I remodeled my bathroom and put in marble flooring in there, its been a perfect vocal or acoustic guitar booth for mixing without synth effects :-)
Linux has a ways to go before anyone is using any of these applications from a standard musicians perspective. I know a lot of geeks that can grok this stuff, but not standard musicians. That and my time ain't worthless...I'd rather spend 3 minutes doing something on my Mac or PC and get the job done efficiently than to waste an hour getting something configured to do what it is supposed to do and loose all musicial motivation (if you are simply a music TECH then this doesn't really matter, now does it).
Clif Marsiglio
Sonikmatter.com
I'd be happy with ANY sound! You gotta walk before you can run, and in my experience, Linux is still in the pre-walk stage when it comes to sound. How about something that, when I install a Linux distro, makes whatever sound card I have actually work without having to play around with wierd downloads, configuring text files, etc.? I know that's a bit advanced for 2003, and maybe I'm asking for too much, but it's something that I'd really like to see.
Great -- I love when I preview something and it comes out formatted differently than in my original statement :-(
No only the purchase of Emagic, but the development of CoreAudio and CoreMidi at the kernal levels augmented by a simple to develop for interface in the form of AudioUnits, means Apple's OS is more than ready for pro-audio dominance.
Hell I was bitching about this over on my forum just today --
Sonikmatter Emagic Forums
I love Linux and I run a box in my own studio, but it won't be running ANY audio applications for a LONG time. Right now, its a file server to pass info between Studio A and B (ok, Studio B just happens to be my bedroom -- but since I remodeled my bathroom and put in marble flooring in there, its been a perfect vocal or acoustic guitar booth for mixing without synth effects :-)
Linux has a ways to go before anyone is using any of these applications from a standard musicians perspective. I know a lot of geeks that can grok this stuff, but not standard musicians. That and my time ain't worthless...I'd rather spend 3 minutes doing something on my Mac or PC and get the job done efficiently than to waste an hour getting something configured to do what it is supposed to do and loose all musicial motivation (if you are simply a music TECH then this doesn't really matter, now does it).
Clif Marsiglio
Sonikmatter.com
But Linux has a lot to catch up to before professionals will take it seriously (see below links) http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/audio.htm l
http://212.86.33.7/home/news/index.php?lang=EN
http://www.digidesign.com/
I think having a conference dedicated to audio issues on Linux is great for the platform. Linux is going gang-bisters on the server - it's on the desktop that the next surge will take place. If compelling video and audio applications are produced that push the envelope in terms of performance and features can that take advantage of the cost savings of Intel hardware, then Linux may be able to carve out a niche from some of SGI and Apple's customers. This will certainly be of benefit to the end user and will help increase Linux mindshare.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
I love to hear linux success stories -- especially ones about Mandrake, don't get me wrong. The article, however, mentions that this person paid $69 for a Mandrake powerpack and installed it on three machines. He claims that this made the cost $23 per machine. Don't the commecial pay-for-media distributions usually have a caveat that the license is for one machine only and that additional machines require separate licenses?
His claim is kind of like me going to BestBuy and buying one copy of XP, installing it on 165 machines and claiming I reduced our licensing fees to $1 per machine.
Trust me, I'm not a licensing nazi or anything like that but, being a software developer myself, I strongly believe that if you like a certain piece of software, you should pay for it. Even more so in this case because this is in a corporate environment and because Mandrake is having financial difficulties.
If everyone in the corporate world adopts this attitude that "just because it's linux, we don't need to pay our licensing fees", theres not going to be much commercial linux left after awhile.
If I were this guy, I'd run over to MandrakeStore.com and buy another two powerpack licenses just to help out the company that cut his costs so much.
However, supporting pro hardware, and syncing MIDI with real audio, at 24 bit resolution, including a reasonable GUI to do it all with, is the domain of Mac/Windows only as far as I can tell. Cakewalk Sonar leads by a long way on this. You can add digital effects in real time, chuck in a canned drumbeat while you lay down the first couple tracks, export to a single compressed file (lossless) and all sorts of wonderful stuff. That's what a pro studio needs.
Editing single stereo files is NOT what professional recording studios do. Radio stations have very low requirements in this regard, they just pre-record shows and interviews, compress them in a lossy format, and send them out. Since FM and digital radios have analog or digital compression anyway, then OGG at high bitrates is fine. However, artefacts from SEVERAL mp3/ogg streams all in a multitrack environment is not acceptable.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
There's a recent project that tries to integrate all the best audio software into Mandrake Linux 9.1, including a patched multimedia kernel for the low latency, the ardour sequencer and other stuff.
It's all explained in this howto.
Here are some things to consider:
1) Did you compile low latency support with sysctl support? In that case you have to turn on lowlatency mode on your own , a little known and not widely documented feature!
2) I actually had worse performance, w/ the 2.4 tree, when both low latency, and the O(1) scheduler were enabled, and am now using just low latency. In 2.5, AFAIK, they play much better, and it's sensible to enable both.
4) Are you using OSS, or alsa?
3) Gentoo now includes a safe hdparm script (I think it's installed by default, at least on ~x86), which works great. Check for it in /etc/init.d
4) Be wary of the difference between march and mcpu optimizations! The choice makes a big difference!
People like you make me sick. Instead of having anything constructive to say, you tell how today Apple and m$ are better and Linux will never being what you need. Pleople like you should stay away from Linux because you are just to negative.
Not used Rosegarden for a while because I haven't ever had MIDI working on SBLive+ALSA. Last time I used it it had an Athena GUI with promises on seeing if GTK+ would be nice.
And now I noted that not only have they made Rosegarden 4 depend on Qt, they've also made it depend on KDE.
Good Lord, why? The old UI wasn't that bad. *sigh*
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. At least there's still Denemo + Lilypond, far better suited for notation anyway.
You can! Both are difficult, and both require that your hardware is on a short list of supported equipment. And both will need to be specially configured for each app that wants to use it.
Calling a radio station a professional recording studio is a little misleading. As he mentions in his article, he is working at a radio station rather than a recording studio per se. Yes, people record at radio stations, but they are usually recording voice with prerecorded music which is a very simple task. I think it's great that they have switched to Linux, but it's not going to change the recording industry overnight.
Real recording studios require multitrack recording. Those recording to DAW's are using Digidesign Pro Tools mainly, with smaller ones using Nuendo or Cubase. Pro Tools 6.0 runs on OS X and supports up to 64 tracks of audio at 24bit 192khz. It's way beyond anything that a radio station would need.
Pro Tools dominates because (a) it's very mature and feature rich (b) it has proprietary DSP hardware for audio processing and A/D and (c) it has hundreds of DSP plugins from third parties.
There is also a Windoze version of Pro Tools but it's remarkably less popular and I imagine given the stability of the new OS X version it will continue to be so.
Forgive my skepticism, but I don't see Linux apps supplanting Pro Tools any time soon. The idea of migrating to Linux to save money is invalid in most professional recording studios.
Given that Pro Tools users are investing many thousands in hardware already, and studio times can cost from $50-$100 an hour, the additional cost of a machine that can run OS X is hardly a major issue.
Linux could take off at the desktop level for non-pro studios who require multitrack, but then you are fighting against $399 copies of Cubase which still have ten years of audio and MIDI functionality and integration that Linux apps lack. Frankly, it's such a specialized area that I doubt open source apps will ever have enough mindshare or skilled developers to compete with the commercial applications.
I do trust there are developers at this conference that will do nifty and wonderful things for Ninnle Linux!
High end audio on Linux.
Having spent the better part of a weekend trying to get RedHat 8 and ALSA to jive with a fairly standard pro-consumer soundcard to no avail, I'd say the first thing Linux sound developers need to do is get shit working. I mean ALSA is absurd: every time you upgrade your kernel, you recompile. Explain that to any pro studio user who's used to the Mac/Windows "install driver, reboot, get working" way of computing. Then explain to them about all the command line stuff they'll have to learn, about two differing and conflicting user interfaces, about all the different distributions and package formats. I'm not sure pro users are willing to sacrifice hours of thier time for a 5ms drop in latency or whatever Linux audio developers can promise, and they certainly won't give up tools like Logic, Reason, and Pro Tools. Get stuff working for average users, Linux audio devs. Then we'll talk.
"Linux in the Professional Recording Studio" lead me to believe that a linux box was running as the core of a multitrack system in a music studio.
Then the article goes on to describe a radio station that needs a computer for stereo recording, Ogg-encoding, cataloging and backup with some editing. There is no professional recording studio here - no multitrack recording, professional audio hardware, MIDI, effects, mixing, or mastering. The machine they built hardly qualifies as a Digital Audio Workstation, let alone a Professional Recording Studio.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
As Florian Schneider is a professor at ZKM, I wonder if he might be attending the conference...
Hmmm.... Kling Klang going open source, that would be the day...
However, one of these was a bad port on an SBLive! card. The kernel would hang when the ALSA driver was insmod'ed for this card. The same card on a Windows 2000 machine would NOT hang the machine -- the bad port just didn't work.
Now, I can see both sides of an argument here regarding whether drivers should accommodate hardware which is actually broken (rather than just poorly designed). If I didn't use that port, I'd have never know w/ Windows that the card was bad.
But linux is becoming more popular, and like it or not getting close to taking over apple.
This is not a Linux good Apple Bad argument but software (and hardware drivers) are usually only written for the top two OS's in the market.
If Linux hits the #2 spot then their will be more games, profesional GUI based apps and media/consumer drivers for linux.
Linux on the web has been #1 for quite some time, and already has reasonable support for serious hardware.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
OK, this may in fact be a "professional recording studio", but in the author's own words, he uses the machines for archiving audio, burning discs and making CD's for distribution.
When I can slap a pair of DigiDesign TDM cards into a linux box, run ProTools, and then use them to mix a 32 or 48 track mix for a band I'm recording... well, THEN it'll be ready for profesional audio use.
Frankly, the only UNIX doing that kind of audio right now is MacOS X. Native multi-channel 32 bit audio is pretty sweet, yes... but it's not something linux sports in a usable fashion right now.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Is that all effort on the parts of linux audio developers is done for free, in their spare time.
Please take this into consideration before you compare the current state of audio to other plaforms such as Windows or Mac. Linux audio is still very much in the hacker domain.
LDB
Simply put, the base system installed and configured itself, including a rather complex ethernet router link to the internet.
That's the easiest possible way to connect a Linux box to the net. Or am I missing something?
Get your own free personal location tracker
I used to just use linux for sequencing and mixing down to digital, but now I have been playing with Ardour, JACK, LADSPA, and it's a whole new ball game. I can't wait to try the latest RoseGarden; it looks like it has come a long way. With JACK I can use my Delta 1010 sound card, and it sounds like a million bucks, and has fair support, including a mixer control panel very like the one it has under windows. I haven't tried recording under Windows since 3.1, but the software is all very expensive. I love software like Vision, but it's just not worth it to me anymore.
I tried Be, which was supposed to be low-latency this and multimedia that, but nothing I recorded with it ever turned out very well. At the time, one couldn't even purchase a decent sequencing or multitrack recording app, even if you had the money.
Lots of work has been done in the Linux kernel to address latency. It still is jerky sometimes, but a multi-processor system might help address that.
It's odd to hear the basic complaints about audio in Linux. Back when I was running a Pentium 200mhz box, the ability to play mp3's under Linux without any skips when switching windows or programs is what convinced me to use it rather than Windows.
I would like to see better sourround support or EAX support very much so
He never mentioned what hardware, what software he was running.
I would GLADLY build a home studio around Linux if I could figure out which distro, which sound card, and which EASY TO USE APPs to use to do the same kind of Cubase VST stuff I've previously done.
Some package from some obscure German FTP site with a command line interface that doesn't even compile doesn't rate as "easy to use".
If you're going to say how great your system is, please let some of us in on what it was you eventually used?
Maybe the reason for the complete absence of detail is he didn't want to go into the endless kernel recompiles, header file and package searches (no no no you need ALSA_dev_package_weirdo_tool_support.h, that's available from ftp.godknowswhere.com) the frustrating incompatibilities with the top-end hardware, the latencies, etc.
Much more rah-rah to say he installed Mandrake and suddenly he had no support costs.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
give me a break. they're going to tell me how to use linux in my recording studio, but they can't tell me how to get my audigy2+drive to work correctly for day-to-day use.
i love linux, i love it's stability, i love it's security, i love it's interaction, but hardware support is hard to find. perhaps they should have more conferences on that. then we really can use linux for all these great things.
if it wasn't for that horse, i wouldn't have spent that year in college.....
Bull Fucking Shit.
/. profess to enjoy their Macs quite often and vocally.
You don't know what you are talking about. Thats as plain stated as I can make this.
The Mac is designed for folks that don't have the time or desire to deal with computers as anything but the tools they are -- they get their work done and get on with life.
Linux is designed for computer enthusiasists that want to know intimate details about their computer -- which you really have no choice under most of the popular distributions to do otherwise.
Linux is NEVER going to hit the #2 spot among those that need a professionally design GUI and consistancy and ease of use. Apple on the other hand is taking great steps to make certain they ARE the top of the list for usability by folks that need this purpose.
Past that, whats the entire purpose of OSS? Software that doesn't suck. The Mac can run with some modifications a good deal of the software that doesn't suck from the Linux / BSD worlds. In such, they are taking over a good portion of mind share from those that would have otherwise used a pure unix workstation. The leaders of
What does Linux have going for it? Its a GREAT server environment. Its not 'enterprise' software by the definition of a lot of tech managers, but IMHO, its FAR more stable in most aspects than some of the Enterprise Ready crap I have to deal with day in and out (yeah, I program Windows Apps....unfortunately...as well as administering some of these boxes). Its cheap and its efficient. No OS Tax and I can take out to pasture Windows machines and turn them into powerhouse servers.
What doesn't it have for it? Quite a bit that the common user needs -- and especially in the music realm.
What doesn't Apple have? Cheap Servers. Who the hell cares...I have Intel for this...and when I need to develop for that Intel box, I can pull out my iBook and have ALL the same tools on it that I need. I have Perl, PHP, Apache, Sendmail, MySQL. The developer that cares about having a decent working environment will be running Macs. Heck, I even have VPC running Redhat 8.0 on my iBook incase I need to try out compiled stuff that I occasionally have to deal with when speed becomes and issue and I can't patch things with a scripted language (though the Bluecurve desktop is pretty slow on the 'book...I generally simply SSH into the VPC from the Mac side anyways and do everything in Terminal).
Macs and Linux have NOTHING in common from a common users perspective and as such, Linux will never take over their mindshare. This is Apples Advantage.
Macs and Linux have quite a bit in common when you get into the Sysadmin minds. Mac Users can now use Linux servers with exceeding ease and connectivity without having to install and configure Appletalk on the server side of things. This is a plus for the Linux Admin.
Macs and Linux also have a lot in common for the Developers. No Mac Developer is going to pick up a Unix box to develop against. A Linux Developer will feel at home on a Mac with X11 or Terminal as well as the semi-standard unix directory system. Advantage Apple.
The way I see it, servers are increasingly going Linux. Thats bad for M$. Desktops will stay Apple or M$. Developers will migrate SOMEWHAT to Apple -- though I wouldn't predict droves, thus your argument is simplistic and again bullshit.
This is NOT a troll -- Mod me down if you so desire, but don't mod this as a troll.
Clif Marsiglio
Sonikmatter.com
Yeh, it's a good job that production studios still use Macs and that Maya hasn't been ported to linux. etc......
Oh and Mac is Unix now.
Not so every distro -- for instance, I believe that SuSE is a single-station license for certain components, even though the bulk of the software is GPL.
Mandrake, though (and as I understand it, Red Hat, perhaps not the Starship Enterprise edition) are all GPL: you can burn copies to hand out on the street. If you're selling them, Red Hat doesn't want you to call them "Red Hat" or even come close, but that's an aside;). The sofware itself is nice and Free. Now, you may only have bought *support* for one desktop, but that's another matter.
Now it would be *nice* to buy boxes for every copy of mandrake, especially if it would help the company survive, and in many corporate settings, that would probably relieve a nervous twitch in whoever used to take care of Microsoft licensing certificates.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I would like to see EAX support in Linux. I know Creative Labs has an opensource project, but I don't think their emu10k1 driver has EAX support. I don't think any of the Linux native games support it, even Unreal Tournament 2003. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This is an absurd article with a misleading title.
A radio station studio isn't what I would call a "Professional Recording Studio". I would call it a broadcast studio or something. They have completely different needs from a studio where musicians are recording music. That's the type of studio that I would call a "Recording" studio. A broadcast studio just has the must rudimentary editing, archiving, and transporting issues to deal with. Cut, copy, paste, burn. Anything can do that.
The article doesn't talk sensibly about specific issues that they were having with their windoze system either. How were these viruses ravaging them through "some of the best firewall and virus software on the market"? As far as I can tell, we have completely incompetent network engineers and we're using McCafee AV on our network. We haven't had any significant problems with viruses in the two years I've been working here. What software was crashing on them also? Was there an affordable competing product?
What excact software are they using and for what purposes? It sounds to me like they're mainly encoding recordings into ogg files and burning CD's. This kind of work is nothing. I can do that on any one of my boxes, my old P133 linux box, my win2k machine, or my mac.
Linux may be coming up to speed for a radio station environment and that's great. I love seeing it work its way into little niches here and there. However, it's not even an option for a professional multitrack studio. Hardware compatibility just isn't there first off. Until I can install MOTU, Digidesign, or competing interfaces, it doesn't even matter what software I'm running. Of course really isn't linux software out there yet that can compete with things like Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Nuendo, etc. I'm sure it's coming but I haven't seen anything close to any one of these three applications.
This acrticle should have read "I found a great application for linux in a broadcast studio and I love it but I'm not going to tell you much about it. Oh and I hate windows". It would have saved me the time I wasted reading it.
All five of the issues (#1, #2, #4, #3, and #4) mentioned in the parent post are things that a typical OS user should NEVER have to know about. Linux distributions still have a long way to go before they're as friendly as MacOS or Windows.
I don't want to spend hours tweaking my OS to get MP3s to play smoothly. I just want them to play smoothly.
This is my own contribution to Linux audio programming. Its pretty basic, and possibly buggy, but it was fun to write.
The name and the idea was inspired by the infamous Mac application "Back to Basics" that was used onstage by the late, great, band Man.. or Astroman? Its actually much more basic than that, though.
It uses curses, and one of the intended uses is that the "musican" could be on stage controlling an unseen computer with vt100 or other such hardware.
http://hacked-2-basics.sourceforge.net/
I love Linux but it is WAY behind in professional audio (sound blaster cards are not pro quality). Digital studios need at least 24 tracks of 24 bit sound and a badass software sequencer like Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Cubase, Logic, etc. I can't name a single pro audio interface that supports Linux and is compatible with a high performance sequencer. Just so you know before you tell me why I'm wrong, I'm an Audio Engineering major at Berklee College of Music. Most people here have never heard of Linux. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for open source, but Linux doesn't have a chance in the pro audio domain. It's way too far behind. The article is about everyday things like mp3 support and cd burning, not professional recording.
(The domains are only shown in-line when they're part of the comments, not stories).
- With a high resolution display, you can barely see the pixel or two gap between the underscores. It just looks like one big long link.
- To find out what each link is for I need to mouse-over each one individually. But Slashdot doesn't even make of the TITLE attribute of A tags, so I need to look at some cryptic URL in the status bar to figure out where it will take me!
- The Related Links section is automatically generated from the links within a submission. But it's now rendered useless since it contains link titles such as 'many' and 'cutting'.
A longer more-descriptive sentence would allow easier embedding of links, even though it may sound awkward when read aloud.That was very well put. :)
Just to reiterate some of your points, I don't even see Apple and Linux as competitors, but as siblings in the larger scheme of things. People that buy Apple's use their computers for different things that most people who run Linux. Sure, there will always be the oddballs who try to shoe-horn Linux (or windows) into every nook and cranny without ever thinking that there may be a BETTER solution around. Maybe it's due to cost-analysis, but chances are it's some "zealot" determined to make headway into the market by forcing his OS of choice onto some hapless corporation.
For example, take the article that all this is spawned from. What happens if Mr. Linux decides to leave the company? Will the company know to email Mandrake if they have problems? Will they be able to find another competent Linux audio-geared admin? What will they do when something goes wrong and he's not there to fix it? Face it, people, there's not a whole lot of competent Linux admins around who would be intimate with the Linux environment. They might be lucky to find someone, maybe. (just a note: this isn't necessarily a bad thing, you have to start somewhere. If one person can do it, well, another can surely learn it, too).
Another issue I have with the article is, just exactly what does the author's studio produce? I thought Broadcast 2000 went away and was a video product? The article was too vague on specifics for me to take too seriously. What applications DOES he run (he listed a few) and how does he manage his workflow with them? I'm not knocking the idea, it's just that when I read about how Linux has replaced "windows" in the workplace, I want to know what it replaced, what shortcomings were overcome by finding a different tool, etc. What kind of audio hardware was being used? SBLive's are a vastly different beast than the "pro" cards.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Soundservers will all go away except Jack, I'm sure. And that's because ALSA now (0.9.1) has the dmix plugin, which handles mixing of multiple streams to one device. esd didn't do anything but that, and it did it bad.
A Soundserver like Jack has a different purpose. It aims at interconnectivity beteen audio apps. So i can (and I did) control two alsaplayers from Pd, route their output to Pd and put on some crazy effects. This is only possible with Jack, that's why Jack will stay.
'Proffesionally design GUI'
;)
;)
Gnome or KDE
Take a really good look at ' many cutting edge Linux audio ' in the article, these are all links to pro audio apps for linux
Linux WILL be at LEAST #2, believe me
That's quite amusing. Pretty much every audio app I've ever tried invented it's own utterly non standard GUI, sometimes just for the hell of it. If you'd done any real audio work, you'd know that ALL the main sequencers and plugins for them are full of GUIs skinned to look like sequencer racks, knobs (literally), bitmapped keypads and so on.
You know what? I never, ever, hear pro audio guys whining about how Cubase VST doesn't always use the standard widget toolkit of the OS, or how their soft synth is skinned to look like a rack mount.
So, you are the one talking "Bull Fucking Shit", not only is GUI consistancy way way overrated, but there's even a great deal of evidence these days that Apple couldn't give a rats ass about GUI consistancy - it's own apps regularly invent their own widgets, even duplicating the standard ones (which of course introduces bizarre ui quirks). Don't even go near the font preview pane, or .. dare I say it ... brushed metal.
So if you're going to try the "Linux will never make it on the desktop because the widgets look different" line, at least try and sound credible about it. Maybe some people seriously care about this. Pro audio people clearly do not.
So you want pro audio card drivers?
RME, M-Audio, ECHO, Alesis, Sek'd, Korg, Ego sys, Hoontech, Roland/Edirol, seasound, sonorus, terratec...
(all included in ALSA)
information is the key...
Mental slip above... I meant the pre-empt patch, rather than the O(1) scheduler.
Your argument is largely true for DAW work on current desktop linux distros (and although they're making relatively quick progress in the right direction, many of the people working on it seem somewhat clueless about the issues involved), but largely false in relation to linux as an OS for embedded use or special-purpose computers.
After all, what is a Mackie HDR if it's not a PC with an embedded OS and some nice musician-friendly hardware and controls? That's a job Linux is more than capable of doing, and it beats even a Mac for "I don't want to know about computers, I just want to play my gee-tar" points.
On the other hand... I'm a musician myself (using Logic, Sonar and Pro Tools LE a PC), and I must say that I find the complexity of Logic in particular is actually worse than the complexity of keeping my music PC polite and well-behaved. Can't see how it can be different on a Mac.
http://www.lindows.com/lindows_news_pressreleas
With several more years of improvement, Linux and other free operating systems are starting to gain on the technical advantages present in that several year old operating system. I feel confident that given a few more years and the efforts of individuals and companies worldwide, Linux will soon be the operating system of choice for everything from coffee makers to the next generation space shuttle. So I'm happy to hear about this conference and all this exciting stuff.
I disagree. There are no analogues for most of what happens in the audio world to that what happens in the generic widget. As such, items have to be paralleled to that which it intuitive to the target user.
For instance, the average user knows what a trash can is. As such, it makes sense to a novices eyes that a trash can is used for throwing out what you want. Apple use to break interface rules by using this motif to eject discs or unmount drives...they've actually fixed this by having the trash can morph into something else when you select one of these items (in the case of a CD you are building, it will turn into a Burn button). No -- its STILL not the best interface one can use, but its something that is pretty well consistant.
As for Cubase, I agree with the fact that its looks suck. They try to use the real world paradigm a little too much. Logic does well by splitting the line and making it accessable to folks that have knowledge in the physical world as well as expanding the knowledge to that which makes sense in a more virtual world. Past that, since Apple's purchase of Logic Audio, they've been consistantly fixing the interface to be more inline with their internal widgets when it makes sense.
Not all Audio apps have to be skinned for the sake of being skinned. Personally, I'd like a more standard interface to a lot of my plugins. I'm sick of seeing Cool K-Rad (or whatever the kiddies are saying these days) interfaces and make them more functional. I'm sick of seeing knobs that says Meathook and a slider that says Angry Kitten...all with their own custom interfaces. However, these guys learn from the real world where musician tools are often creative nightmares intended to be explored more than they are to be completely understood.
The more professional of a plugin and you will see more professional of an interface. And personally, I'm SERIOUSLY sick of user skinnable applications where a client asks me to come in and I can't tell that he's actually running the same application I am at home undernethe all that chrome.
Trust me, the pros all complain about this stuff. Cubase users on average don't because they are just happy to have found a cracked version to run (last I talked with folks from Steinberg, they said off the record that they estimated the illegal users outweighed the legal ones 3:1).
As for Apple's internal guidelines -- this is changing. There are guides as to when its appropriate to use the Brushed Metal look. For the most part, if you are designing a virtual representation of a physical item, BM is the way to go. At one point it wasn't spec'd and it breaks some of the guidelines from the OS9 days, but it fits in with the OSX guidelines from a good UI POV. There are still some things that obviously need changed, but I think Apple is getting back to being Interface Nazi's like they use to be.
Quite honestly, if you want to talk credibility, ya need to read through your own post again and do some research. I shouldn't have to write a thesis just because someone reads half a line of my post and can't be bothered to understand it in the great whole of the text.
Clif Marsiglio
Sonikmatter
umm... the poster is using Gentoo, a distro where EVERYTHING is compiled from source, it's not meant to be as friendly as MacOS or Windows, it's meant for power users who want to try to get the absolute most out of their system.
If you don't want to spend hours tweaking your OS then Gentoo is not for you.
For the record I only recently upgraded from a k6-2 300 and never had any problems playing mp3's.
Australian? Join EFA
Well, I will admit to being a linux newbie, which is precisely WHY I chose Gentoo over a pre-compiled distro. Having to set options and compile is, I've found, the only way I learn what's really going on with my computer. I'm up for tweaking and fiddling and cursing until I get it right.
:)
I'll say this, I've learned a lot in the past 2 weeks.
I guess that makes me, what, a power newbie? Or masochistic. What's the diff?
GMFTatsujin
which doesn't matter a thing, because he uses gentoo. If you are a gentoo users, you know about those things. And you like it.
If you do not like to worry about this:
you should be on mandrake (upcoming 9.1)
you will have a precompiled lowlatency kernel, automatically selected best driver for your card (with a gui for switching drivers, which if you want you can even have to worry about on other os-es), jack compiled to make use of the setpcap feature of the kernel (ie it can put itself on top of the scheduling queue), and dozens of other professional audio tools packaged as rpms.
All in all, the best linux audio station currently available.
But actually, i do not think this is the problem, he is probably just using a shitty soundcard.
According to their website, it is available for Windows, IRIX, Linux and Mac OS X. And the unlimited package is only $6999! Go buy it now! :)
> (all included in ALSA)
I don't think so, each brand you listed might be represented with a couple of cards that has decent (at best) support..
You don't even need that particular headache (I haven't had enough time to get my 2.5 Kernel up), but Redhat 8.0's 2.4.18 kernel supports low-latency (enabled via the /proc filesystem) and the ALSA drivers (0.9) drop in quite easily.
Due to the lack of good audio software at the time for Linux, I've made libgaudio at the ZKM for a game presented at the ZKM's Net_condition exhibition a few years ago ... good to see some move on this issue at the same place.
As far as audio apps are concerned, it should not be hard to make the Linux "workbench" good enough for the tools to work at their best. I would expect the 2.6 kernel, with its interactive scheduling improvements, to be quite close to the mark for these purposes.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Heaven forbid someone post about their negative experiences with Linux. They MUST be a Troll!
Crackhead moderators...
Wow! I have to enter an arcane command at the prompt that may require me to be root just to get mp3s that don't skip! I can't believe that "crap" about optimizations either!
The APIs are good. The effort from the *community* has been strong. The problem is the manufacturers. They design inexpensive DirectX "winmodem"-type sound devices that are only designed to mix one chanel, yada-yada. There aren't many hardware developers that have taken the time to make satisfactory drivers. Cirrus Logic did it with some of their chipsets (but they were crippled). Creative made a valiant effort with the Live series, but many of the envolved employees aren't with the company anymore.
What you are mentioning about "new hardware" is often incorrect. It is there, but comes at a price. 4-Front tech supports new cards, and they are even working on drivers for the brand new M-Audio (Midiman for you "professional" audio heads) cards. Actually, they probably have drivers for the Revolution as we speak... It's a high-end consumer card. Actually, the Envy chips are being used in a lot of products; M-Audio, Terratec, Hoontech...
It's hard to develop open source drivers when everyone has an intellectual property stick up their ass. But I will say that there are some quality ALSA drivers out there, and there are some Quality drivers from 4-Front at Opensound.com. It just depends on the device that you are using. You can't expect some Intel audio chip that nobody cares about to perform up to par. Stability isn't a problem, if you have good drivers. My OSS drivers for my Santa Cruz are rock solid, and have most (and a few extra) features that they had under Windows 2000.
The latency is good with proper drivers. The features are there with the right card. You just have to be picky about what you buy, because you can't expect the manufacturer to stand up and write some drivers. But I think that companies like nVidia have paved the way for hardware support on a multi-platform scale. Graphicws card companies are getting better at it, and it is just a matter of time before more sound companies step up.
Understand that we are not all experts in everything.
/. criticism and not aimed at you in particular]
If you lay down 5 questions asking (A || B), insinuating that one is a much better choice than the other, please let us know! Teach us damn it instead of just scoffing at our ignorance. [this is meant as a general
1) Use "/sbin/sysctl -w ???" to turn it on?
2) [pre-empt] and O(1) might colide. Good to know, thanks.
4) I've got a 50/50 chance of guessing ALSA might give better results, but how is someone new to know? If you ask a non-redundant question that you know the answer to, please answer it too for dog's sake!
3) Useful, thanks. But what is it?
4) the gcc man pages don't tell me much, and either do you. Which should we use in what situations? march or mcpu?
Facts are better than opinions, knowing a problem exists is good, but knowing the solution is better.
You did well on the serially even numbered questions anyhow.
One can bind a key to push-to-talk that's still intercepted when one's game has focus.
One feature I find missing is the ability to bind push-to-talk to a mouse button. (It can do this in the Win32 client.) If anyone knows how to do that, please post in the TS forums.
i agree.
my mobo's sound works great, it goes beeep beeep beep beep beep! everytime i hit bkspace too much.
"it ate my mp3 collection. it was a really good mp3 collection..."
who will explain why everyone's 2-year-old motherboard's ac97 ONBOARD sound isn't automatically configured in almost every fricken distro you try?
i know, i should just spend ANOTHER 30 bucks on a soundblaster. Or spend a few MONTHS getting comfortable with linux enough to try installing alsa only to be puzzled as to why everything is muted by default!
fuck that.
YOU WONDER WHY PEOPLE USE WINDOWS!?
a: shit takes like 2 minutes.
i wont even get started on video.
this is soundless, signing off...
I hear nobody speaking about a great full featuerd audiosequencer called JAZZ++ (http://www.jazzware.com). It's GPLed as well.
It's Gentoo, you fucking idiot. Install Mandrake, Red Hat, or Suse and shut to fuck up. You'll be able to skip 1, 3, 3, and 4, and you won't need to fuck around with Windows update.
Or else, be happy being ignorant. Either way, just shut the fuck up. Nobody gives a damn what you think because you're running off of your daddy's preinstalled Windows PC.
I mix with MP3s. My MP3s come from the vinyl I buy. My MP3s are easier to mix with. I spend more time watching, listening, and giving my paying audience what they want to hear (verrrry slickly mixed, I might add), than futzing with my romantic old decks. Yes, perhaps I used to look cooler mixing vinyl, but since switching to vinyl-sourced MP3s, my friends and customers have both commented that I seem to read the room better and serve up the right stuff at the right time.
Maybe you think you're doing the best job you can with vinyl right now. You might be. But I used to think the same thing, and I know now that I was wrong.
We have waited for a long time, but finally there are some pretty neat projects coming along like drivers for Unitor8/AMT8 (studio standard 8x8 midi interfaces with perfect timing)
On the sound device support side development is a bit poorer, like none of the protools hardware works, recently tried a low end Audiotrak 8x8 card, and no go either.
It seems that many people perceive cards such as Creative labs SBLive!/audigy/2, EWS, TB etc. as useable for proffessional purposes, let me assure you that this is not the case, the kind of quality offered by such hardware would be sufficient for emergencies only. (earthquake/fire/tornado wasted your studio)
don't even get me started on built-in mobo audio-chips...
If we don't support quality cards (apart from the novel work on RME devices) then who will care to develop useful applications? (apart from RME owners of course)
I know for a few migrations I've been asked about, the show stopper has been lack of tools like those provided by Sonic Foundary and other music maker tools. Vegas and Fruity Loops are the two that have lost me converts in the past and neither work in WINE. I'm not a music man so I didn't have anything to counterpoint with but this is one area where Linux apps (not the OS) need to play catch up since Win and Mac apparently have many good music composition apps available for them.