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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.
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
Sorry if that was too much of a self-serving plug.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
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
RME and M-AUDIO are sufficient for me.
good quality + good performance == bliss
1. High Latency when performing other tasks such as opening windows or moving windows around. This leads to stutters in Audio and MP3 Playback.
This is definitely being fixed in Linux 2.6. Between the new O(1) scheduler and the recent patches for interactivity, this SHOULD go away completely.
God Fucking Damnit
High Latency.....
pop along to kernel.org and get a 2.5 kernel. Oh, and make sure your graphics card is accelerated.
'Poor compatibility with Professional and New hardware', wait till Mac becomes #3, also I think it's easier to write drivers for 2.5/6.
'Poor feature support for Linux', go get alsa (or 2.5 since it has alsa in the kernel tree).
'Best Stability on Linux audio drivers', now this is where you can help, since you want 1 2 and 3 why not goto kernel.org, get a 2.5 kernel, do some testing and report the bugs in the kernel bugzilla.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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.
Linux doesn't use ASIO, it uses ALSA, which in addition to being much faster (lower latency) than ASIO also supports quite a few soundcards, both consumer and professional grade.
Here is a pdf with latency tests
I think the sound managment in linux has improved quite dramatically in the past few years, and there are right now _a lot_ of projects which will make linux a reasonable choice for professional audio authouring, such as ardour, jack, alsa, etc. (look at links in the story)
I don't know what the current status on VST plugins in linux is, but there's still ladspa, which seems to be a very competent architecture. Steinberg's hesitation in this area might very well prove to be a mistake, costing them influence in a growing market.
I'm right now in the process of trying linux out for a synthpop project I'm working on, using ardour, and various softsynths and sequencers. If some interesting experience comes out of it, I'll make it known.
The stars that shine and the stars that shrink
in the face of stagnation the water runs before your eyes
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
1. High Latency when performing other tasks such as opening windows or moving windows around. This leads to stutters in Audio and MP3 Playback.
;)
I don't have any problem with this on my Athlon XP 1800+ running Gentoo Linux. Although I did have some problems with these on my old Mandrake 8.1-based AMD K6/2 400, the problems were *more* pronounced in Windows 98 and Windows 2000 on the same hardware than they were in Mandrake.
Now I'm not sure whether the lack of these problems is due to Gentoo's high-level of optimization or my faster processor, but I suspect it's some combination of the two.
I paid less than $600 for the components to build the Athlon box last year.
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.
I don't know about higher-end hardware than the SB AWE64 and SB Live! cards, but you say that Linux doesn't work with hardware that's cheaper. I say sure it is. The aforementioned Athlon has integrated SiS 7018-based sound hardware that works absolutely fine and has 100% functionality with ALSA.
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
I've never had any audio driver crash on Linux, but then again I've only used 3 different drivers so what do I know?
My journal has hot
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...
This is a conference for professional audio on Linux, and most of your points are from a amateur/consumer viewpoint.
You have to invest both in skills (ability to set up the computer and apply patches) and in hardware (RME/Hammerfall or M-audio are well supported) to use Linux for pro audio.
1 High latency.
Use a kernel with Low-latency patches, and a low latency sound server like jackd. Do not use a journalling file system on your audio drives.
2 Poor compatability.
See the ALSA page for supported hardware.
3 Feature support.
3D sound and simple soundcard MIDI music playback are not much use in a studio.
4 Best Stability.
Audio drivers rarely if ever crash, you may be thinking of sound servers such as ARTS, or indeed a program like xmms.
I think that if Linux makes an impression in the pro-audio recording world, it will initially be as a replacement for dedicated systems like the Mackie HDR 24/94, Fostex MX-2424. These are the workhorses of studios, required to do a straightforward job, but with very high reliability.
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/
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!
ALSA is the ultimate "hackers" plaything; Inscrutable to mere users, it could take months of study to figure out what all that mess is and how to use it properly.
Whatever shortcomings of OSS, they pale in comparison to the jungle known as ALSA. OSS is clean, simple, and portable, everything that ALSA isn't.
Try to sell Linux to a Mac user or a Windows user, but for god's sake DON'T show them ALSA. The Mac guy will either laugh at your face of throw up. It's hard to say what sort of negative gut reaction you'll invoke.
ALSA is the dark side of Linux. It is the epitome of getting it wrong the first and every subsequent time. Talk about design by committee and "too many cooks" . . .
- The live audio stream to be broadcast on Friday and Thursday (probably
between ~ 2 P.M. and 9 P.M. on both days) is available at these LiveIce
servers:
x http://plugin.org.uk:2300/liveice (currently set to max. 50 clients)
x http://politik.uni-duisburg.de:2300/liveice (max. 20 clients)
As posted to the linux-audio-developers mailing list.
Last time I checked up on this (a few weeks ago) there was a big discussion going on kde-multimedia about this very issue. KDE is really the key point here, as now GNOME is moving to GStreamer they are basically isolated from what sound server is used.
The main sticking points seemed to be: JACK is cool for pro audio, but doesn't have network transparency and is Linux only. aRts just blows goats, and needs to be phased out. MAS == Unknown?? GStreamer is being blocked by a few developers who aren't happy with GObject. Then there's this thing called CSL which is supposed to wrap the whole mess up into YAAA (yet another audio api).
Basically, the situation is highly confused, and I don't know if we'll get anything good out of it :(
Oh, and just to make things even more fun, it seems that at some point ALSA may get the ability to route its audio via JACK, so apps that are unaware of the sound server in use could end up being mixed by JACK.
Personally I'd favour JACK (or Jack) here, because firstly it's been designed by the linux audio community for low latency etc, so clearly real audio apps will be using it. Having to switch sound servers because you want to fire up a sample editor is stupid. Secondly, it's light and small enough to be accepted by most people, ie it's not a CORBA driven multimedia framework.
The main problem seems to be lack of network transparency, which isn't really of great concern to most users at this time and could be added to Jack anyway.....
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.