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New MusE Release, A Step Toward The Linux Studio
spamatica writes "In these times when multimedia on Linux seems to be on a roll, it's my pleasure to break the news that one of the most powerful midi/audio sequencers on Linux, MusE, has just had a new release. This release is a major milestone featuring things such as Jack-transport and win32/VST-Instrument support. Moreover it has been much improved concerning usability, stability and functionality. The Linux-based studio is looming ever closer -- in fact, it's here!"
.. all I need now is to get my professional audio card to actually work under Linux.
-el
I can put my old Atari 1040ST to rest. No, seriously, this is another killerapp that kept some of my friends from switching to Linux so far. I am really curious if it is competitve enough and easy to use for all those Apple switchers.
if they made a live distro outof it, then it would help people change. do people want to dump windows before even trying the software: no
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
well, there are reasons to avoid cheap 2nd hand hardware for a studio. if you can't get low latency or a low noise floor out of your sound card, or if you can't get linux drivers for the card, what's the point in saving money?
:)
also, there's no ableton live for linux, which is key in my book
We can all troll that Linux still has trouble supporting sound, decent system-wide hardware MIDI beyond KDE's aRTs MIDI (or a really nice software wavetable synth like WinGroove's), more-than-2 channel support for sound, and difficulties playing DVDs and WMV9 systems (which still seems impossible for the video portion even if the WMA2 stream plays), but I think this could be a push for improvements to all of the above.
(Wow, that was just one sentence)
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
How about some of these super-star coders make things like simple audio work properly on Linux? Hands up if your soundcard doesn't work properly with ALSA, or aRts doesn't work properly
I have a shiny sixpence here that says you have a VIA, i8x0 or other such insanely bad integrated sound device.
I mean honestly, ALSA is usually nothing but flawless with any decent soundcard. Even the $15 SBLive works great. Granted, ALSA isn't the easiest thing to set up, but once it's done, it works. As for aRTs, well hmm,.. it's aRTs you know, but at least with a soundcard that supports hardware mixing, it won't tie your audio out.
Audio on Linux is a joke,
Traditionally that's true. But fortunately, some people want to improve it instead of just whining about it like you.
Oh and also, just so you know, your post was OT, since the article is about a MIDI sequencer, not PCM audio through the soundcard.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Here you are, Mr. Bowie, your studio is finished, you can start recording your next 'Space Oddity' now!
"How come I'm not hearing any sound?"
Oh yeah, I forgot, here's the manual. And a copy of 'How to learn C++ in 21 days'. Don't forget to recompile your kernel once you've written the driver.
"Colonel? Chauffeur??"
Build your own website - full service homepage system your m
Who else has read the title as SusE? This miscapitalization is silly.
If it were a propritary system you could be waiting months or years for support that might not come.
I'm not sure quite how to break this to you, but the essential problem is that the architecture of professional sound cards is a propriatary system.
You cannot write a driver worth a crap against a secret spec. If the card manufacturers will not release those specs you are stuck waiting for support that might not come.
It isn't enough for your software to be open source. Your hardware must be open spec as well.
KFG
Your impression is wrong.
First, you need good A/Ds if you have *any* external instrumentation. If you're using hardware effects (and pros do) you'll need good D/As as well. I have *severe* doubts that the free plugins available will necessarily sound as good as some of the really nice ones from people like Waves or Universal Audio, and many still won't use those plugins, preferring to use outboard hardware (how much is an LA-1 going for these days? Anyone? Bueller?) And those plugins go for damn near as much as the hardware they replace. You can count on a couple grand here; even if you wind up using RNC's for all your compressors, they're still gonna cost you a couple hundred per, and you need more than one if you're doing multitrack.
Many studios provide some instruments to customers; that cost isn't going to change.
You'll need outboard compressors, and outboard mixing, in order to do real multi-tracking (especially of vocals), because you'll have serious dynamic range issues trying to track them without at least a little bit of compression available. You could, I suppose, go straight into pre-amped A/D inputs, but then again, that hardware isn't cheap either.
Good monitoring hardware is important, and you'll need to spend around $1000, minimum, to achieve acceptable results. Most studios will spend more, acquiring multiple pairs of monitors in different price ranges, as well as some typical "home" speakers for final checkout.
And of course, we're forgetting the most expensive, most often forgotten, and in many ways most important part of a studio - the room itself. It can cost a metric ass-tonne in order to properly treat a room, and god forbid you have to knock down/rebuild/move walls to make it sound-tight and to eliminate nasty room modes.
Sure, if you want to do a computer-only studio, which is pretty much useful only for totally synthetic music (you've pretty much limited yourself to non-vocal electronic music with no real instruments and no outboard anything), you could use a Linux solution with spare hardware, but most of that sort of studio wind up spending a bunch on their computer because *everything* has to happen inside of their computer and they don't have enough processing for it all to happen at once.
$50,000 is a reasonable figure for a low-to-mid end studio; of that, exactly how much is the OS, computer software that could be replaced with Free, and computer hardware (not audio hardware) cost? About $5,000, tops.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
No, _MOTU_ are not ready for linux, that's their problem (and their customers')
But there are pro audio sound cards made by companies that actually support Linux.
Not that I'm suggesting you go and change your setup just so that you can run Linux. I can't see any sense in that myself, if your current setup works fine, there's no point in messing with it.
But don't make the blanket claim that it's not ready just because your brand doesn't support it.
Advanced users are users too!
"Why would you now spend $50k on a mac recording studio when you can get a Linux based one for the cost of cheap 2nd hand hardware?."
Because the most you will be spending on a Mac Based Recording Studio will *NOT* be in the computer hardware. If you have $50k in a studio, I can guarentee that at most, a tenth of that is going to be on the computer.
$3k for the highest performing Mac...maybe another $2k for the monitor. Thats $5k right there.
And its well spent because it works out of the box. I don't know about you, but when I'm in a studio, I don't want to deal with computers. I want to deal with music. Then again, thats why PC users call me in...because I can fix their setups. I use to charge $75 an hour for the easy jobs -- and honestly, I've switched tacts over the last few years where I don't want to be bothered by technical bullshit in the studio as I can earn more by dealing with the musical aspects of things as opposed to the technical.
But all in all -- you will not be saving that much all in all. And you won't be saving by running second hand equipment. And if you know anything about music technology, you know the crappy hardware is the death of recording...if all you are doing is a 4 track punk recording or if you are doing offline techno bedroom mixes (and honestly, most techno I've heard could easily be done offline in a loop environment in a bedroom -- its one of the advantages of the medium as well as one of the curses) -- second hand hardware based mediums might work perfectly for you.
Personally, I still deal purely with SCSI and now SATA (firewire is for backups and sample storage). That stuff doesn't come cheap. You *CAN* record the 4 track stuff on a 3 year old laptop with a 5400 RPM drive -- and it will be fine, but when you are recording 64 tracks simultanously (which I rarely do, but I work with studios that do), you will see that your revolution means nothing.
Past that, there is that tricky easy of use thing...people use the Mac because it makes the operating system transparent in many ways. The software they record on is mostly transparent -- at least from a seasoned musicians point of view (there are problems -- otherwise I wouldn't run a forum to help people get over the hump and my friends wouldn't make so much money writting training books or doing instructional dvds).
But all in all -- I say bring it on. The more competition, the better. The more free solutions, the less I have to deal with pirates. The more free solutions, the more potential musicians that might write the next masterpiece. The more not so usable solutions, the more oportunities for music techs to get paid (heh! and maybe the ignorant slashdot masses might actually understand why albums cost so much to record -- because of bastards like me who want to get paid).
I'm gonna have to try this one out as my PC has sat for 6 months without being turned on -- and its actually twice as fast as my Mac. Maybe I might find a reason to use it again...
clif
sonikmatter.com
oh cripes. 90% of the noise floor in a studio is the equipment before the computer.
the Mackie mixers that are typical in home studios have almost a 5 db hiss sitting there with all controls potted all the way down. (5db from silence not from the bizzare zero db refrence that is so prevalent in audio.) then you have how your cables are run, the low end microphones you are using as well as the noise levels coming out of the guitar's, effects pedals, the keyboards and synth modules themselves (alesis = high noise floor!)
sorry, but a guy in his basement with a turtlebeach santa cruz $48.00 soundcard can get studio quality recording quite easily. going overboard with $300-$500 dollar soundcards and all the other junk without upgrading and making sure your entire analog path is quiet is completely foolish.
low noise floor starts with your audio-gear NOT in the computer.... that's the last place you need to look.