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!"

Comments

Finally,

[Lispy]

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.

Re:Finally,

[Threni]

> What's this Atari ST nonsense?

So you know little about audio software, right? Cubase on the ST was more stable and usable 12 or more years ago than the same software under Windows. I gave up trying to get accurate, fast hihats on my PC, instead using Cakewalk (which is inferior to Cubase in practically every other way). Cubase on the ST is rock solid, with out-of-the-box midi support, and many studios still use it. You're suggesting people upgrade from STs just because they're old? Why? That's just not how things work once you get out of the PC industry. People upgrade because there's a point to it, or because they have to, not just because they can.

Re:Finally,

[LizardKing]

What's this Atari ST nonsense?

I still use Steinberg Pro-24 (the forerunner to Cubase) on an Atari ST. It is far more stable than any version of Cubase that I have used on a PC. I don't own a Mac, but I do hear that recent versions of Cubase have been rock solid on that operating system. So if I upgraded that would be they way I'd go. Then again by the time I can afford a decent Mac, Rosegarden (http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/) may have reached a stable release ...

As for the poster below who talks about booting from a 720Kb floppy, my ST has a SCSI hard drive, and boots in seconds.

This is where Apple has traditionally worked

[Saven Marek]

This is where Apple has traditionally worked, and it's been a strong position for them.

While the market isn't big, it is fiercely loyal and worth money to them. Now that Linux based solutions can compete and strip away that advantage, Linux too will embed itself more concretely in the mindset of Yet Another Subculture.

Heh. 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?. Revolutions baby...

The Nets Biggest Adult Anime Gallery's

Re:This is where Apple has traditionally worked

[proj_2501]

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 :)

Re:This is where Apple has traditionally worked

[Dylan2000]

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??"

Re:This is where Apple has traditionally worked

[pesc]

After all ur working digitally, and can do all ur audio straight from what ur working on into a CD ISO.

You need a professional soundcard because:

1) You may want to record good quality audio. Maybe from several sources simultaneously.

2) You may want to listen to what you are doing before burning a CD.

3) You need a professional soundcard with latency of a few ms (and good drivers) so that you can play a note on a MIDI keyboard and not having to wait half a second to hear it from your softsynth and effects.

Re:This is where Apple has traditionally worked

[ajs318]

And therein lies the problem.

When the US constitution was written, nobody could have foreseen that one day, the technology would exist that would enable a manufacturer to sell something which effectively kept a secret from its rightful owner. If you bought a locked box, you could always split it open. If you bought something tiny, you could always look at it through a microscope. It just wasn't anything to be bothered about. (This is the same thinking as "you could always sneak off into the woods somewhere to be sure of having a private conversation".) It was simply inconceivable that that "right" could be violated, and therefore, it wasn't viewed as worthy of protection -- it would have been about as sensible as a law today issuing speeding tickets for anybody caught travelling at more than 300 megametres per second. Furthermore, the Founding Fathers wanted to keep the laws fair and few. Banning the impossible would have been a Bad Law -- it was redundant, because there was no conceivable way to break it, and also it might encourage future lawmakers to create redundant laws.

Fast forward 200-odd years and see how things have changed. Now it is physically possible to attempt to keep details of a purchased product secret from its rightful owner, with a high barrier to discovery; though this is clearly at odds with common law property rights. And the rest of the world seems hell-bent on adopting US-style law.

What we basically need is a new law clarifying -- for it is not, by any leap of imagination, a new right, but dates back to the time before it was physically possible even to violate that right -- that the rightful owner of a piece of hardware is, by sole virtue of such ownership, automatically privy to {but may be bound to keep} any and every secret contained within that piece of hardware. For manufacturers to attempt to keep secrets from the very people who pay their wages is very broken, and should not be tolerated. There might be some predictable protest from manufacturers, upset at the though of competitors knowing their secrets -- but the chances are that your competitors have already reverse-engineered your secrets. (side note: should we try ATI for open source nVidia drivers?) Furthermore, there are such things as patents, which oblige other people to pay you money before they make any money out of your ideas (at least until such time as you ought to have made enough money out of them and now it's everyone else's turn) which actually can be used properly.

(Of course, such a law may turn out to be unnecessary: it is entirely conceivable that a future technological change will restore the situation where keeping secrets from your customers is impossible.)

ardour?

[MancunianMaskMan]

anyone know how this compares (quality-wise, cpu-hunger-wise, functionality-wise) to ardour.

I can't try it out because my pII-233 is a bit weak...

Re:ardour?

[JohnWilliams]

Ardour is a hard disk recorder. Muse is a MIDI sequencer with some support for audio tracks. They are not competitive, but complementary.

Pushing for multimedia power in Linux

[Zorilla]

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)

Re:It looks fully functional but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Here it is: http://www.agnula.org/ and here is the MuSE tutorial: http://www.agnula.org/documentation/dp_tutorials/m use/index_html/view

Re:Thats nice

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Copies of the changelog

[djcapelis]

The slashdot effect is starting on the poor site and the database only allows 32 connections at one time... so I figured it would be best to post a copy of the news summaries that it digs out of the database: .7 and .7-PRE4 don't have much changed in the way of news. .7-PRE3

# Configuration and customization

* Shortcuts for 'arrowing around' in arranger added
* changed default start behaviour to open default.med template
* Lots of new icons ;-)
* A proposal for MusE logo (tell us what you think!)
* Autodetect of browser for help system

# MusE general:

* FluidSynth: added support for drum patches
* MusE now will not start if RTC is not available.
* show one more measure in pianoroll and drum editor
* list editor: implemented input mode for program change messages

# Fixed bugs:

* fixed: pitch bend handling and import fixed
* fixed: 'edit - delete track' hangs MusE - bug
* fixed: routing for stereo LADSPA plugins used in mono strips
* fixed: midi import problems
* auxSend chorusSend and reverbSend enabled in midi mixer strip if corresponding controllers are added
* implemented 'Add New Controller' in list editor / edit controller
* midi controller values now saved in .med file
* updated roland-XP30.idf instrument definition
* And a number of other bugs fixed (and added?)
* Also check the TODO for currently known issues. .7-PRE2

# Custom guis for plugins work again
# Splash screen
# LADCCA/LASH support updated
# Cleaned up shortcuts
# Single key shortcuts for edit tools
# Update marker list on tempo change
# Allow adding markers from the ruler with shift-click
# Metronom now sends proper note off events
# Clip list editor deaktivated
# After loading of template, treat current project as 'untitled'
# Song format changed due to bugfixes
# Shortcuts to bug reporting tool and homepage from help menu
# Updated AboutBox
# Fixed QT version check in m4/qt.m4
# And a number of other bugs
# Check the Changelog for a complete list of changes.
# Also check the TODO for currently known issues.

Re:Linux + Guitar

[ptaff]

In addition to the audio/MIDI editing stuff that Muse now has, I'm looking for some decent guitar-oriented analog effects

This would have to be pipelined in Jack. As you'd put your pedals between your guitar and your amp, you'd put a software soundeffect program between the input source and MusE, via Jack. One of the available pipeline filters is JACK Rack, which does what you want.

I've been waiting for MIDI...

[no longer myself]

I've missed messing around with MIDI since I left MS Windows, but this still looks a little too tricky for a convert like me...

~~~ Requirements (paraphrased)
- QT: Qt 3.2.0 or above
- ALSA 0.9.x or newer (cvs)
- gcc 3.x.x
NOTE: you _must_ compile MusE with the same compiler you used to compile QT
- libsndfile 1.0.1 (current 1.0.4)
- Linux kernel with rtc (RealTimeClock) driver (device /dev/rtc)
- JACK
- fluidsynth-1.0.3 (formerly known as iiwusynth)
- of course: a soundcard and/or some midi gear
- (if you compile from cvs:) automake 1.7 and autoconf 2.54
~~~~

I don't even know "JACK", and just looking over these things I'd have to update every single one of these requirements except for the ones I don't even have installed in the first place. I guess I won't be installing this for a while... :-(

Sadly all my boxes have that on-board AC97 audio, and it has no hardware MIDI support at all. Otherwise, ALSA does a great job, and I never needed to configure anything for wave output. Just no MIDI.

(Side note: I never could get things like TiMIDIty to work right either... Guess, I'm just not quite geeky enough... yet.)

Rosegarden

[javilon]

How does Muse compare to Rosegarden?

Re:Rosegarden

[Chris Cannam]

> How does Muse compare to Rosegarden?

Well, they're both audio and MIDI sequencers for Linux. They both support outboard MIDI gear, native Linux ALSA soft synths, and audio and transport synchronisation through JACK. Both look and feel somewhat like the big sequencers for other platforms. Both use Qt for their GUIs, though Rosegarden also uses the KDE libraries. I happen to think Rosegarden has the more polished GUI, but I'm biased (see disclaimer at bottom).

Both support arbitrary numbers of MIDI and audio tracks, with audio mixing and routing capabilities. Both support LADSPA effects plugins, of which there are hundreds available free. Both can (with some work!) be made to use VST effects through vstserver. MusE can host VST instruments with libfst using Wine; either of them can drive VST instruments hosted separately using jack_fst. None of these VST solutions is currently at all easy to configure and build, but see here for more information. Rosegarden is implementing the DSSI synth API and will probably ultimately use a DSSI wrapper for VST instruments. Rosegarden can also be run without audio support if you only want MIDI or score, whereas MusE always requires JACK.

My rather fuzzy impression of the difference in "feel" between them is that MusE feels like it came more from a studio/MIDI gearhead background, Rosegarden more from a composition background. MusE is a bit further ahead with things like instrument plugins, audio routing (send/returns etc) and automation. Rosegarden places a lot more emphasis on the score editor, whereas the one that used to be in MusE was actually removed completely for the 0.7 release.

Rosegarden is a somewhat bigger and more complicated program than MusE (c 200K lines of code vs 130K LOC), which you may see as good or bad depending on whether the extra code happens to do stuff you want or not. They're both written in C++, should you happen to care.

On the subject of soundcard support: the usual quick answer is "it's probably supported unless it's FireWire or made by MOTU". In particular the current M-Audio, Terratec and RME semi-pro gear mostly works fine, as well as most consumer cards. The lack of FireWire audio device support currently is a pain though. Anyway, see the ALSA soundcard matrix for detailed information.

(Disclaimer: I am a Rosegarden developer and, although I track MusE CVS, I have never actually managed to get MusE 0.7 to build because I don't have the right libraries and autotools. So do take all this with a pinch of salt.)

Re:Exciting..

[abe ferlman]

My Delta 1010 works just fine, as does my Turtle Beach USB MIDI adapter.

Your Echo Darla, Gina, Layla or RME Hamerfall card would be supported by ALSA as well, among others. Linux audio may have issues, but a lack of professional sound cards that work is not one of them.

Yes, but...

[Ed Avis]

Does it run on SuSE?

Re:VSTi support??

[wulfhound]

In theory this allows all Windows VSTs to work. In practice compatibility is somewhat less than 100% due to bugs in the VSTis themselves, or lack of support for nasty things like PACE copyprotection drivers which quite a few VSTs (including, I think, TC) use.

Re:Exciting..

[zerblat]

Actually it's the other way around, Aardvark doesn't support ALSA. Had they supplied the ALSA people with sufficient specs, I'm sure your Q10 would be working in Linux right now. Have you contacted Aardvark and told them that you would be interested in support for ALSA?

Check out PlanetCCRMA

[theManInTheYellowHat]

There is a great deal of work that should be reviewed by anyone concidering Linux sound / video production and I am supprized that someone has not mentioned it yet.

Planet CCRMA is awesome! This is such a good start for everyone who says "I am not geeky enough to get {insert package here} working". I suspect that the FC2 iso's are close to coming out, the ones for FC1 are excelent. You basicly install FC and then there is a kernel iso and an app iso which installs most of the known linux sound apps. The mailing list is also quite active and the people very helpful.

Strong work from Fernando Lopez-Lezcano!!!

Re:Close, but no cigar

[Lumpy]

I've had a few friends adventurous to consider playing around with Linux audio programs, but when they ask if their $200 (and up) interfaces don't work and the best I can do is point them to the O'Reilly book on writing Linux drivers, it's (understandably) a real turn-off.

Of course, you're being an ass to them by playing the elitest RTFM! game.

Linux supports a WIDE range of professional sound recording cards. if you would have actually searched instead of acting like a snide know-it-all to your friends you would have known this....

Here, I'll help you...

Alsa sound card matrix.

it shows support for the Sonorus medi/o and studi/o professional 24 channel recording cards.

Oh look it supports the RME hammerfall card 52 recording channels at 24bit resolution.

There are lots more supported, I leave it up to you to find the rest in the link above.

I strongly suggest you actually learn about the ALSA support of professional soundcards and the PRO MIDI interfaces.... the midiman usb midi devices are also well supported and used extensively by professionals. Handing out advice to people when you do not know the facts only spreads bad information.

and as always, find out what is supported and then go buy it. buying something at random and then hoping it is supported is always a silly thing to do.