Wired: Pro-Level, GPL'd Audio Editing For Linux

Sven Hertz writes "For all us music professionals who were longing to a promising music production and creation software on Linux, there is now Wired (screenshots). It supports unlimited Audio/Midi tracks playback and recording, and introduces a Plugin system for instruments and effects (VST support under way too). It can also read AKAI CDs and import 18 different Wave formats. The first test version was released a few days ago and its news made the rounds successfully on OSNews & GnomeDesktop while it was placed "app of the week" over at GnomeFiles."

Comments

This rules

[necro2607]

Awesome... The only reason I still use Windows on my desktop is because the audio software I use is Windows-only...

Let's hope this program will be good enough for me to be able to switch over to Linux full-time :)

Re:This rules

[Indy Media Watch]

I will probably be branded a troll for this, but have you considered Macintosh?

It beats Windows hands-down for anythiing to do with audio/video straight out of the box. As much as I support Linux development, I don't think the release of first-generation software makes it quite ready for the studio yet.

As an added bonus, OS X will probably run everything else you are looking at. Think about it...

Re:This rules

[necro2607]

Yeah, I actually have an old PowerComputing PowerTower Pro 225, upgraded to a G3 450mhz. Has 512mb of RAM too.

Only thing is it's about 8 or 9 years old, the [SCSI/expensive-to-replace] hard drives work only intermittently, and I can't really run Mac OS X on it unless I can find an old ATI Rage 128 or similar Mac OS X-supported video card (the IMS TwinTurbo 128 piece of crap in there isn't supported). I installed OS X before but it crashed constantly and wouldn't display higher than 640x480 resolution. :(

Also I just prefer to do it all on my Windows comp seeing as it's far faster than my Mac (Athlon XP 2000+ w/512mb DDR RAM), runs a recent OS, and has 320gb of disk space. It's just all-around a better environment to work with, especially with CPU-intensive audio processing... other than the fact that it runs Windoze...

But you're right, I really would actually prefer to have a nice G4 with tons of space and so on. I just don't have enough money to put towards such an awesome computer. I'll end up getting an awesome Mac to do my audio stuff but that's well in the future. For now my band and I are at the 'bottom of the food chain', so to speak, so yeah... it's low-budget solutions for us, for the time being.

Re:This rules

[UnknownSoldier]

Maybe the /. crowd can help point out a Mac, Window, & Linux versions of these Audio/Video apps?

CakeWalk
BeSweet
VirtualDub
TMPGEnc
Alcohol 120%
DVD Decryter
DVD Shrink
? => DVD Studio Pro
Nero => DiskBlaze (or are there better burning apps?)

I'm in the process of switching over to Mac OS X. (The only other OS that ever got me excited was BeOS.) The funny thing is I used to *hate* Macs, LOL.

Peace

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually this is a bit of a myth now.. it was true say 5 years ago but not these days - ProTools et al has fine Win support.

Re:This rules

[krymsin01]

I use a program called Buzz. It's a windows program, and was once the only reason I used windows at all. Buzz is a modular synthesizer/composer, and a very powerfull tool once you get used to it. I tried to get it to run under wine, but never with much success (various dlls would kill wine). Eventualy, I found a good tutorial on how to get it working under wine. Haven't used buzz on a windows machine since.

Re:This rules

[necro2607]

Ahh yeah someone I know recommended Buzz to me one time. I thought it was cool, but it felt like a step backwards for me, learning a whole new interface which likely wouldn't have much benefit for me compared to what I've been using... Uh I think basically I just didn't feel like learning a whole new program, especially with the minimal free time I have these days.. :\

Anyway I actually started out using a similar (although primitive in comparison) program called PlayerPro for Mac OS years ago, which was a pretty simple "tracker" type program. Buzz seems to reproduce (and supercede) that functionality completely. I really wish I had had that kind of software available to me back then!!

Re:This rules

[krymsin01]

Yeah, I started out with Impulse Tracker, heh.

Re:This rules

[CowboyBob500]

For Mac:-

CakeWalk -> Logic Audio/Cubase/ProTools/GarageBand
BeSweet -> FFMPegX
VirtualDub -> ?
TMPGEnc -> FFMPegX
Alcohol 120% -> Dragon Burn
DVD Decryter -> MacTheRipper
DVD Shrink -> DVD2OneX
? => DVD Studio Pro -> Sizzle
Nero => DiskBlaze -> Dragon Burn

For Linux:-

CakeWalk -> Rosegarden/Ardour
BeSweet -> Mencoder
VirtualDub -> KDenLive
TMPGEnc -> Mencoder
Alcohol 120% -> K3B
DVD Decryter -> AcidRip/Video-DVDRip
DVD Shrink -> ?/DVDShrink runs under Wine
? => DVD Studio Pro -> DVDAuth
Nero => DiskBlaze -> K3B

Bob

Re:This rules

[renoX]

Do you realise you advise him getting a new computer for an app?

Kind of expensive, don't you think? Especially since he has already a working solution dual booting Windows..

I wouldn't brand you as a troll, but as an "over-enthousiast"!

Re:This rules

[The_reformant]

Buzz was an awesome little program. I used it for a good few years before graduating to cubase

Re:This rules

[UnknownSoldier]

Thx Bob!

Too bad /. didn't have stickies, as we could compile a "recommended" app list summary.

I finally remembered that DVD authoring program for Windows...
- DVD Maestro => DVD Studio, or Sizzle
(Allthough it is no longer being sold. :( I wonder what people are using instead?)

You a Red Dwarf fan?! The seasons are out on DVD! (Or your "local" torrent TV show listing)

Peace

Re:This rules

[Bedouin X]

What does the Mac do out of the box that Windows doesn't do? Like you, I'm not trolling but I really don't see any evidence of this. I have been a Mac user for 15 years and have a dual G4 in my office and have been settng up a couple of dual G5 ProTools systems over the past few months so I have a decent cache of experience to go on.

Maybe in the Windows 3.1 days or even windows 9x I would concede that the Mac had better audio capabilities by default, but I really don't see it these days.

Re:This rules

[Lumpy]

for mac -> seting up any of these audio tools is easy.

for linux -> getting alsa and JACK running together correctly is a nightmare.

getting some of the apps to recognize your version of JACK is also a fight, give up on binaries, try to compile and then can not figure out why rosegarden will not see your installed JACK libraries and therefore refuses to compile with JACK support making it 100% useless.

Fight to get your midiman MIDI hardware recognized. Get pissed because your nice 8 channel USB midi rackmount device is not supported yet, you need to downgrade to the 2 port cheap model.

Be happy that your pro soundcard is supported, format your linux partition and go back to windows in hopes of tyring this while dance again in another 6 months.

I am a huge support and user of linux, the only 2 machines in my home that run windows are my video editor and the dedicated audio PC in the music studio.

I would love to get microsoft completely out of my house but it is not possible yet again.

Re:This rules

[boodaman]

Maybe it is due to lack of knowledge, but I haven't found anything yet that compares to SonicFoundry (now Sony) ACID on Windows. I have a G4 Powerbook, and GarageBand, but it just isn't the same. In my amateur opinion, GarageBand doesn't come close to ACID, and the interface is horrible.

I use Windows, OS X, and Linux at home, on three different computers. Whenever I want to whip up some quick audio tracks, whether for fun or something serious, I always find myself back at ACID on Windows. It just works, the interface is great, and it is inexpensive (almost as cheap as iLife/GarageBand).

I've looked for over 2 years for something comparable, preferably on Linux, and haven't found anything. For my purposes, ACID is the "killer app"...its the one app that is preventing me from dumping Windows altogether.

If anyone out there knows of a stable, robust application that is ACID-like, can read my hundreds of ACID project files (not loops, but the project files describing tracks), isn't GarageBand, and runs on Linux, I'd love to hear about it.

Re:This rules

[NanoGator]

"Do you realise you advise him getting a new computer for an app?"

He suggested it as a consideration. Nothing wrong with that. It's up to him to decide if it's too spendy or not. When it comes to content creation, using the right tools for the job is never frowned upon.

Re:This rules

[boodaman]

I agree with your assessment. I've had many similar difficulties myself.

Re:This rules

[Hackeron]

I know compiling shouldnt be needed to begin with, but I had great experience getting things working on gentoo.

Not sure about hardware support as my sblive! platinum has better support than under windows -- but I would recommend trying gentoo. A lot of work was put in to make everything just work there.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using Alcohol 120% mainly for it's virtual drive features on Windows, you won't need anything on the Mac. DiskCopy (now DiskUtility, i believe) allows you to create images of disks, and the OS supports mounting of these natively. And it's been that way for at least the 10+ years that I've been using Macs...One of the beauties of not having letters assigned to drives...

Re:This rules

[MrHanky]

For something that can be used a bit like Buzz, but is far more advanced, try Pure Data. Be prepared for a very steep learning curve, though. The default screen is just a blanc canvas, and it doesn't need to be used like a tracker (the likeness to Buzz is in the modular approach to synthesis).

Re:This rules

[Maznafein]

The one thing that I dislike about windows in the studio. It's not reliable. I work in various studios depending on the projects I'm hired for. When I work in a studio that has windows I pray so hard that while the band is playing or the rapper is doing his thing that the thing doesn't crash out.

I've had three projects crash in three different studios because of windows. Every time I've brought my power book or worked on a mac this hasn't happened.

Though as long as I can export everything into wav files to import into logic I'm happy.

-maz

Re:This rules

[UnknownSoldier]

> If you're using Alcohol 120% mainly for it's virtual drive features on Windows, you won't need anything on the Mac.

Yeap, .dmg files rock. The auto-run feature when mounted is just a bonus.

The other reason to use Alcohol is to rip music & games.

The music part is covered with iTunes. Even rips to aac, and mp3 out of the box!

Peace

Re:This rules

[Necr0maN]

I think you really should check out Ableton Live (for mac or wintel), it has the same autostretching loop-based approach as ACID + lots of extra's.

Re:This rules

[spectre_240sx]

Well, if a cheap video card is all you're looking for to get that mac running the way you want it, here you go: Apple Mac ATI Radeon 7000 32MB 32 MB PCI Video Card

Re:This rules

[micromoog]

There's already a gigantic shitload of good audio software for Linux . . . I'd call this a "minor addition". Here's a listing. There's also an entire Linux distribution set up for audio.

Here's what I use:
multitracking: Ardour
MIDI sequencer: Rosegarden
editor: Audacity
drums: Hydrogen
softsynths: Alsa Modular and QSynth

There's really a ton of stuff out there . . . it just (like almost all free/OSS) doesn't get as much exposure as commercial work.

Re:This rules

[Acous]

http://developer.apple.com/audio/coreaudio.html

Re:This rules

[Bedouin X]

Seriously, this sounds like it either happened back in the early Windows 9x days (or earlier) or on poorly maintained Windows installations. My Mac digital audio experience mainly consists of MAX and ProTools and I'll tell you that I've had ProTools on my G5s crash more in the last three days than I've had Sonar or Nuendo crash in the past few years on Windows. The Mac also has a much larger propensity to randomly crash or lock up. I hear Mac users say what you've been saying all the time but it just doesn't jibe with my real world experience. I think that people are just so used to saying it that they haven't bothered to check recent developments.

This has generally been the case since Windows 2000 dropped. I've been using and setting up Macs and PCs in studios for 15 years and it appears as if the tables have pretty much turned. Well, not really as the Mac doesn't suck on digital audio like Windows did, but Windows certainly has earned its stripes and is - at minimum - a peer to the Mac in digital audio.

Re:This rules

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Show me the ports of any Sonic Foundry products (now owned my Sony) to OS X. Show me a decent drum machine. In fact, show me a non-apple produced audio editing application without a more current windows version.

My holy trinity: Vegas for recording, Sound Forge for editing, and (insert sequencer here) for arrangement. Two out of three don't exist on Mac.

Re:This rules

[Bedouin X]

This is fine for developers, but I'm speaking from an end user perspective. I can go the the store and by ProTools or Nuendo for the PC or the Mac, take it home and install it with similar results. The G5 is cool in that it has a built in lightpipe interface, but if that's a requirement (and it's far from a general one), not paying the Mac Tax will free up money to buy an even better interface.

Re:This rules

[I(rispee_I(reme]

It's not my intention to spam this article with Sonic Foundry Products, but CD Architect is the best audio cd authoring program I've used.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Demudi from the AGNULA project. Tons of audio tools, (including Rosegarden, JACK, Muse, Ardour,Hydrogen, +++) all in binaries and working.

If you want a working Linux/JACK system I recomend Demudi......

Re:This rules

[venomkid]

Agreed, man. I do all my music on Buzz. People are surprised to find out it's all done in a free (as in beer) piece of software. (http://www.lacunaemusic.com/)

Gotta love those finnish hackers.

Re:This rules

[UnRDJ]

There are loads of (mostly free) VSTs for windows not available on the mac (most smartelectronix stuff, synthedit, and synth1 come to mind). These are usually the kinds of plugins that do "non traditional" stuff for people looking to do more cutting-edge, experimental stuff with their music, which makes windows ideal for this. I'm assuming Wired will run windows VSTs, which is really exciting as it could allow for a more stable, secure and efficient DAW that will run all these great plugins.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

and here is a link agnula

Re:This rules

[IANAAC]

You do realize that people do that all the time? New apps are what drive PC sales, not the OS - particularly games.

But yes, I agree it probably shouldn't be that way.

Re:This rules

[dgatwood]

Alternately, it should take about two or three days for an experienced programmer to put together a simple device driver wrapper around an existing driver, and MkLinux has a (limited, non-accelerated) BSD driver for the TT, IIRC. (I suggest this one because BSD drivers are generally easy to wrap with I/O Kit drivers because the driver models are relatively similar. Linux drivers may or may not port as easily, depending on the subsystem.)

Just a thought.

Re:This rules

[djdavetrouble]

He suggested it as a consideration. Nothing wrong with that. It's up to him to decide if it's too spendy or not. When it comes to content creation, using the right tools for the job is never frowned upon.
Everytime there is a linux audio discussion on here someone comes along and says what about OS X, it just works. Well, agreed, and it also just works on Wintel machines also, But the cool thing is that there is this group of people that think it could work on OSF software as well. I have built mac audio systems for jobs, and if you start with a new computer, and actually purchase several software suites and/or an audio interface like MOTU or Protools, you are looking at a 4 thousand dollar investment when all is said and done. Now, what many of us have is way more time than money, so getting x to work with y on linux may be a pain, but it still costs no money, and something was prob. learned along the way. This makes the experience a valuable 'pain in the ass' to those DIY types that expect to not only use what they have built, but also expect to understand it on a deeper level than double click, enter serial number, and run.

Re:This rules

[ThJ]

I'm inclined to agree. I used a Mac ProTools system for some time. I wasn't impressed. SONAR 4 beats the crap out of Cubase and ProTools. And it works reliably for hours on end... unless you start installing sucky plug-ins, etc...

Re:This rules

[dgatwood]

No kidding. My Mac list:

Audio: Digital Performer
MIDI: Sagan Tech Metro (formerly Cakewalk Metro), though I haven't used it since 5 or so.

I'm told DP's MIDI support is also superb, but I haven't done MIDI in a while, so I can't say for sure.

I just switched from another DAW to Digital Performer and couldn't be happier (occasional crashes in 4.12 notwithstanding). It took all of about two hours for me to be comfortable with it. Some of the keystroke commands are different, and it takes a little while to be comfortable with the menu layout, but otherwise, it's just so brain-dead obvious that if you've ever used any DAW, you should feel right at home.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeez Bob! Where the hell is JAMin. Boy, we work our fingers to the bone... ;-)

Jan

Re:This rules

[screeble]

Gotta love those finnish hackers.

I assume you mean Oskari Tammelin?

I love Buzz and use it for a guitar processor. I totally agree that Buzz is an amazing piece of free software.

However, I find the whole "hard drive crash" thing awful convenient. Remember, Oskari was the guy who was "dumb" enough to develop without backups and then have a "convenient" hard drive crash shortly before Buzz plugin support appeared in Fruityloops. http://www.flstudio.com/

Shortly after the crash we saw the appearance of XS-1 and BuzzVST as well. Hmmmmmmm.

Personally, this "crash" looks like a few cards up the sleeve and a personal marketing move. Oh well, for the most part mod scenesters are complete asshats so who could blame Oskari for turning his back on them?

Here's hoping some Buzz clones can pick up the torch someday...

http://buzzle.spr.at/

http://buzztard.org/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/venomtwist/

http://neuro.snusnu.at/muwiki/index.php/Cockslap

Re:This rules

[B1gP4P4Smurf]

As a Linux audio developer I would have to agree with you. Very few people on LAD claim this stuff is ready for prime time yet. So, please don't jump to conclusions about Linux audio sucking, give it a year or so. The usability issues are universally acknowledged and people are working on it...

Re:This rules

[Acous]

Oh, sorry. :P.

Seriously though, I can only speak from my experience with consumer level stuff -- not having any significant experience with professional audio software. Firstly, what's good for developers is ultimately good for end users. As far as I know (and I could easily be wrong), ProTools has (had?) it's own audio system. They had to write the equivilant of CoreAudio specifically for their app. Plugins, midi handling and audio device drivers had to be written specifically for ProTools. Without that overhead the developers could have put the time towards polishing the program itself or adding new features.

Having one audio engine also means you can download one effects plugin and have it work in any of your audio apps. In theory it means you could easily and efficiently pipe audio around from app to app through plugins and external interfaces and what not... but I don't know how easy that is in practise. New features can also be added to the OS and all applications get the benefit.

It isn't as significant for cross platform developers, but if you used a mac I'm sure you would still see benefits. There's a wide range of CoreAudio plugins and utilities available -- which can be used no matter what piece of software you choose.

I also gather that CoreAudio uses pretty a clean and efficient design in comparison to the alternatives (ALSA, ASIO etc. i guess?). That probably means lower latency and more flexibility.

Re:This rules

[TheLittleJetson]

I would love to get microsoft completely out of my house but it is not possible yet again.

Get a mac. They're great for audio.

Re:This rules

[TheLittleJetson]

I really would actually prefer to have a nice G4 with tons of space and so on. I just don't have enough money to put towards such an awesome computer.

You could get a powerbook g4 on ebay with a broken screen, and just put the guts in customized desktop case (outta wood or something). Small and cheap...

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to.

But I do not have the $3000.00 needed to buy that MAC (plus where do you get a rackmount Mac G4??) plus the software I use in the studio.

So get a MAC, while a real answer is not a real solution.

Re:This rules

[St. Arbirix]

I bow before thee.

I missed Buzz. All the tutorials I could find stunk. It's back now... *sniff*

Re:This rules

[reflective recursion]

The cost of a computer and software is miniscule when doing things at a professional level. If the software available already for Linux/Windows isn't good enough, then you're probably a professional and can afford to get the right tool for the right job.

People used to purchase expensive SGI machines for rendering. Film/video editors purchase expensive Avid machines, and lately they have been purchasing *cheap* Macs with Final Cut Pro. $3000-4000 Mac vs. a $10,000+ Avid? Whatever will get the job done.

It's a shame that Linux and even Windows have poor support in certain areas, but it's completely the fault of the API layer. Anyone serious about developing professional-level applications using GNOME API with ALSA/Jack is insane.

Re:This rules

[MsGeek]

I would kill for an ACID-type program for Linux. Ableton Live is good on the MacOS side but it's even more expensive than ACID.

The DeMuDi project seems to be pushing sound recording on Linux pretty far forward, but there needs to be a good loop composing program for it.

Re:This rules

[Bedouin X]

ProTools is unique in that it uses hardware DSP. This is, yet is a little different from, what you refer to as it's own audio system.

Of course Windows has Direct X which is pretty much the same idea with a wider scope, though CoreAudio is probably a better system-level implementation. From what I've seen CoreAudio doesn't offer much more in the way of lower-latency with respect to ASIO (don't know much about ALSA to be honest) but I'll give you that having a solid core level of functionality can only be a good thing in the long run.

With the availability of ASIO in pretty much every halfway serious Windows audio driver, I'm not sure if there is so big a real-world advantage in CoreAudio right now.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't read the parent, but I don't think buying a new computer for a specific app is unreasonable. Consider the server room, it's common place to dedicate a single system to NFS, or Apache, ntop, etc.

My highest powered system is dedicated to audio. I bought Renoise ($45) as my primary application, and there's a myriad of free sources of VST effects and instruments and samples out there (see thread in their forum for lists). The point is that I can easily max my CPU usage, without even stepping outside of Renoise just with sample data and its built-in effects, add VST and I can bring my system to its knees easily.

If you're even semi-serious about your hobby or profession, it's not unreasonable to dedicate a system to a single purpose.

Re:This rules

[blincoln]

CakeWalk -> Logic Audio/Cubase/ProTools/GarageBand

I can't speak about GarageBand, but none of those others are drop-in replacements for Cakewalk/Sonar.

Logic is like a sci-fi set piece designed by a team of Germans wasted on PCP. I've tried using it before and couldn't even figure out how to send a SYSEX message.

Cubase is a sea of windows, and I also found it very unintuitive (although less so than "Logic").

ProTools is an awesome digital audio system, but the last time I used it the MIDI support was not very good. Maybe they've improved it recently, but I remember the focus being squarely on digital audio.

Cakewalk/Sonar are the only really intuitive MIDI/Digital Audio recording suites I've ever used. There used to be a Mac product with a similar interface, but I believe it was discontinued years ago. I think it was by MOTU. If Wired is like Sonar, I might consider setting up a Linux recording system the next time I have the space for one.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, since you mentioned Buzz, I have to plug Renoise

Personally I chose Renoise over Buzz, Renoise doesn't have any built-in 'buzz machines', so you have to use samples, and it has full VST support including multi-tibral support now. Renoise is a tracker on steroids.

Renoise just released a public beta of their latest and greatest. I just installed yesterday and I'm very impressed so far.

Re:This rules

[k31bang]

for linux -> getting alsa and JACK running together correctly is a nightmare.


You are right. I was having such a hard time with alsa and JACK that I said "screw it", and got MediaLinux 2. (Purchased my copy from Linuxcd.org because I don't have broadband)

Re:This rules

[FrkyD]

except that you DO NOT NEED $3000.

I do professional audio production on a Powerbook, but it is overkill for a good portion of my work, and if it hadn't been for my video hobby, a $900 ibook would have sufficed. I use a firewire external audio solution, although if you absolutely must have a high end audio card (why are you bitching about $3000 then) you can get a desktop G5 for starting at $1499.

Our production team had been happily working along on roughly 500mhz g4s for ages, so the fact is you can get work done on ANY of the current models. Hell, I used to do broadcast video production on 9600s and G3's, both of which could be picked up for a song, if you were capable of writing one worth selling.

Re:This rules

[yog]

Has anyone created a Linux distro especially for audio applications? It seems as though there are thousands of people out there who need it, and it takes an inordinate amount of effort to get the general Linux distribution to do audio properly.

I just upgraded my Redhat 8 system to Fedora Core 2 to take advantage of lots of security fixes. The old system used OSS for audio and while it wasn't perfect and lots of apps (Rosegarden, e.g.) don't use OSS, most things worked. Now I'm struggling with getting alsa to work properly with things like mplayer and Crossover. I can't record from the audio input, I can't watch AVI or MPEG videos, Microsoft Media Player under Crossover has no sound, and the docs and FAQs are of little help. OSS Emulation doesn't seem to work all that well unless I've got something really basic set up wrong.

If someone out there were to take Fedora and smooth out the audio stuff so that musicians and music fans could just install it and run with it, it would be a tremendous help. I guess it's time to put in some suggestions at fedora.redhat.com and hope they can devote some time to this soon.

In the meantime, my audio recording work happens on my Compaq laptop running Windows 2K Pro, Adobe Audition, and USB MIDI Man :(

Re:This rules

[mellon]

It sounds like you have bad RAM. Every time I've run into instability problems on the Mac it's been because of bad RAM. If the RAM is okay, the thing never crashes.

Re:This rules

[Sj0]

For the record: Ew, rosegarden.

Before I picked up a cheap copy of magix, I used this ancient windows 3.1 program to compose songs, and it was infinitely better than rosegarden. There MUST be something better.

Re:This rules

[Bedouin X]

If that's the case then Apple has ginormous problems with RAM - and has for years.

Seriously I think that this is more of a ProTools problem but out of the 5 Macs that I normally use (1 powerbook, 1 iBook, 1 G4, and 2 G5s), random lockups occour notably more frequently than with my PC.

Re:This rules

[log0n]

My G5 never randomly crashes or locks up. Neither does my PC for that matter...

Sounds like you have some bad memory on your hands.

Re:This rules

[connorbd]

A G4 can be modded for rackmount -- I don't have a source for you but it involves replacing the CPU handles with some kind of bracket. I don't think a G5 can, though -- different case design obviously. If you don't need expandability you can get an iMac or eMac -- both are basically just monitors with built-in computers, so integrating them into a rack environment wouldn't be too hard.

If you had the budget (which you pretty explicitly said you don't) I'd say go for an Xserve if you need rackmount.

Re:This rules

[necro2607]

I'd be glad to do that if I had any clue how to do so.. I don't even care about the video performance of the comp, since I'd just be using it for audio anyways...

The only reason I can't just use it right now is it constantly crashes. Plus I'd like to be able to use a resolution higher than 640x480 too.

Re:This rules

[Bedouin X]

I don't mean to make it sound like the OS randomly crashes or locks up on me constantly, but I might get a lockup every month or so with an app crashing at about the same clip.

ProTools is much worse though and two of the systems in question are built around ProTools. We recently added Final Cut Pro HD, but these issues existed before that on both our ProTools HD2 and HD3 machines...

One machine did have a bad motherboard which was fixed by Apple ($899 tag) but it would be a serious coincidence is this is an across the board memory problem.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

It ain't just a river in Egypt.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

DP is hand's down the best!! I use it a lot. The only problem: now everything else sucks!

Re:This rules

[makohund]

Go install DeMudi. It's Debian, but tweaked for audio & music production.

It "just works". Didn't have to do or set up squat... it was all there ready to rock as soon as the install finished. Hardware, software, ALSA, JACK, Ardour... the whole ball of wax.

Didn't even have to touch anything to get our Delta 1010 working.

I've shown the setup to peeps used to doing audio on windows, and left them in awe... asking me to burn a copy off for them. They've all come back to thank me a few days later.

Trust me... it's sweet as can be.

Re:This rules

[object88]

ProTools isn't unique in the fact that it uses DSPs. You have systems like Creamware and (the now defunct) PARIS which follow a similar concept.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a firewire external audio solution, although if you absolutely must have a high end audio card (why are you bitching about $3000 then) you can get a desktop G5 for starting at $1499.

Considering he already has a PC, the cost is $0. That is infinitely less expensive than $1499 and repurchasing software licenses.

Plus, you can build a dual cpu P4 in a rack mount case, slide it into a suitcase rack and throw in an 8 or 16 channel professional audio card for less than the cost of a G4.

The amount of horsepower needed is dependant upon your methods. A powerbook is sufficient for playing back soundfonts or running a sequencer, but if you depend heavily on soft synthesis, then you are going to want a bit more capability.

Just a thought considering Reason, Cakewalk and other "tools that matter" are multiplatform now. It isn't like a Mac is going to "sound better" or do anything better in these programs. It is time we quit living in 1990 and realize x86 dominates music, gaming, and video.

I do my work in Cakewalk, using Reason's soft synthesis and my faithful Korg's oscillators.

Re:This rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Maznafein,

Either you are lying or you are working with completely incompetent people.

First off, I spend about 4-6 hours a day in Cakewalk/Sonar on Windows XP. I've got 3 100GB drives full of editors, samples, patches, and various bits of content I have created. Know when the last time I had the system hang was? About 4 months ago, but that was due to a VSTi not getting along with the hacked up device I had connected to control a modulation wheel in a soft-synth.

So please quit coming to /. trying to play the "OH WINDOWS JUST LOCKS UP A LOT" BS. If this were the case, then there would be no Windows in studios and from the ones I've seen, there are more people using Windows for audio production these days.

Re:This rules

[Bedouin X]

You are correct. We actually have old MicroSound systems in our studios that do this. But as far as the market leaders go, it seems that Digidesign is the only vendor that exclusively relies on this approach.

GPLed?

[Poromenos1]

It's GPLed too?

Re:GPLed?

[necro2607]

Topic says:

"Wired: Pro-Level, GPL'd Audio Editing For Linux"

Re:GPLed?

[Poromenos1]

I should start reading the topics instead of just clicking on them :(

Re:GPLed?

[Zorilla]

No, by all means, click on links without looking.

In fact, check out my new web page

Re:GPLed?

[LnxAddct]

At least he's rtfa :)

But...

[flewp]

will it run on linux?

Sorry, I had to. But on a serious note, does anyone know of any good free audio editing software for Windows? I don't currently have a sound card in my linux box, but I might throw one in if this is a nice program.

Re:But...

[flewp]

Ooops, I meant audio editing/music production.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

>> But on a serious note, does anyone know of any good free audio editing software for Windows?

AFAIK, there's
-- Kristal as a sequencer / multitrack / VST host ( www.kreatives.org/kristal/index.php )
-- Audacity as a wave editor ( audacity.sourceforge.net )

Re:But...

[yannick_mt]

Check my URL. It's completely free until you want to save your song as a WAV file. It's very cheap though. :)

Re:But...

[mm0mm]

does anyone know of any good free audio editing software for Windows?

Let me think...
... wait, you are not working for this company, are you?

Re:But...

[Ianoo]

So, it's not free then?

Re:But...

[neko9]

MODPlug Tracker - really completely free and even allows to save your song as a WAV file. and MODPlug Player - plays modules correctly.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

ProTools Free
www.digidesign.com

No more crack.exe

[mfearby]

But that means no more having to find cracks on P2P networks... what a shame!

Re:No more crack.exe

[Anonymous Coward]

But that means no more having to find cracks on P2P networks... what a shame!

This might not be true. In order to prompte Wired someone might compile a windows edition and say it's been cracked. Crack.exe tosses out some extra long ass reg key that is totally random and boom, you have instent warez hit.

Re:No more crack.exe

[Anonymous Coward]

good news for microsoft!

How does this compare with Ardour?

[adrianbaugh]

That seems to be a pretty comprehensive recording package. I'm guessing this is more a mixing / editing / adding MIDI type of program?

WiReD

[Anonymous Coward]

There I was thinking that was a Magazine/Portal that regurgitated 'news' in handy dead tree format...

maybe this audio software might need to be renamed FireWired
hold on, what does that remind me of...? hmmm...

AndyboyH

Re:WiReD

[Lispy]

you could still call it Firebird, though. Wait!

Maybe Microsoft should take a look at this...

[cybergibbons]

seeing as they are running short of licenses of another piece of software....

Re:Maybe Microsoft should take a look at this...

[Maul]

Dangit, I should have reloaded the front page quicker. You beat me to the joke.

Re:Maybe Microsoft should take a look at this...

[cybergibbons]

I wanted to make it more elaborate with links and references, but I knew that someone else would have been working at it... :)

Re:Maybe Microsoft should take a look at this...

[Zorilla]

That would have killed the joke. Be glad you made the comment as terse as you did.

Re:Maybe Microsoft should take a look at this...

[strider44]

he beat about two thousand other people to the joke as well

OSX needs this

[imag0]

Would be nice to have more GPLed/Free audio/music editing apps for macos X. Sure, Garageband is nice, but the more the merrier!

Re:OSX needs this

[jonwil]

As this is GPL, there is nothing stopping ports to other platforms :)

Re:OSX needs this

[northcat]

but the more the merrier!

No. Contributing to the same project would be better unless you have something in mind that would need some serious design changes. Even then there would be stuff you will want from other projects.

Re:OSX needs this

[Bulln-Bulln]

Well, Wired seems to use wxWidgets. It shouldn't too hard for a skilled person to port it to OSX or even Windows.

Re:OSX needs this

[Anonymous Coward]

The hard part would be implementing the Mac look'n'feel. That's very important for Mac users, because they're too dumb to understand different interfaces.

Re:OSX needs this

[timeOday]

Anybody care to report on the OSX port of wxWidgets? I tried to port a wxWindows app to MacOS 9 a while ago and the Mac port wasn't complete enough to be useful.

Re:OSX needs this

[Turing Machine]

While I haven't programmed using wxWidgets myself (keep meaning to), I believe the Audacity application that's been mentioned repeatedly in this thread also uses wxWidgets.

It definitely works great on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, and looks very polished on all three platforms.

Linux sound is start to pick up

[Pecisk]

Yes, it is great to welcome another program, aimed at normal production use for common users for working with sound, but I want to point out that it doesn't arrive in the empty place. We have Audacity, Ardour, MuSE, lot of other programms which slowly reach stability and production use. Also I should mention work on ALSA and JACK, which are critical components making Linux a profesional workstation for working with sound.

Of coarse, lot of work should still be done for getting serious for common recording pro's crowd, but we are moving here.

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[flappinbooger]

What about video editing? Firewire support "out of the box" for video capture?

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[Pecisk]

AFAIK Kino http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=213 is one I think you will want to use in Firewire video capture. It is lean GTK/GNOME app and is matured for very long time, and afaik, they are targeting to support fully Ogg Theora/Vorbis, so, it will provide completely free video capture.

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[arose]

There's also Cinelerra: "Render like a dentist!"

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[sahonen]

Audacity is a joke even for a casual user. Just like The GIMP, the UI is braindead and it lacks some of the most *BASIC* features essential for an audio editor. I'd rather pay $300 for Adobe Audition than try to make anything decent with Audacity.

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit!

What *BASIC* features does audacity lack exactly? You're comparing an audio editor not with it's obvious counterpart (soundforge) but some Adobe prosumer targeted wankathon wannabe, all-encompasing sound package.

Audacity/GIMP UI's are by no means perfect but if you think this is an improvement then you obviously haven't done enough late night sessions!

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[m50d]

Linux format did a good feature on these a bit back. Kino, cinelerra, and kdenlive seem pretty good. I can't speak for the others, but kdenlive will work "out of the box" if your distribution has the firewire modules and a correct modprobe.conf, which I'm pretty sure newer versions of mandrake do.

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[jabuzz]

I would say the ability to drop markers into the audio and then have selections snap to them later is a *BASIC* editing tool that Auditon (and even CoolEdit 2000) has had for a long time. In fact compared to CoolEdit 2000 which is now a defunct product on which no development has taken place in years, CoolEdit 2000 easily surpasses Audacity in all areas apart from not running natively on Linux.

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[ksheff]

How does that compare to Audacity's bookmarks? I've never used CoolEdit 2000, but really like the additions that were made in the latest releases of Audacity.

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[flappinbooger]

Very Interesting!

I need to try the latest mandrake then. I tried it about 6 months ago and had terrible luck getting firewire to work. I had cinelerra and Kino installed, but the firewire was a mystery.

Could someone point me towards a FAQ on enabling firewire, assuming that the latest mandrake will still need some encouragement to hook up to my DV camera?

Re:Linux sound is start to pick up

[sahonen]

Snapping. Ability to type in a timecode and have it put your audio cursor at that timecode. Stuff like that. I don't actually use Audition, I use CEP, but Audition is what CEP became, so I used that as the example.

Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

A very important rule in software engineering (especially in OSS) is: A program should have as few dependancies as possible.

So this is for gnome. Next week we'll have a similar thing for KDE on qt. And next month another tool based on XUL that runs on all systems....

Why, did't they had to add the GNOME(->pango->freetype->xrenderer->xpat->rederer- >xgoofy) dependancy on a program who's main function is audio processing?

They will lose users because at the time the same thing appears with no WM dependancies, users will prefer that. Compare KDE-mail-app, GNOME-mail-app and mutt. Everybody except KDE/GNOME developers uses mutt.

Re:Damn.

[cammoblammo]

Everybody except KDE/GNOME developers uses mutt.

Not quite. I use Thunderbird, and apparently Eric Raymond's wife is a very happy but nontechy Kmail user.

Good point though.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. What exactly is keeping this program from only depending on GTK2, and the necessary audio libraries? Does it really HAVE to be Gnome-integrated? Can it be compiled without it?

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

This uses WxWindows for it's GUI, the screenies had me thinking it was a KDE app but I've no idea where you got gnome from. I totally agree with you though, anyone running a pro audio workstation on Gnome or KDE is an idiot when they could be using fluxbox, XFCE4 or IceWM. I'd prefer not to have the overhead of a X-server at all.

On the otherhand things like Jack and ladspa could be considered the libc of audio apps... and I'm not convinced writing the core audio engine in C++ is ever a good idea.

Re:Damn.

[TheNarrator]

A very important rule in software engineering (especially in OSS) is: A program should have as few dependancies as possible.

The other far more important rule is don't reinvent the wheel. I think your attitude has come from years of Redhat/Mandrake/RPM dependency hell. I've been there, I know what it's like, I feel sympathy. You probably wouldn't have this gripe if you used Debian. I'll be able to install the whole thing with one command, dependencies and all when the deb package gets added to the repositories.

Re:Damn.

[arodland]

KDE isn't so bad on dependencies, I think, as GNOME is. Ignoring some fairly common stuff that they both need, here we go:

KMail deps:

• KDE Libs
  • aRts
  • Some X libs
  • Some graphics libs
  • libxml
  • Qt
• KDE PIM libs
• KDE Network libs
• KDE Calendar lib
• MIME Libs

Evolution deps:

• gtkhtml
• bonobo
• atk
• gail
• glade
• GNOME libs
  • GNOME VFS
  • TASN
  • separate custom ops lib
  • GNOME UI
  • GTK
  • ORBit
  • GConf
  • pango
• GNU TLS
• the NSPR (?!)

Re:Damn.

[northcat]

What you are frowning about is the very the nature of the current state of OSS software. There are just too many apps to do a single task and most of them can do better with a little more work. This might not be so bad for end-user apps like mail clients, but this bad for stuff like X toolkits and libraries. People who develop end-user apps are in a dillema - make your app less dependent but lacking features OR more dependent with features. People need to either stop duplicating work or agree on standards for libraries et al.

On a side note, however, anyone with a fair amount of harddisk space has to install both KDE and GNOME and the supporting libraries. There are just too many important apps using either one of them to ignore one of them completely, and statically linking programs is only going to increase burden on your disk space.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing worse than having to deal with lots of library depedancies is having dependancies and being totally unaware of them (Debian)

Dependancies just suck, period :)

Re:Damn.

[mikis]

My WILD guess is: audio programs NEED good looking user interface. Judging by few released screenshots, this is one of the best looking Linux applications.

Now, question is: could they make it to look this good, and work on both Gnome/KDE/whatever, without reinventing lot of hot water?

Re:Damn.

[TheNarrator]

The package maintainers know a lot more about their program's dependencies than I do and that's the way it should be. Managing them on one's own is just a big waste of time. Not using third party libraries is wasting a lot of effort on not much gain. There's already enough api fragmentation as it is on unix. Think of how many different config file formats we have. All because everybody had to write their own config file parser just to be a bad ass (I.E XFree/Apache/Passwd/Fstab/Sendmail/Postfix/ /Bind/Postgres/Every Single 31337 window manager out there) and then there's all the myriad font handling for X Windows, etc, etc. Anyway I think some people are starting to get a bit of stockholm syndrome with regards to these limitations. Meanwhile over in Java land there isn't a single library or program I've used recently that uses a config file format other than XML. BEAUTIFUL! One guy tried to invent his own XML like format just to be cool but I think he got talked out of it.

Re:Damn.

[BlueLightning]

and work on both Gnome/KDE/whatever

KDE apps run fine under Gnome, and vice versa. In fact, both KDE and Gnome apps should run just fine under any (X) window manager/environment.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

audio programs NEED good looking user interface

Oh yes, a good looking UI adds so much to the sound! Wired interface looks pretty awful to me, like those ugly molded plastic home stereos that people who aren't really into music buy, wire up out of phase and then run everything through a crap preset digital eq. They sound like shit but they look good with those contoured speakers, bass boost logos and flashing lights! Do you think that if people closed their eyes and listened to the sound instead of allowing themselves to be overwhelmed by the visual asthetic that they may make better decisions about music? (/me waves @ MTV weenies)

A simple, uncluttered and intuitive interface is more important than something being 'good looking'. The only thing I imagine the colors on wired UI skin doing for me (especially the drum machine) is giving me eyestrain. The filter and loop sampler don't look bad by any means but the other UI's are dire, staring at bright contrasting colors for 10 hours and having to parse all the detail isn't something that's remotely pleasurable and if I had to use this on a session I'd be setting the monitor to approximate monochrome.

For the record I don't think wired is going to be running in many pro studios, from what I'm seeing it's a software studio targeted at home users. That's not a bad thing in itself, it's just a tool, it's how people use it that matters and there's no reason it shouldn't sound good in capable hands.

Re:Damn.

[Bedouin X]

My WILD guess is: audio programs NEED good looking user interface.

You've never used ProTools huh?

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. What's really needed, as things stand, is a wrapper library that can be used by all X apps. It's sole purpose should be nothing more than mapping the functionality to the interface library of the user's choice; be it GTK*, Qt, Motif, or whatever.

Mind you, such a thing would be quite a difficult task, and would likely fail without the major camps agreeing on how things should be done; and if that's the case, they could work something out on their own, virtually making the wrapper useless.

The days of GTK vs Qt, KDE vs GNOME need to end, quickly. Not in terms of actual usage, but in terms of incompatibility. For the "Linux Desktop" and all we're so fond of pushing....

Re:Damn.

[ImpTech]

> A very important rule in software engineering (especially in OSS) is: A program should have as few dependancies as possible.

Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of OSS though? The whole *point* of OSS is that you don't have to write every little thing, because chances are there's a perfectly good free library out there that already does it.

Re:Damn.

[fossa]

Why do these comments always come up? I *want* my software with lots of dependencies. I don't want my software duplicating effort, especially if the duplicate will be of lower quality. I want it to inherit the work of Gtk+/Gnome so that my computer will have a consistent look and feel. I understand this program uses wxWidgets which supposedly abstracts the gui. This is only true to a point... I hate the wxWidgets gtk file selector (though perhpas they now use the nicer gtk2 file selector? I don't know...).

Portability between desktop environments and platforms is nice... but can't I have a consistency as well? This isn't a question of everyone deciding on the One True GUI Widgets. It's a question of a poorly designed system. Can a system be designed that has a consistent interface *by design* ? (e.g. not due to developer discipline, which as we can see from experience will never produce a consistent system). I submit that one can, though it would be difficult at best and certainly a long uphill battle to gain the popularity required for it to become useful.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, talk about living in dreamland! "In the beginning, there was XML. And so it started ..."

I guess those C noobs that started Apache, XFree, Sendmail, etc (heck, the original mount, too, it seems) were just backward-thinking doods for not using XML for their config files! Shame on them, I say! Shame!!! /sarcasm

Geez, go watch Cartoon Network or something!

Re:Damn.

[WWWWolf]

A very important rule in software engineering (especially in OSS) is: A program should have as few dependancies as possible.

Yeah, so I thought, but then I thought of another important software engineering rule (especially in OSS): Diversity is good, but reinventing the wheel can be worse.

Besides, if I wait two months, someone's got .debs of it, just stick it in sources.list; If I wait an year, it'll be in main Debian repository... and the best thing is that all this time, I hear the wailing and lamentations of Gentoo zealots as they compile the thing for weeks and weeks and weeks. =)

Re:Damn.

[m50d]

Erm, do you have a statistic to back that assertion up? In alt.os.linux, knode is usually pretty high in the stats - it was the most popular newsreader a few weeks back, although granted slrn is usally a bit ahead.

I would be very surprised if mutt was the most popular email client any more - maybe back in the days when only hackers used linux. It's possible the wm-agnosticish thunderbird would be top, but iirc that still depends on some gnome stuff. Hackers may use mutt, but for my money the majority of kde-distro users (SUSE, Mandrake...) will be using kmail, and gnome-distro users (Fedora) will be using evolution.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's really needed, as things stand, is a wrapper library that can be used by all X apps. It's sole purpose should be nothing more than mapping the functionality to the interface library of the user's choice; be it GTK*, Qt, Motif, or whatever.

They could call it wxWindows.

No seriously; why can't wxWindows be "ported" onto both GTK+ and Qt?

Re:Damn.

[m50d]

You're right. I said a while back that what needs to happen is we need to implement the GTK+ api in Qt. Doing it the other way would be even better (WxWindows programs wouldn't be going through 2 layers of emulation, plus everything would be lgpl) but I don't think it's as feasible, as Qt does all sorts of fancy c++ which would be hell to implement under gtk. Just compare the kde C bindings with gtkmm. There is one other thing that might work, though. The themes are getting closer and closer. I can see it getting to the stage where a gtk+ button and a Qt button look exactly the same, and a theme change changes the theme to both of them. Then it wouldn't matter which toolkit a program used - yes you need the libraries installed, but hard disk space is getting cheaper all the time. Perhaps what we could do is merge them into the same package, then gradually integrate the backend code more and more, until eventually there was no more code than for a single widget library. I think the toolkits will converge, one way or the other, and the way it happens will be from FreeDesktop.org's efforts. KDE has done a lot to be gnome-compatiable - it can use the gnome icon theme, not just a single set of gnome icons but actually intelligently switch when you switch the gnome theme. It's also switching to DBUS for ipc as opposed to the good old DCOP, I for one will miss DCOP but hopefully it's for the best in the long run. Also a switch to gstreamer rather than arts for the multimedia backend is on the cards, as gstreamer's finally getting stable enough. Hopefully we'll see a reciprocal effort from the gnome people, maybe even to the extent of switching toolkits. As it stands Qt is better looking, more themeable, and nicer to use than gtk, all imo of course. Obviously a lot of people have put a lot of effort into gtk+ and I respect that, but ultimately I think it's down to the gnome devs to be the better man and concede on this front rather than dragging out a "war" which can only hurt linux. A switch from qt, which is c++ from the ground up, to gtk, just doesn't seem feasible to me. Apologies for the long and rambling post.

Re:Damn.

[m50d]

I'm not whining. Gentoo users can install it within a couple of days of release, and have no dependency problems. At all. By the time it's in the main Debian repository, I could have written a widget toolkit from scratch. As a gentoo user I probably have it installed by the time it's in the repositories of the most leading-edge binary package distros.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Qt API is correctly abstracted from the underlying widget set; it just happens to implement one itself on X11. The GTK+ API is not, especially since a lot of applications dig down into the GDK layer. So implementing Qt on top of GTK+ is possible, while implementing GTK+ on top of Qt is not, realistically. GTK+'s design sucks.

But, yes, identical themeing is the way to go for now.

Re:Damn.

[dbIII]

One guy tried to invent his own XML like format just to be cool but I think he got talked out of it.

Unfortunately gconf got produced before he was talked out of it.

Re:Damn.

[skybrian]

Not true - lots of Java programs use property files. And even when it is XML, the schemas are all different and can be quite cryptic. But two popular config formats is better than many.

Re:Damn.

[m50d]

OK, that makes sense. But the Qt people seem a lot better at writing bindings than the gtk+ ones, so I'd put far more faith in some of their work. And I don't see them writing something to put their library out of use. Maybe they can just port everything to Qt - if mozilla can be ported in 4 days, there's hope yet.

Re:Damn.

[jdowland]

Just listing the dependencies isn't good enough. More dependencies might be a good thing from a disk space POV if the libraries are more atomic - i.e. do one thing and one thing well.

The KDE libraries tend to bundle a lot of functionality together - smaller number of libraries, but greater individual library size.

Re:Damn.

[jdowland]

XML is a framework for inventing a language, rather than a specific language itself - so, just because all the java apps use XML doesn't mean there's much portability between knowing the config of one app and knowing it of another.

I do a lot of work with XML config files and they are a horribly verbose waste of time. They are usually peppered with namespace declarations etc. which are never variant anyway, and only serve to confuse the user.

The easiest and most useful program I manage configs for is Apache - with a homebrew, but simple and to the point config language.

Re:Damn.

[arodland]

True -- but it's less time spent fetching and installing dependencies, less time spent finding libraries on disk and loading them, and quite a bit less possibility for those nasty library version conflicts, which tend to increase exponentially in the number of libraries.

Re:Damn.

[jdowland]

True -- but it's less time spent fetching and installing dependencies

I'm not sure if you mean manually doing this, in which case your complaint is about your package management system, or the multiple files overhead. If the latter, you have a point where a distinct connection needs to be opened for each file. However, FTP and HTTP 1.1 can transfer multiple files in one connection.

less time spent finding libraries on disk and loading them

Thats true. With lots of libraries and lots of calls this can be a significant chunk of time, at least we're told. I've never really noticed a performance improvement through prelinking.

and quite a bit less possibility for those nasty library version conflicts, which tend to increase exponentially in the number of libraries.

I've never really experienced these.. most of these sort-of bugs are ironed out, again by the package management system my OS employs. However I do know they aren't all ironed out, as I've read reports of problems etc. Especially with C++ programs with unstable ABI's.

Cool, but what about...

[AceJohnny]

There are other "professional audio" tools for Linux out there. Now I'm not into this, but how does Wired compare with these?

Ardour multi-track sound editor (not MIDI, I think)

Rosegarden Audio and MIDI sequencer

The smaller Audacity A wave/AIFF/MP3/Ogg/etc editor

Re:Cool, but what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a beliver, all pro audio software more or less sucks, so take what I say in context with that.

Ardour is closest to a how a pro DAW should be with a plain workman like interface that inspires confidence. Rosegarden is obviously inspired by cubase, I've fired it up but never used it on a project because I can't stand QT apps. Audacity is a great editor, it's always built without error for me and despite a couple of minor niggles it's solid and usable.

Ardour is the most solid, workman like DAW I've used since the Otari RADAR; if you want to work with sound and not look at pretty brushed metal UI crap that is.

Re:Cool, but what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good toolkit bashing! Bloody Rosegarden using the bloody QT thingy! I can say it sucks just from that, no need to fire it up! /sarcasm

Re:Cool, but what about...

[m50d]

Why do you dislike Qt so much? If it's just the general look and feel, have you tried using a gtk-like theme? If not, what's wrong with it?

Re:Cool, but what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

"couple of minor niggles"

MAN you RACIST MAN. YOU phucking RACIST. YOU IGNORANT. YOU da NIGG3R.

Re:Cool, but what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

Audacity is not actually a usable application for larger projects, due to the way it handles mixing multiple tracks. Each time you press the Play button in Audacity, it premixes your entire project into RAM and then plays it, and it makes no difference if you mute certain tracks beforehand.

So for example earlier today I was working on a mixing a CD-length waveform at 24bit, and it was around 35 minutes long so far. The interface was taking up 32MB of my RAM, and when I hit play Audacity would suck up 488MB RAM.

Re:Cool, but what about...

[coaxial]

There are other "professional audio" tools for Linux out there. Now I'm not into this, but how does Wired compare with these?
[...]
The smaller Audacity A wave/AIFF/MP3/Ogg/etc editor

Well as an Audacity user I'll tell you that audacity sucks. Far from being "professional" quality, it's not even "amature" quality. I've used version 1.2.1 (the newest in debian) and it suffers from major bugs. The biggest of which is that the gui's representation of the time index gets further and further out of sync with the actual time index on the file. The problem shows up when you delete large chunks of the audio. At first everything seems fine, but when you export the wav and then play it back, it's all screwed up.

Don't waste your time with it.

Audacity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Audacity runs on Windows, Linux and OS X... and is GPL.

Re:Audacity?

[imag0]

Close, but no importing .aiff and interface is pretty clunky. the app mentioned in the article looks very polished.

Re:Audacity?

[harikiri]

However, Audacity has the benefit of being available for more platforms than just Linux. But if it doesn't have the features you're looking for, then who cares.

Re:Audacity?

[rethin]

the app mentioned in the article looks very polished.

You must be new here. This is slashdot, we don't rtfa around here.

don't worry, you'll get the hang of it soon.

Re:Audacity?

[Xabraxas]

Close, but no importing .aiff and interface is pretty clunky.

The interface to audacity is clunky?! How so?

Re:Audacity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Audacity can't edit loop points. Complete garbage.

Re:Audacity?

[camperslo]

"Close, but no importing .aiff"
Perhaps you're using an old version? I've used 1.2.2 for reading and writing AIFF. The Audacity Manual also shows it as supported.

Re:Audacity?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Close, but no importing .aiff and interface is pretty clunky. the app mentioned in the article looks very polished.

Ummmmm, Audacity does import aiff (and every other sound file format that libsndfile supports), and while you might have some gripes about the interface, Audacity has been stable for years now.

Re:Audacity?

[wolftone]

This is slashdot, we don't rtfa around here.

Why read the article when you get to read phrases such as "Sorry, this site is temporary unavailable. [ Daily Bandwidth Limit Exceeded ]" instead?

Re:Audacity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Audacity is great, I use it all the time, but the thing is, it's mainly a PCM editor/multitracker, not a full-blown recording studio with MIDI support. I'll probably use both once Wired gets into Debian Sid.

Linux Audio developement is fairly decent nowadays

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's good enough for the amature/prosumer enthusiest definately. If they have a strong computer background already.

Of course nothing will be good enough for the wannabees, which I suspect will come out in droves on this article. (which I hope not)

Linux has gotten very decent at audio production since Alsa drivers became standard. It makes this sort of thing much easier then compared to the old OSS stuff. Now you have stuff like gstreamer being developed, but that's desktop stuff, not audio developement.

There are lots of apps. Lots of information:
Linux audio developer's list
http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/

google will show you the way.

A great app is Ardour, which makes your Linux PC into a audio workstation.
http://ardour.org/

From their website:
Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. Produce your own CD's. Mix video soundtracks. Experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Generate sound installations for 12 speaker gallery shows. Have Fun.

Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-linear, non-destructive region based editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a mixer whose capabilities rival high end hardware consoles, lots of plugins to warp, shift and shape your music, and controllable from hardware control surfaces at the same time as it syncs to timecode. If you've been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Cubase SX or Sequoia, you might have found it. /end of qoute.

And before you get all up tight about VST/VSTi plugins you can run many Windows plugins thru Wine
http://www.djcj.org/LAU/quicktoots/toots/vst -plugi ns/

And there is ongoing work of getting native plugins developed/ported.

With audio backends like JACK and Linux 2.6's scedualling options you can mix outputs from various different applications and sources with garrenteed latency and quality.
http://www.agnula.org/documentation/dp_t utorials/a lsa_jack_ladspa/

Here is a audio specific distro:
http://www.agnula.org/

Linux audio Guide:
http://www.djcj.org/LAU/guide/index.php

And that's just scratching the surface. If your intellegent and you make sure to select the proper hardware and sound equipment you can setup a very effective Linux-based audio workstation enviroment for relatively low bucks compared to something like OS X or Windows and depending on commercial software.

Unless of course your a Warez'ng pigfucker and don't pay for crap in the first place.

Before you get all up tight about desktop quality or lack of hardware support and how windows kicks ass and such, just stfu. If I was going to do this professionally and I had a lot of money I'd use OS X on Apple hardware. Windows just blows goats for everything except generic desktop usage, unless your willing to just throw pockets full of cash at it.

But Linux is actually fairly decent. Not the greatest, but definately best bang for the buck.

Re:But...Not 100% free but very close :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilst its not 100% free nTrack Studio http://www.ntrack.com/ is very good (supports all VST/DXI/ReWire) and only costs US $75 for the 24bit pro version. Has a completely free/fully funtioning (no timeouts) demo too! Pretty impressive from what I can see.

pro-level...

[Cryptnotic]

...you keep using that term. I think it does not mean what you think it means.

Re:pro-level...

[PasteEater]

***I have not used this software***

However, as a professional who makes a living both recording and doing live sound, I find this very hard to believe.

Let me explain, please....

I think that software deadlines are similar to professional audio deadlines- you just never have enough time. No matter what happens, you can always look back and think, "This could have been better."

However, you get no revisions with a song (or album, etc.) after it's been released. Once it's "done"... you're ass is on the line.

Here's the big finish: I don't know of anyone (and I don't know _everyone_) who would consider this "Pro-level". It's only pro-level when it does A) things better thanPro Tools B) things better than Logic C) things cheaper than both. Most importantly D) Has been through trial by fire.

Perhaps I've not emphasized enough that prefessional audio engineers are under a very tight schedule. Considering that fact alone, it's *very* difficult to call something "professional" when it's barely out of it's infancy.

I would really like to see something like this succeed. After spending a huge amount of money on pro gear, it would be nice to have some thorough, reliable tools that work well. Remember though, Pro Tools has the same thing Apple has going for them - tight software/hardware integration.

I don't care about the Open/Closed software discussion when it comes down to paying my bills or not paying my bills. If it works, you are going to have to *really* try to convince me that I should change my mind.

So... mod the parent UP, not only is he right, but dammit, The Princess Bride is a funny movie!

Re:pro-level...

[StormReaver]

"***I have not used this software***"

Come back and give us your opinion on this software when your opinion means something: after you've used the software, found it lacking on a professional level, and have something concrete to say about it.

"It's only pro-level when it does A) things better thanPro Tools B) things better than Logic C) things cheaper than both."

By your own (bad) logic, only one, at most, of the tools you mentioned can be considered "professional", as only one can be better than the other, and only one can be cheaper than the other. Moreso, you're saying that if they are both of equal quality and price, then neither is professional grade.

But the same tool doesn't necessarily have to be both better and cheaper. So by your own odd definition, neither of these tools is necessarily professional grade.

"If it works, you are going to have to *really* try to convince me that I should change my mind."

How about actually getting down off your high horse and giving it a try to see if it does what you need? Wow, what a novel f*****g concept. Don't be such an arrogant ass.

If you'd rather spend a ton of money on something that doesn't get you anything more than similar FOSS software, then be my guest. If, after using it, it really stinks compared to the high-dollar stuff, then so be it. At least then there is a foundation for a rational objection.

But don't expect anyone to take you seriously when you've giving an opinion out of your ass on a piece of software that you've never used.

Re:pro-level...

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you think it means "costs a lot of money".

Re:pro-level...

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I like open source, I can't stand having discussions about audio software with Linux folks. They just can't seem to get it. "This problem can totally do the same thing you need!" "Uh... no... it only supports a few major functions... overall it would make things very difficult and time consuming." "...."

Re:pro-level...

[antiMStroll]

I'm not sure what your professional specialty is, but I do know there are very many different pro-level needs. We (radio) have three production studios, two occupied 18+ hours a day, none running Pro Tools or Mac. Everything's done on Intel/Soundscape and at least one of the producers bugged me for months to get 'downgraded' to Soundforge, which he feels is more efficient. The department cranks roughly $25 mil in commercial inventory a year, plus promos and positioning. By any measure a 'pro' shop. These guys run on a deadline that would make most studio producers blanch.

BTW, Pro Tools ships a lot of Intel systems nowadays.

Re:pro-level...

[Creepy Crawler]

You know, it wouldnt surprise me if certain software companies and trade groups paid people to denounce pieces of software in the OSS arena..

Trade groups for software almost always have bearing for the big names only. And they dislike or even hate open source.

Though, in the Linux arena of software, software usually starts kinda sucky, and then if it hits a chord (heh), people use and help make it better. It's like comparing Linux network support to Windows network support, or MPlayer, or OGG, or the many many server daemons.

Re:pro-level...

[m50d]

I think he does have a good point though. You cannot say it's professional grade until it has been used in a professional environment under professional deadlines, so a project this new cannot possibly be professional grade.
And, of course, no one is going to try it in a professional environment until it has been shown to be pro grade.

Re:pro-level...

[CliffH]

Before I begin, to all the mods. Mod me down to oblivion, I don't really care. I need to say this even if no one wants to listen.

"***I have not used this software***"

That's the most telling thing you have said. As a sound engineer, musician, artist, you should be wiling to experiment a bit, try new things, look at other avenues. This doesn't mean giving up any of your knowledge, equipment, tools, etc., it could mean adding a valuable piece. When I was activiely recording and playing, I wasn't afraid in the least to try new and unusual (to myself anyway) ways of getting the sounds I wanted. If I felt a particular piece of software would have helped me get the sound I wanted, hell, I would have tried. If it didn't, oh well. I tried it. I know about it. If I need it in the future it's in the meat-space database.

ProTools is an excellent product and I will say that I haven't seen anything yet that will compare to it. Saying that a product has to be better and cheaper to be comparable to it is a self-defeating statement used to vidicate your love of ProTools. Love, like, or use it because it gets the job done. In the end, it is a tool. Just as much as my basses, guitars, kits, keyboards, and brass instruments were mine. Hell, I loved one of my basses. I'd play it for hours on end just because I could, not for any kind of gain except a gain in happiness. In saying that though, if I would have found another one that would have done the job better, no matter the cost, I would have probably scrimped and saved to get it, or at least given it a good go as a point of reference. I wouldn't have dismissed it fully based on price or whether or not it was just like mine or better.

Open/Closed source truly has nothing to do with it either. That I will whole heartedly agree with you on. If it works the way you like, use it. If you're so inclined and you have software programming abilities and it is Open source, change what you don't like about it. Hell, make it into a ProTools clone for all anyone cares. If you're using it in house and it does exactly what you want it to do, we're all happy for you.

In the end, I'll make it short and sweet. Ardour, Wired, ProTools, Cubase, Logic, they are all very good tools that can get a job done for you. It's your choice as to what you use and how you use it. Using what everyone else is using as an argument (this is for everyone else thinking it, not pointed at you personally) or justification is only limiting you to new possibilities.

CliffH

P.S. The Princess Bride did kick ass. :)

Re:pro-level...

[PasteEater]

Thanks for calling me names, it really furthers your point.

Logic does some things better than Pro Tools, and vice versa. I use both because I need to. Most sound engineers are not all that familiar with computers, but see them as a necessary evil. I would imagine that most of those same people don't want to relearn software, when what they have already does what they want.

I was not commenting on the quality of the software, I was just saying that it has to be out "in the industry" getting used everyday for critical tasks to be considered "pro-level".

Ya know, I even prefaced my comment by stating clearly that I had not used the software. No where in my post did I say "this software sucks" for a reason- I wasn't commenting on it.

But don't expect anyone to take you seriously when you've giving an opinion out of your ass on a piece of software that you've never used.

Before you fly off the handle, perhaps you should read what I actually wrote. I didn't give any sort of opinion about the quality of the software. I understand your points, but there's no need to be rude about it.

Re:pro-level...

[PasteEater]

I appreciate the thoughtful reply.

ProTools is an excellent product and I will say that I haven't seen anything yet that will compare to it. Saying that a product has to be better and cheaper to be comparable to it is a self-defeating statement used to vidicate your love of ProTools.

Well.... you're right. It wasn't the best argument I could have made (it was very late, and I was a little drunk). Being a musician also, experimentation is key. I didn't mean to imply that I *won't* use this software. I probably will eventually, when I get some spare time to play with it.

I just think that it's a mistake to call something "pro-level" when it hasn't been properly tested in a professional environment. Heck, I don't love Pro Tools... I spent thousands of dollars on a system that crashed in the middle of a session the other day. However, it does some things that other programs just can't touch. Reading your reply, I'm sure you know that.

Using what everyone else is using as an argument...

I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time. It's important for clients to *know* that all of their hard work can translate to another studio. Pro Tools makes this very easy. Logic... well it's getting better. I can't comment on the other programs you mentioned because I haven't used them. Perhaps this new OSS makes it incredibly easy, but until it starts getting tested, no one will know. I understand that I could be the guy to see, but I'm busy doing work. And *that* is the real problem (yes, I am part of the problem).

You are 100% completely correct though- use what you need to get the job done.

Again, I appreciate your polite response.

Re:pro-level...

[PasteEater]

BTW, Pro Tools ships a lot of Intel systems nowadays.

Yep, and does so quite well. I hate to admit that I was shocked, but I was. There are still a few things that Digidesign has left out, but nothing big, and nothing I can remember off-hand.

Yeah, I'm a studio engineer (and I also do live sound). My deadlines are no where near as stringent as yours I'm sure.

It was a mistake for me to imply that Pro Tools and Logic are the only solutions out there. They are not as your post shows. However, would you feel comfortable installing this new software in one of your suites working with mission critical data? I wouldn't, but that's me. I *am* anxious to try this software out, but calling it "pro-level" is IMHO a mistake.

That was the point of my long winded post. =)

Re:pro-level...

[fishbowl]

"It's only pro-level when it does A) things better thanPro Tools B) things better than Logic C) things cheaper than both. Most importantly D) Has been through trial by fire."

You are correct, mostly, but it definitely does NOT need to be cheaper. A $1000 Linux DAW software that could outperform Samplitude would be fine, and would have a shot at being considered "Pro Level".
Never mind that it runs on Linux. Make it a $10,000
20-channel DAW hardware/software combination in a silent, rackable form factor, that happens to run linux, and happens to be of sufficient quality and have the features pros need, and you've got a player in the market. I mean, why not?

ProTools is an example of vendor lock-in, nothing more. It's something you use because you have to, or because your contracts say you have to, or because your studio was designed around, and heavily invested in Digi. It gets the job done, well, and you won't walk away from the investment. But that doesn't make it the best value, or even the best choice for audio software or hardware.

Logic is dead. Samplitude is better anyway. Sonar hasn't stood the test of time, but it is probably better, judging by anecdotal evidence.

"Pro Tools has the same thing Apple has going for
them - tight software/hardware integration."

Digi (ProTools) has something else -- a first-to-market legacy that is entrenched enough that they are actually specified by name in contracts, and are otherwise an absolute requirement in order to get some kinds of business. Yeah, you actually do the recording in the room that uses
Logic, and the PT DAW hasn't even been powered up in months, but you have it when the customer asks.

But I agree with you, there is no software yet for a Linux system that, as delivered, earns the moniker "pro-level". It may *perform* to pro audio specs (the Jack driver on my Delta 1010 does that without any help at all!), and it may have some subset of features that are regarded as "pro level", but if an audio guy can't put it to use effectively, it has missed the boat.

I'd really like to see something in the spirit of the Tivo here. (Runs linux, customer may or may not know or care, linux is beside the point). A nice DAW box.

Hell, I'd settle for the fanless 4U short rack version of a Shuttle XPC and do it myself.

Re:pro-level...

[fishbowl]

"You know, it wouldnt surprise me if certain software companies and trade groups paid people to denounce pieces of software in the OSS arena.."

No conspiracy theory is needed. Software that fills a niche, or does a job well, will spread like wildfire in the audio world. Look at EnergyXT, or FruityLoops for examples of really teriffic software that started out on a shoestring budget but is well-regarded among amateurs and professionals alike. There's nobody from Cakewalk or Digi getting into the forums to denounce that stuff.

I think you're misinterpreting the criticism.

Don't claim you've released something that will be the killer app for the DAW, that's for US to decide, not you.

I think there is a market for a professional linux-based DAW box. Hardware+Software, in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. My DAW is somewhere in the middle of that range. And I'm the biggest Linux advocate in the world, but for practical reasons, my DAW is a Windows XP box.

Re:pro-level...

[PasteEater]

Excellent points. You're right, it doesn't need to be cheaper to be considered "pro", but there is no incentive to switch if it's not cheaper. I kinda thought that was the major "selling" point of this new software.

I'm not sure if you are right about Logic though. It is missing some key features (delay compensation on Aux tracks!?!) but it does some things exceptionally well (better than Pro Tools at least). When it comes to MIDI, I don't Logic is matched by *any* other software out there, although I have not used them all.

What I should have said, is "No one will switch unless it's A) Better than Pro Tools B) better than Logic and C) is cheaper than both." I stick with cheaper versus what's available during this "generation". If SACD picks up steam, we are all going to have to switch to systems that are capable of doing both PCM and PDM encoding (rolls eyes).

But, when that happens, we are going to be in the same boat we are now, and is mentioned in your post: use what gets the job done. From an engineers perspective, I could care less how much something costs because that's not my concern.

I have yet to see a contract that specifies Pro Tools, but it doesn't surprise me. As soon as you say "Pro Tools" eyes light up, that's for sure.

Re:pro-level...

[fishbowl]

"As soon as you say "Pro Tools" eyes light up, that's for sure."

Heh. I'd be more interested in what kind of cables are in the back of your patchbays. And what's in your mic closet.

Re:pro-level...

[PasteEater]

Agreed, but no one outside of the engineering community knows the difference between an SM57 and a U47 besides that they look different.

Cables in the back of my patchbays, eh? I'm not sure what they are at the studio as the patchbay came with the board (Neve), but on my home rig (Pro Tools TDM + Logic) I just use Hosa. Not very high tech there, but after spending all of that money on the TDM rig, I ran out of cash! =)

Most musicians don't even know what Pro Tools does, they just "know" that they need it. THAT'S entrenchment right there.

Re:pro-level...

[fishbowl]

"I ran out of cash! =)"

I budgeted $1500 for cables for my home studio, mostly just moving 8 channels around. It wasn't enough.

Re:pro-level...

[PasteEater]

Jeez, really? What kind of cables are you using if you don't mind me asking. I was looking into getting some high quality cables, but again, ran out of money.

I realize the importance of good cables, but also realized that I could replace them in the future. I, too, am usually only moving eight channels in or out at home. If I need more inputs, I slave Logic to Pro Tools and track into that with my MOTU 896HD.

Re:pro-level...

[StormReaver]

I read exactly what you said. Let me summarize:

1) I have never used this software.
2) My opinion is that this software cannot be called professional grade because of some nebulous preconceptions.

You're right that I shouldn't have flown off the handle, and I apologize for that, but statements like that push all the wrong buttons with me.

Re:pro-level...

[PasteEater]

Apology accepted, and I am sorry if I pushed the wrong buttons.

Again, I have no opinion of the software. I can't have an opinion because I haven't used it.

However, calling this software "pro" is completely unwarranted for something that's a 0.1 release. What criteria are fulfilled by this application that make it pro? The plug-in arcitecture isn't even finished- it has no support for RTAS (proprietary), Audio Unit, or VST plug-ins (VST is currently in development). That alone is a deal breaker.

I'm not trying to be a jerk (although I may be one anyway) but calling something "pro" does not make it so. From the website: Wired aims to be a professional music production and creation software. Aiming for something is great; I hope they make this app the finest in the world. Until that time, it's still in development ie. not finished.

For those of us who have spent *thousands* of dollars already, not only must we be able to use our current software (plug-ins, for instance) but also our hardware (TDM cards, etc.) to consider another app. Otherwise, we have no reason to use something else.

Another poster replied to me that I should be willing to experiment, as you can usually discover cool new things that way. It's a great point, and I can't say that I will never use Wired. Maybe I will someday soon. Experimentation is one thing, but when it's crunch time, there's no way I could turn to this app to get the job done. Lack of plug-in support alone kills it.

They are not nebulous preconceptions, they are facts. If XXX isn't supported yet, and pros need XXX, then it's not professional grade software.

Again, I apologize if you feel that I've insulted you in some way, but I stand by my original post.

Re:pro-level...

[Creepy Crawler]

Hear hear, fishbowl, I was talking about the original parent, PasteEater.

He says he has never touched it.

Then he goes on to extoll how it sucks, it wont work, and two other very overpriced programs are "somehow" better.

Perhaps it's just a "conspiracy" theory, but it would seem in character to the way advertising is getting. Word of mouth is the best marketing, bar none. To use that idea and apply it to a webform would mean hiring a few monkeys, watch the big technews sites and blasting the open-source ones.

If you watch that, you'll see a lot of this "I never used it but it probably sucks" comments. And they're the ones that're watched.

Re:pro-level...

[fishbowl]

"What kind of cables are you using if you don't mind me asking."

Mogami snakes for the main long runs,
Neutrik connectors, and Gepco bulk cable, assembled locally on the bench by someone who cares, me.
I have a couple of Conquest mic cables.
I don't consider myself a pro, but I only want to do this crap once. As much wire as there is in my studio, very little of it shows. I'm real proud of that, and knowing that, even though a lot of my gear is crappy (analog synths, cheap-ish rack gear, etc.), the signal path is as good as it gets.

Re:pro-level...

[fishbowl]

Yeah, I get it. But PasteEater has a strong, valid point. There's a high barrier to entry in the pro audio world, it's not purely a technical barrier, and if you don't get over it, you crash on the floor and your product is a lost cause. I realize nothing that has an open source devel model is going to completely crash and burn to oblivion if it fails in the marketplace, but I'd go as far as to say the problem with DIGI/PT market penetration is even worse than trying to get a web browser to approach IE, or a word processor besides Word, or Gimp into the Photoshop world.

I wouldn't dream of trying to do my own studio work with ProTools, because if it's work for ME where I am both the producer and consumer, I'd rather pull out my fingernails with pliers than use that stuff.

so ..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. microsoft won't have to use pirated software to create their audio-samples anymore ..

SMP support?

[Thaidog]

Being both Linux and "pro level" I would imagine this would be a no brainer but I don't see it in the documentation...?

Re:SMP support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being pro level, you probably realize that SMP may not be the best choice for audio work? In any case the kernel has the scheduling job, if an app is threaded it's going to see improvements. For a pro audio app that typically means the GUI is threaded and more responsive.

Re:SMP support?

[Thaidog]

Lol! Please explain how smp is not good for Pro work? I don't know any other pro level audio applications that are not smp aware...

Re:SMP support?

[StormReaver]

If the application is either multi-threaded, or uses multiple processes, then it automatically supports SMP.

On Linux, apps don't have to be specially aware of multiple processors. Linux apps are SMP aware merely by being multi-threaded or multi-processed. Linux will automatically spread them around the processors.

Re:SMP support?

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't what I said at all. Timing is critical in audio applications, you don't generally want to be thrashing between CPU's unless you're going for that jitter effect. Compare screen updates on loaded SMP and uniprocessor audio workstations to see what your additional processor[s] bought you.

Re:SMP support?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is completely opposite to my experiences. When I had my dual celeron as my main box, I'd compile a kernel and do whatever I wanted on the desktop and it felt like the box wasn't break a sweat at all.

Re:SMP support?

[GreyWolf3000]

Actually, I have a dual P3-1Ghz system and I can tell you that SMP is excellent--it offloads all the overhead and gives you a dedicated CPU to record with.

Ardour's website recommends SMP.

Re:SMP support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that what I was getting at? If you read the full thread I've said the GUI will be more responsive on SMP because it's threaded all along, gains for the audio engine on an SMP host are not so great because that really needs to be a single process to maintain good timing.

Re:SMP support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and if you had ever done any real audio work (compiling your kernel does not count), perhaps you could understand why no one is going to listen to you.

"Latency is too important to use SMP for audio work."
"OMG linux smp rox0rz my kernel compilation, n00b."
"..."

Re:SMP support?

[m50d]

But, in an audio application, it would be good to have the backend be able to completely take over one of the processors, since latency is so critical. That way the important thread *will not stop*, whatever happens. Of course such a thing would probably require hard realtime patching and suid root, and quite possibly be impossible even then. But it would be a good idea.

deepZ0ne

[Anonymous Coward]

Now Microsoft can afford to edit wav files legally.

Re:deepZ0ne

[Anonymous Coward]

If all you need to do is edit a .wav file, This program and similar ones like Ardour (ardour.org/) and MusE (lmuse.sourceforge.net/) are massive Overkill. What you need is a program that is a wave editor (not a digital multi-track recorder) like Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net/).

The first step, no more

[NeedleSurfer]

One can hardly run a studio with only one software, I'll agree that the main required software has finally been made for Linux but there is a host of other software you need to actually run a studio. Librarians/editors, machine control for your automated consolle, track and cue sheet software, archival software (which surely exist on Linux), countless number of utilities; BPM to delay calculators, pitch to loop lenght calculators, you know, little utilities you just can't live without in the end when you get use to their function. You will also need, pitch detectors and a lot of pluggins, from noise reduction to convolution-based reverb and so on.

What I'm trying to say is that, this Wired software looks fun and potentially great but as of now it looks like it's not even on par with Cakewalk (or Sonar if you prefer) which in turn, aren't on par with anything they are the lowest grade wares you might find in a studio (I say might because I never have seen a studio running on Cakewalk or Sonar).

I sincerly hope some LinuxHeadz will be jumping at this and bring us back the good ol' days on the Mac, when the entire audio community was working on one platform making better and better by the day, now the devellopement effort are spread a lot less new wares and a lot more me-too wares are being made, Wired has the potential to change that. The Linux community has the necessary structure to bring this back and make this software evolve and get complete with an incredible assortment of companion wares.

So a first step it might be but it's a great one and the future will tell us if it was a leap...
go Linux!

Re:The first step, no more

[micromoog]

There's already a gigantic shitload of good audio software for Linux . . . I'd call this a "minor addition" rather than a "first step". Here's a listing. There's also an entire Linux distribution set up for audio.

Here's what I use:
multitracking: Ardour
MIDI sequencer: Rosegarden
editor: Audacity
drums: Hydrogen
softsynths: Alsa Modular and QSynth

There's really a ton of stuff out there . . . it just (like almost all free/OSS) doesn't get as much exposure as commercial work.

Re:The first step, no more

[Bedouin X]

Well personally I think that Sonar is the best sequencer around. It runs rings around ProTools and is much more intuitive than Nuendo. I hear that Digital Performer is cool but the copy that I had wouldn't install on my dual G4. After scouring the web and sitting on hold with MOTU for a couple of days I just said to hell with it and went back to Sonar on PC.

Re:The first step, no more

[antiMStroll]

You're talking about one specific form of audio production. There are many pro versions. Assuming it's solid I could see radio, for example, operating on a Linux program like Ardour. Most of the apps you mention have no relevance in that environment, and where I work they prefer external hardware for much of the rest.

Re:The first step, no more

[david.given]

There's really a ton of stuff out there . . . it just (like almost all free/OSS) doesn't get as much exposure as commercial work.

Everything you've said here is true. Unfortunately, while all the tools are available, working with music is one place where the tradition Unix mindset of have-lots-of-little-components-that-do-one-job-wel l doesn't fit.

So, Hydrogen is a pretty decent pattern based drum sequencer. Rosegarden is an adequate score-based MIDI sequencer. What if I want to add ddrums to my MIDI file? Well, the only real way I've found is to do them seperately and merge them together. And that causes incredible grief later when you want to change something. And you can't edit the drums and the music at the same time.

This sucks. Really. To me it makes it pretty much unusable. Instead of concentrating on the music I'm trying to write --- and trust me, I really need to concentrate --- I spend all my time trying just trying to make the tools do what I want.

So far, the best program for what I want is FruityLoops, a pattern-based sequencer for Windows. I find it really easy to use and it fits my needs perfectly. Unfortunately, it's also Windows only and expensive.

On Linux, the closest would seem to be the various Tracker descendents: Soundtracker and Cheesetracker, mainly. Unfortunately, the interface is almost wilfully cryptic, and not only do they require you to do voice management manually, but they'll only play one pattern at a time, which is a bit awkward...

Re:The first step, no more

[micromoog]

So, Hydrogen is a pretty decent pattern based drum sequencer. Rosegarden is an adequate score-based MIDI sequencer. What if I want to add ddrums to my MIDI file? Well, the only real way I've found is to do them seperately and merge them together. And that causes incredible grief later when you want to change something. And you can't edit the drums and the music at the same time.

Actually, the ALSA midi routing tools do this. Perfectly. And qjackctl provides a nice graphical front-end for it. Then you use JACK to route the audio together into a recording package, via whatever synth and processing software you want. The potential is unlimited.

I've used FruityLoops, and while it's got a slick interface for what it does, it doesn't do everything (like recording, for example).

Re:The first step, no more

[msimm]

I think the important thing is that most of that isn't pro-level. Not in a snotty elitist sense, but in a business sense. Thats good software you've pointed out and I've used most of it. But its good in the sense that its nice that someones taken the time to make it available.

Re:The first step, no more

[LuSiDe]

One meant for overal media production is Dyne:Bolic. Also see http://www.dyne.org

Great! If really Pro-Level...

[Kartik3]

I don't have a great deal of knowledge as to what "pro-audio" applications are already available for Linux. But if this package could be a comparable replacement to Pro-Tools (TM) (the standard program and hardware used by the majority of the audio community) then it could be an unbelievable boon to much of the music and audio community. The availability of professional software programs, such as Wired, which level the financial playing field and grant all users the tools to create at a professional caliber is one of the reasons I love the open source community. I am overjoyed that one may not need thousands of dollars to be able to produce professional quality sound and I feel making the tools available to the broadest population allows for the most innovation and creativity.
Just my 2 pennies

Re:But...Not 100% free but very close :)

[Anonymous Coward]

The funniest thing is all the "24-bit" as if it's a feature. Too bad the standard is 16-bit. Have fun recording in 24-bit and readjusting the resolution afterwords for a net loss.

It looks ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

The real difference between professional and consumer audio has more to do with hardware than software. The actual difference between these two standards is the voltage at which the signal is sent, professional audio equipment sends it's signal at a higher voltage than consumer audio, and the signal is balanced (requiring balanced cables). The only real standards to measure this as 'pro-grade' software would be to look at things like latency, sampling and bit rates, and how versatile of an audio editor and midi sequencer it has. This program looks OK, but as for me, I will stick to using JACK and combining the many many many many many powerful programs which already exist for linux audio and are packaged together into customized operating systems like agnula listed above (which is good for debian) or planet ccrma (your best bet for redhat and fedora):
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/so ftware/
Is this program really what we've all been waiting for ?? Not if you know anything about linux audio software, it doesn't even support LADSPA yet!!!

Re:It looks ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

Audio circuits are unbalanced period! Pro audio gear has transformers on the input and output to balance the signal for the cable run to combat interference. I've seen pro studios who remove these transformers and run unbalanced. Most of the pro/prosumer differences are analog equipment, mics, mic pres, outboard...

Agnula does rock, I hope they carry on maintaining it now that funding has run out.

Re:It looks ok...

[rco3]

1) Microphones are balanced for several reasons. Noise/EMI immunity, phantom power - these are sufficient right there. No pro studio in the world runs any significant fraction of its mike closet in unbalanced mode.

2) internal circuitry in GOOD audio equipment is often balanced from end to end, for reasons of noise / EMI immunity, etc. It's more expensive, but in a PRO studio that's often worth it. The Soundcraft 3200 console, e.g., uses a balanced mix bus for exactly these reasons.

3) Transformers on the input also serve as galvanic isolation (DC offset protection), impedance matching, and of course conversion from balanced to unbalanced. Have you considered the size of the capacitors required to get a 1 Hz LF response in a 150 ohm microphone input stage? They'll have to be electrolytics, and frankly I'd rather have a nice Jensen transformer than a pair of 22,000 uF 'lytics in my signal path. You don't see those in a Mackie, but then a Mackie is hardly pro level, is it?

That said, it's distinctly possible to build a good active line-level input and output stage, balanced, without large electrolytics at all. Even a top shelf op-amp like the AD797 is cheaper than a good transformer - hell, *6* AD797's are cheaper than a good transformer! Horses for courses.

Re:It looks ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Obviously people don't run Mic signals unbalanced, it's obvious I was refering to +4dBu balanced line signals. Even then most mics (eg: Neumann), transformerless or otherwise, present a single ended output to a balancing stage.

2. PRO desks with balanced inserts are a rare breed (never mind the mix bus).

3. When I asked at rooms where I'd seen it done, I was told the BBC radiophonic workshop stripped all the I/O transformers from their gear in the 80's and ran unbalanced.

I've got plenty high end outboard and it's all unbalanced circuits with transformer balanced I/O apart from the all-valve units. Frankly I'd rather have a transformer than an opamp. I actually like what transformers do to audio, some people don't, but there you go.

Re:It looks ok...

[rco3]

1. Well, it's obvious that no one in their right mind would DO it, but it wasn't all that clear from your comment :-) . I would suspect that dynamics like a Shure 57 or 58 actually present the voice coil directly to the tranny primary - in fact, I'm pretty sure of it. But for condensors, ribbons, etc. you're absolutely correct.

2. Every TV truck I've ever worked in either had balanced inserts or a Mackie. Most of the control rooms I've worked in had unbalanced inserts, occasionally even those godawful 1/4" TRS like a Mackie. And, sometimes, they had Mackies. Sigh. I did work in one truck a few times in which the engineer who built it / ran it actually installed unbal/bal transformers so that all the patch points from his unbalanced mixer were represented as balanced at the patchbay. But hey, that's TV, right? You gotta expect long runs with TV. Balancing is essential.

3. Whether you can get away with running a recording studio unbalanced will clearly depend on your environment. I've heard horror stories from a NYC sound engineer (Eddie Kramer's fave engineer for a while) that there were rooms in tall buildings which, because of the profusion of radio transmitters, actually had hundreds of volts differential between the top of a rack and the bottom of a rack - induced by the RF. OTOH, in a rural studio, running unbalanced could quite conceivably result in simpler, better sounding inputs and outputs with no fears of EMI.

In general, I'd rather have transformer I/O as well. However, when I design *MY* mixer (optimized for TV remote trucks), I'll probably have to settle for your basic op-amp balanced inserts, but using an EDAC or terminal strips - I just can't see spending $4800 for transformers JUST for the inserts on a 48-ch board. Nor can I see selling many mixers with that kind of parts cost, except for the REALLY big trucks. Probably I'll design an optional transformer-input mic section, just in case somebody wants to spend a LOT of money.

It might get done this decade, too! Hope I'll still be able to SELL an analog board then.

Re:It looks ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

As an audio pro, tech, BSEE, geek, live mix, etc., I can tell you I've taken apart (and in some cases fixed) Shure SM57 & 58s and they DO have their own transformer, capacitor, resistor (I forget the exact configuration but I think I remember thinking it was to help damp out some of those awful cardiod mids...) The VC is NOT directly connected. The aforementioned components are potted in hot-melt glue in the bottom of the handle.

Most older mics DID have the VC directly connected to the XLR, and very often a mic cable short would put the 48V phantom power across the poor VC. You can guess the rest...

Re:It looks ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um- you don't really have to use a .022 F cap! The input impedance is NOT 150! Mackie (and others) feature lower input impedance- usually around 2.5K. In fact, if you loaded the mic to a 150 ohm load it would sound like crap (try it!)

Audio signals are not like RF signals, where source, line, and load impedances must be matched. Generally you want a low output impedance to drive lines well (and for lower noise sensitivity) but the input can be and usually is high. 10K is typical for line and mic, good instrument input stages and DI boxes, like the "Countryman DI", are over 1M Ohm.

And in fact they DO use NP (non-polar) electrolytics to decouple balanced lines and mic inputs. Check the schematics of any pro audio gear. OK- yes, some use real transformers at the input, but still have caps inter-stage. I used to work for a company which made mixers for broadcast.

[BSEE, many years repairing, AND I do much paid/pro live sound (and wimpy studio too. :)]

Re:It looks ok...

[rco3]

Yes. As an audio pro, tech,BSEE, MSEE, geek, live mix, studio cat, TV A1, and musician, I am fully aware of this.
When I said that the 57 and 58 present connect the voice coil directly to the tranny primary, I was referring to the transformer internal to the microphone - looking back, I see that it wasn't clear. Sorry. It's a matter of philosophy whether that means that a 57 or 58 is balanced throughout, but my point was that it isn't UNBALANCED anywhere in its signal path before or after the transformer.

None of my 57's or 58's have any capacitors or resistors internally connected anywhere that I can find 'em, although it's always possible that someone else has removed them. I tended to buy my mikes used from the store I teched for.

Mentioning phantom across the VC reminds me of a true story: I once had a customer, who was thoroughly ignorant about matters PA, ask us to sell him a "speaker". After much pointing, we finally realized that he wanted a microphone. We sold him an EV N/D 357 or something similar (don't get me started), and he didn't want a cable. He intended to do it himself.

Well, of course, after that Sunday (you knew he was a clergyman, right?) he was back in the store, complaining, threatening, and raining down brimfire and hellstone upon us for selling him such a substandard, dangerous "speaker" - and him a man of the cloth! How could we? We should be ashamed! He dropped it on the counter, and sure enough it was charred, smoky, and melted. Miswired XLR? Phantom across the VC? Well, not exactly.

He'd taken it back to the church, gotten out the electrical tape, and wired an extension cord (yes, 120V power cord) straight to the XLR connector. No PA, just expected plugging into the wall to magically make him louder. I shit you not.

Re:It looks ok...

[rco3]

A good point, sir. I *have* spent the last few years doing video and scientific data collection. It's hard not to think about matching impedances, but of course you're right, it's unnecessary for AF. I even worked this exact problem a couple of months ago for a line input stage. Duh.

Of course they use NP caps to decouple the DC at inputs - it's either that, or transformers. And obviously 22,000 uF is an exaggeration anyway - you only need 220 uF to get below 1 Hz LF -3 dB point in a 2k circuit (Mackies are 1.3k). My point is that capacitors of that size just about HAVE to be electrolytics, and NP electrolytics are likely to induce more distortion than a good transformer (Jensen JT-16-A, e.g.). I realize that "'lytics are bad!" is a popular subjectivist position, but I think Cyril Bateman's series of articles on capacitor distortion in Electronics World add a bit of objective fuel to that fire.

The alternatives include using a transformer, which is expensive but simplifies several factors including noise impedance; using large value metallized film or film-and-foil caps for decoupling, which is at least as expensive as a transformer and takes up more space, but probably provides lower distortion; or terminating resistively prior to the DC decoupling caps and using a higher-impedance gain stage, which allows the use of smaller, cheaper, lower distortion film-and-foil caps but makes noise impedance matching more difficult.

Or, of course, you can simply use big lytics and deal with the relatively higher, but still overall pretty low, distortion and spend the money you saved on a) better faders and op-amps or b) a second Mercedes for all the corporate VPs.

For me, the fun lies in splitting the zeros. Let someone else design the DOD and Peavey crap. If I can reasonably avoid using NP lytics, 4558's, etc. then I will.

Re:But...Not 100% free but very close :)

[Anonymous Coward]

(I'm the original AC from above)

I dunno - there is certainly loss between the two but the dithering is quite good and I don't notice much difference there. The one thing I'm dissapointed about is standard audio CD's being 44100. My pro-card does 192khz although I usually use 96khz regularly - I didn't really think I would be able to hear the difference between the two sampling rates but its quite obvious.. need more Super Cd supported players or whatever they're called.

Suggestion: A music section

[gad_zuki!]

Music tech has gotten extremely geekified in the past twenty years and its a shame tech sites don't embrace and report on some of the very-high tech stuff out there. Many "geeks" are either musicians or have dabbled in music. Many are also hardcore music fans.

I've found one blog that does this very well and its called MusicThing (I have no relation with the people there, just a fan). I wished slashdot or other high-profile tech sites would also report on pro-audio gear, audio software both free and Free, the digital revolution in music (not just in techno), etc.

I mean, one of the coolest pieces of tech I own has to be my Line6 amp, which models eight tube amps digitally. That's a little revolution in itself.

After reading this article I was wondering if there were open source equivalants or homebrew solutions like build your own analog synth, theremin, microphone, etc.

Re:Suggestion: A music section

[zerblat]

Well there the Linux Audio Blog, Linux Musician and Quick Toots. I'm not sure most /.ers in general are that interested in pro audio.

The are lots of articles on the web about recording with open source software. Also check out Dave Phillips's site and his articles in Linux Journal.

Re:Linux Audio developement is fairly decent nowad

[necro2607]

Hell yeah dude, thanks for the post.

Mod parent up!!

Totally useful. Ardour looks awesome. Now I'm all excited to get all this stuff running. I can see it being very very useful for our band and future musical endeavours.. !! :)

Re:Linux Audio developement is fairly decent nowad

[Anonymous Coward]

whoever modded "overrated" is a fuckin moron

LINUX!

[Anonymous Coward]

LINUX! Veni, Vidi, Vici!

Time to rejoice again!

http://www.multitrack.us/

[Anonymous Coward]

Those guys would tend to disagree with you.

Also take a look here:
http://www.linuxmusician.com/index.php
You might be surprised. ;-D

Gstreamer is not only for desktop!

[fons]

Now you have stuff like gstreamer being developed, but that's desktop stuff, not audio developement.

As I understand it, Gstreamer is a multimedia framework, and as a framework it would be IDEAL to build Wired/Ardour-like software on top of it.

When changes are made to the framework, they would also work for the software on top of it.

For example, all plugins written for Gstreamer could work for the software you build on it. And when other people make Gstreamer plugins for their gstreamer-based software, those plugins would also work for you!

Words as "modular" and "flexible" come to mind

Now, i'm not a hacker, i'm a software user, so I might be talking out of my ass here. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Re:Gstreamer is not only for desktop!

[m50d]

Gstreamer is good for modularising playback. For example, noatun, the kde multimedia player, is built on top of arts, the kde equivalent of gstreamer which is probably about to be switched. I've looked at the source, and there is no decoding code there at all. All the actual playback stuff is handled by arts, noatun basically just sticks a little bit of api on top of it (and it's such a nice api even I can write a plugin), and then the rest of it, even the basic user interface, is all done by plugins. How's that for modularity? It means that when the kde people added a xine bit to arts, the noatun maintainer didn't have to do anything, and I could suddenly play .wmas in noatun, without even upgrading it.
However, this approach does not work for audio editing, and the reason is simple: there's far too much latency. A generic modular backend is never going to be as fast as a custom-written one, and when you're doing audio editing the backend matters. Gstreamer is designed to be network transparent for goodness sake, and there's no way you want an audio editor running with the latency you have sending things over the internet.
Jack is a good backend for audio editors though. Jack plugins work exactly like you said, and crucially, the developers have been fanatically devoted to low latency, because it's been designed from the ground up for editing, not playback. It's possible gstreamer will be able to plugin to jack and use it as a playback backend; I know arts does.
Modularity is good, but you're better off fabricating a screwdriver than trying to use a hammer :).

mod parent up

[clsc]

Most insightful post.

>> Here is a audio specific distro:
>> http://www.agnula.org/

Here's their Debian based flavour (ISOs here): http://www.agnula.org/download/demudi

gogogo... Project is financed by the EU btw.

Fruity Loops?

[Tethys_was_taken]

I've just started to dabble with music creation on the PC. While I was looking for apps to start with, I found this excellent windows app called FruityloopsM (FLStudio now). IMO, it is very polished and excellent to use. And, like a good game, simple to learn and hard to master. I'm not advertising, I'm just blown away by this things quality.

Now, FL is pay software, and I have the 30 day demo (*hangs head in shame*) and it's one of the things keeping me on Windows (the other things being the games :).

I've been looking for a decent app for linux which resembles fruity loops. Does anyone know of one which can hold a candle to FL? I've been informed by various sources that FL is a point and click tracker, a VST interface (whatever that is) and various other scary sounding terms :/.

Besides, if any of you 1337 developer gods out there are interested in making music software, this is one app worth cloning

Re:Fruity Loops?

[clsc]

Yeah, fruityloops is a nice app. I've tried cubase and cooledit pro, but fruityloops, sofar, is the one that appeals most to me.

It's just great to have a tool thats so intuitively understandable, yet so filled with features.

Literally, you're up and running in one minute flat, doing your stuff, and there's absolutely no need to rtfm.

Re:Fruity Loops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there's one available for linux, and it's even in debian. It's called hydrogen.

Re:Fruity Loops?

[clsc]

>> hydrogen

uhm... fruityloops isn't exactly a drum machine by any measure - the "loops" part of the name does not refer to drums.

Re:Fruity Loops?

[LucidityZero]

Sorry, you have obviously never used FruityLoops.

FruityLoops is simply an amazing piece of software. It is NOT just a drum machine/click and point sampler like hydrogen. With *full* MIDI interfacing, the piano roll, VST/other plugins, programmable effects processing, excellent import/export capabilities and more, there is simply nothing else like it.

I know professional artists that have released tracks produced entirely in FruityLoops. Can't say the same for any Linux audio software.

I have been running Linux exclusively for closing in on three years now. I really don't want to run Windows, but looks like I will have to. I have spent PLENTY of time trying to find comparable software for Linux, and it just doesn't exist. I have the itch to start producing again, and nothing seems to touch a FruityLoops/Goldwave setup for me...

Re:Fruity Loops?

[BoneFlower]

Fruity Loops rocks.

The best thing? Not the ease of use(thought that is nice)... Full VST, Dxi, Rewire, and MIDI support for extending it with hardware and software. It can remain the centerpiece of your digital studio long after you've grown out of whats included.

Re:Fruity Loops?

[BoneFlower]

"there's absolutely no need to rtfm."

Actually, I've run into the need to RTFM. But, again to Fruity Loop's credit, the help file is actually HELPFUL!

Had trouble syncing up a drum loop... brought up the help file and found what I needed right off the bat and got on with my music.

Re:Fruity Loops?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I don't think there is a comparable linux host. Have a look in the kvr-vst.com database.

Re:Fruity Loops?

[fishbowl]

There isn't much in the world of audio production that FLStudio *can't* do. I believe it is the name that turns people off. FruityLoops is by far the best value in audio software. The coming version will even have sync-to-video, a feature that adds $500 to the price of something like Sonar. And I would *much* rather use FL than Sonar. Opinions vary, but I suppose there are people who get some satisfaction from having paid $1000 for a program, and need to justify it.

Pros working to specific contracturally agreed standards have things they must do. But I'm in charge of my studio (semi-pro, not very ghetto at all) and I use FL more than anything else.

It's good enough for Mike Oldfield. Works for me. best $150 I ever spent.

Sorry!

[hexMonkey]

They forgot!!

To have a nice gui you need

-big rounded corners
-big circular bright coloured buttons
-white background

in short: everything big round ,white and simple

just because its not mac and its not mac's interface
doesn't mean you have to trash it.

Also, its opensource! so..
Stop complaining and make your own interface :P

Another thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, there is a opensource profesional synthesizer for Linux and Windows is ZynAddSubFX.
http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

For MIDI/Audio with music notation, try

[FeatureBug]

Rosegarden has a MIDI sequencer, a music-notation editor, audio, DSSI plugins, etc. For musicians who can read music notation, Rosegarden is probably the best available MIDI software for Linux.

Re:For MIDI/Audio with music notation, try

[WWWWolf]

Also, if you're interested in printing scores, Lilypond is the Best Thing Ever.

The only downside is that you've got to be a printing/typesetting geek, not necessarily a musician; Not shy away from the fact that you can't just mouse the notes to their places, but rather you have to use an interpreted language to produce printable score. It's for people who want *great* output and get the notes to *exactly* where they should be with minimum hassle, and care to spend afternoons tweaking the output to get it *perfect*. It's not necessarily for those who want easy and simple way to enter it.

That said, it's still usable by average users, it just needs some understanding and caring to use. Rosegarden can export the MIDI scores to Lilypond format as well, if you want an usable interface, but trust me, entering stuff works really nicely with plain old text editor.

Re: For MIDI/Audio with music notation, try

[gidds]

Seconded. I've been spending quite a bit of time recently doing some engraving (the music equivalent of typesetting) with Lilypond, having previous done a lot of stuff in Cubase and a smidgen in Harmony Assistant.

Cubase gets me 80% of the way there quicker. But that last 20% is a nightmare (and needs redoing every time the music changes). Lilypond gets me 95% of the way there at reasonable speed; and the last 5% gets easier as you learn it.

What I have noticed is how much more natural its output is. Engraving isn't just a matter of putting the right notes in the right order on the right staves; there are an awful lot of subtleties in the layout and getting it to 'feel right' and be easily readable, making best use of the space. Most other packages (I've seen a lot from Cubase and Sibelius) are reasonably readable, but they feel robotic and unnatural. Lilypond isn't perfect, but it has far far better instincts about how to do layout.

And, like most programming languages, the more you use it, the easier it gets, and the more you can do with it!

It seems to be slowly supplanting ABC and other common formats as the format of choice for online music libraries. Musipedia uses it, for example.

Lets see the VST support!!!

[The_reformant]

Once they get the VST support running this looks like its shaping up to be a pretty decent app. Its going to take a lot to make me switch though, ive just gotten so used to cubase/cooledit it'll be hard to make the jump

Re:Lets see the VST support!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Steinberg want developers to pay huge fees to be able to access the VST API. Don't expect much uness they open up the formats.

Re:Lets see the VST support!!!

[usrusr]

if you consider sending a fax before releasing a plugin a huge fee...

Re:Lets see the VST support!!!

[fishbowl]

"Steinberg want developers to pay huge fees to be able to access the VST API."

I use more free VST plugins than commercial, and my favorite host (EnergyXT) is a $30 shareware registration. 100% Steinberg-free, no huge fees anywhere to be found.

What hardware can you use?

[Eric Giguere]

On Windows I've been using a Yamaha UW-500 audio/midi capture device (USB, works well with the laptop so I can capture piano and voice). What are the hardware options for doing this kind of stuff under Linux?

(I also use Finale for notation, but that's separate. Perhaps the most frustrating piece of software I've ever used...)

Eric

Re:What hardware can you use?

[dmaxwell]

These USB devices work well enough. There are two gotchas. The first is that these devices tend to be samplerate locked at either 48 or 96 Khz. If they work at other rates in Windows, it is because the drivers are dithering down in software. The Linux snd-usb drivers don't do that. The second gotcha is that many of these devices need a firmware blob beamed into them before they start working. The windows "driver" has the blob and the facilities to send it to the device. These will work under Linux as well but you may have to find that firmware somewhere.

Re:What hardware can you use?

[crhylove]

Sibelius treats finale like a retarded step child with emotional problems.

Please don't use finale.

Re:What hardware can you use?

[Eric Giguere]

Last time I checked, Sibelius didn't let me distribute my files on the Internet without buying an extra license. I did like what I saw when I tried it, though, perhaps I'll go expore it again -- maybe the licensing has improved.

Re:What hardware can you use?

[crhylove]

You can save as midi, sibelius imports and exports midi very nicely. Unless you are looking for something else?

Re:What hardware can you use?

[Eric Giguere]

No, no, I'm interested in the actual notation -- the sheet music. When I last looked at Sibelius, you needed a special "Internet edition" to publish your sheet music on a website. Finale always offers a completely free application that others can use to view your music.

Re:What hardware can you use?

[crhylove]

right, like a pdf export or something.... I just print it out myself and give it to people. It would be nice if there was a pdf export, or a new format that all the programs used that could be readable (and displayable) in a browser. There's the beginnings of this going on with lilypond and mutopia, but I'll be damned if I can get any of that to work in windows. If I could get Sibelius to export .ly (or an open source program that replaced sibelius!) and firefox to display .ly (maybe via extension!) that would be ideal.

Well, what can you do... I ain't no coder. :D

Rosegarden also has VST

[Anonymous Coward]

VST, LADSPA, OSC plugins, JACK audio support, internationalization. Rosegarden project homepage

Other PRO-Level audio software for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also advanced drum machine for Linux. It's called Hydrogen.

Re:Other PRO-Level audio software for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing "PRO-Level" about that app. Pro level would be Fxpansion BFD or Battery 2 or Drumkit From Hell Superior or any of the various East West compilation libraries.

People are throwing "pro level" around way too much. Pro level implies professionals are actually using it. They're not, and there's a reason. Other stuff that's out is already better.

Re:Other PRO-Level audio software for Linux

[DrunkenPenguin]

There is nothing "PRO-Level" about that app. Pro level would be Fxpansion BFD or Battery 2 or Drumkit From Hell Superior or any of the various East West compilation libraries.

So, you didn't bother checking out that app? You just rather posted your pointless rant as anonymous coward?

I (as a professional musician) would say that Hydrogen's UltraAcousticKit drum kit that features 32 outstanding live drum samples from the top-notch Roland Fantom-S music production workstation sounds very much like professional to me. In fact - I own Roland Fantom-S and I can not tell a difference.

Re:Other PRO-Level audio software for Linux

[IANAAC]

People are throwing "pro level" around way too much.

By the same token, there are just as many people throwing around the implication that you can't do anything with this software - simply untrue. You should actually try and use the software before you dismiss it as something unusable.

Hydrogen is very usable - and expandable in a way that BFD et al are not.

Just tried to compile it

[Chilltowner]

It looks cool from the screenies, but it has some fairly serious dependency nightmares once you actually try to get it going. I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to compiling these things, and I'm not afraid to start tearing around in the code to make it work, but this is beyond the pale. PortAudio is particularly hellish to deal with. It's only version 0.1, so I'm sure they'll improve things in the future, but I'm giving up until the install and dependency issues become more sane.

Re:Just tried to compile it

[Anonymous Coward]

So did I, and I actually managed to compile it. The readme doesn't specify which versions is needed for all libs so i installed some cvs versions to get it working. Tried using it too, but after 3 segfaults within 5 minutes i gave up.

That's ok though... it's version 0.1 after all. What is not ok is the slashdot headline missleading everybody saying this is a professional level sound app. The poster probably didn't even try it! In its current state wired is no more than a flashy 'look but don't touch' UI (cause if you touch - kaboom). I'll check back in a few years.

Re:Just tried to compile it

[micromoog]

Since this seems to be the only thread in this discussion involving people who have actually tried this software, maybe you can answer this: does it support LADSPA plugins, like virtually all other Linux audio software? Seems like a very important feature to me, and I don't see it mentioned on their ultra-sparse website.

Re:Just tried to compile it

[blackmonday]

Look in the forums, there's help available there.

According to the forum posts, it doesn't look that tricky, but you do have to compile without JACK support.

Worst UI Ever

[Nurgled]

It would have been better to use standard UI widgets for a lot of that stuff. When will people learn that rotary knobs do not work well in computer interfaces.

We use rotary knobs on physical devices because they are easy to manipulate by applying friction with our fingers. A far better alternative for a computer-based interface would be a slider combined with a text-entry widget to allow precise values to be entered, thus making the computer interface better than the real-life one, rather than reinventing all of the limitations of the physical interface with the extra pain of figuring out how to manipulate a turning control with a mouse pointer. They'd also have a bit more room to write a decent text label on the control, rather than the unreadable blurs they use now.

None of it goes together, either. If they'd just let the standard UI widgets render in the standard way it would have looked a lot more consistant across different parts of the application, and they'd only have had to implement special behavior for the more specialised widgets such as the waveform viewers and so forth. I suspect that as we reach higher and higher display resolutions that bitmap-based interface will end up tiny and unusable, too.

Re:Worst UI Ever

[shadowbearer]

Actually the only way I find either slides or rotary "knobs" usable is when I can mouseover and use the scroll wheel to manipulate them :)

SB

Re:Worst UI Ever

[CamTarn]

Rotary knobs are designed to be packed densely. Witness an audio mixer: each channel is made up of many knobs and small buttons, and one slider. Replace each knob with a slider and a text-entry box, and suddenly your channel density drops by a factor of four. It doesn't matter too much in normal applications, where if you've got that number of controls packed that densely, you're probably doing something wrong.

Possibly a better way to do things would be to use knobs, with some way of popping up a text entry box to enter a precise value.

I've used audio apps based on sliders-with-text-entry, namely GranuLab, which has an entire screenful of densely-packed, gray, blocky sliders. It looks awful.

You're right about the bitmap-based interface, however. I use Propellorheads' Reason, which has a beautiful bitmap interface that tries to emulate real-world devices as much as possible. It's great fun to use - but on a 1280x960 screen everything is tiny, and the device stack only occupies half the width of the monitor.

Re:Worst UI Ever

[Christopheles]

It would have been better to use standard UI widgets for a lot of that stuff. When will people learn that rotary knobs do not work well in computer interfaces.

We use rotary knobs on physical devices because they are easy to manipulate by applying friction with our fingers. A far better alternative for a computer-based interface would be a slider combined with a text-entry widget to allow precise values to be entered, thus making the computer interface better than the real-life one, rather than reinventing all of the limitations of the physical interface with the extra pain of figuring out how to manipulate a turning control with a mouse pointer. They'd also have a bit more room to write a decent text label on the control, rather than the unreadable blurs they use now.

I must concur, I have had these exact thoughts before. It seems as if almost every audio program must have it's own fancy widgets that are almost impossible to use. The default colors/interface just aren't good enough. I remember when I first got a soundcard, came with a program to play midi files and whatnot. I couldn't figure out why the UI was so hard to use until I realized they were trying to make it look exactly like a stack of physical audio components instead of an actual program.

Interfaces work much much better if they are consistent. People realized a few years ago that bitmap interfaces were both much harder to use, not consistent, and do not scale well, despite how "cool" they may look. See Winamp vs Foobar2000.

Re:Worst UI Ever

[sahonen]

Probably the best way to do it would be to replace the knob with a simple text box that you could click and drag to change the value as well as click and type to change.

Re:Worst UI Ever

[m50d]

I think audio developers use custom widgets because the default knobs suck. It's probably because they're not used much, but look at QDial compared to any other qt widget, I think you'll agree it's the worst one available. And winamp is still far more popular than foobar2000.

VirtualDub

[DrYak]

Avidemux is a replacement closer to VirtualDub

(Both are linear editing tools : i.e.: you process video streams on which you apply filters and codecs).

KDenLive like BroadCast2000, are more like MainActor, ULead, Adobe Premiere, etc...
They are non-linear (you have small clips you assemble together [usually by drag-dropping them on some storyboard-like tracks])

It's easier to do editing with non-linear.
But you can still do some editing with linear tools too. (Usually linear editting tools alow you to work only on a small portion of your stream [and thus, isolating clips]. They also allow you to use a squence of more than 1 file as input stream [and therefor you can assemble your clips into your final movie]. You only lack the nice and userfriendly interface with tracks, but basically you can do the same).

VST Support in Linux Applications

[base_chakra]

For those who don't know, VST (Virtual Studio Technology) is a plug-in architecture engineered by Steinberg Media Technologies. VST plug-ins aren't limited simply to sound filters, but allow users to expand their host applications with elaborate third-party instruments that do things like, say, simulate a grand piano. Many regard it as superior to the competing DirectX-based plug-in system.

It's hard to overestimate the importance of VST instrument support in Linux-based audio applications. Many musicians depend heavily on specific VST instruments, and wouldn't dream of migrating without them. Also, VST allows for so many new possibilities with your host application, it would multiply Wired's potential capabilities tremendously, and would be tantamount to porting dozens of applications to Linux.

Since Windows has a long-standing reputation for latency problems in MIDI timing (especially with budget hardware), I can see how a new version of Wired with VST support could compel some Windows users to switch.

Re:VST Support in Linux Applications

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

By the way, there's a huge problem with VST and GPL'd programs: the VST SDK has a restrictive license on it that doesn't allow you to redistribute it - you have to download it from Steinberg yourself, after agreeing to their terms. So the only way to distribute a GPL'd program that depends on the VST header files is if you add an exception clause to the GPL...but if you do that, you can't link to any other libraries without that exception clause, such as FFTW, for example. It's a big pain, and that's the reason Audacity doesn't have native VST support (though there are still ways to access VST plug-ins through plug-in bridges).

Re:VST Support in Linux Applications

[jzellis]

Latency problems are the big deal in pretty much any DAW (digital audio workstation) system.

To break this down, here's the problem:

1) I play a note into my guitar.
2) That note is sent as an analog signal to my soundcard, which converts it into a digital signal.
3) That signal is processed by my DAW and whatever realtime effects I'm using, like delay or distortion, etc.
4) The signal is duly recorded to hard drive.
5) As a last priority, the processed signal is played back to me...because it's far more important for the signal to record properly than to monitor properly.

All of this, obviously, takes time -- how much depends upon both your hardware and your software. If it takes more than a couple of hundred milliseconds, it becomes pointless to monitor, because most musicians get a little irritated when it takes half a second between when they play or sing a note and when they actually hear it. (It can also create a 'chorus' effect, which I can tell you from personal experience makes it difficult to stay on key.)

This problem is usually resolved via a combination of expensive soundcards and expensive apps. Nobody in their right mind would seriously try to use a consumer-level soundcard for professional recording -- I've personally got a Digidesign MBox for running ProTools and an M-Audio Firewire 410 for everything else. These provided power for microphones and line-level instruments that need phantom power, they provide XLR and 1/4" inputs...all the important stuff.

So where am I going with this dull lesson in digital audio geekdom? Basically, the deal is this: creating a solid, crash-free, low-latency realtime digital audio production (meaning anything with live recording or realtime effects) is, technically speaking, on par with writing your own FPS 3D rendering engine from the ground up.

Actually, it's even worse, because 95% of the hardware that recording pros use is extremely specialized. I've never used a high-end or mid-level audio interface (like the MBox or the FireWire 410) that didn't have its own custom software for configuring it. They're usually ASIO compatible, but that's about it for standards compatibility. This is reflected in how they interact with software. For example, ProTools *only* works with Digidesign hardware interfaces. If I don't have my MBox plugged in, ProTools won't even start up. But it sucks for use with Cubase, because Cubase isn't optimized for the MBox's architecture.

For most OS/Linux apps, pretty good is good enough. But digital audio recording is an extremely unforgiving and precise application. Lack of VST effects and instrument support is unforgivable. Latency issues are unforgivable. In fact, for most musicians, any requirement that they RTFM or fiddle with the kernel to optimize audio I/O is totally unforgivable. Most musicians hate computers, and only use them when they have to.

I'm not saying that Wired is a crappy app, or that nobody should bother writing DAWs for Linux. I think it's a cool idea. But I also believe that recording studios will be the last people to migrate to open-source solutions, unless those open-source solutions can out-perform the existing proprietary solutions...and that just doesn't seem likely any time soon.

Remember: musicians were one the reasons that Apple survived the first 3/4s of the 1990s. A lot of recording apps were until recently only released for Windows as an afterthought. And personally, as someone who has done audio production/recording on both Mac and Windows, I won't touch a PC unless I have to. The architecture is just not as optimized for audio as Macs are. (This is not a "Macs are better than PCs thing"; I'm speaking quite literally here. The audio layer in OS X has higher CPU/memory priority than any other OS subsystem.)

But I'd love to be proven wrong. Good luck to the developers of Wired.

Re:VST Support in Linux Applications

[DaveCBio]

For me it would have to support VST, VSTi, DX, adn DXi as well as my Emu sound card.

Re:VST Support in Linux Applications

[The_reformant]

The latency is only an issue if your using creative cards which aren't designed as music production cards anyway. My terratec DMX6fire has rock solid timing and you can pick one up for under a hundred quid these days.

The traditional mac dominance of the market is long gone and windows really is the choice that most pro's make

what about http://www.virus-ti.com/

[Anonymous Coward]

what about http://www.virus-ti.com/

also check out their audio demos

http://www.virus-ti.com/audiodemos/

WEEEEE!!

[suso]

Well, this is not quite a replacement for Reason by Propellerhead Software, but it is close. Great job. I think it will make a lot of audio heads consider Linux a lot more.

Not an unreasonable amout of deps.

[donscarletti]

I am not anwering the original poster. It is clear to me that this is just a deliberate troll, and a damn skillful one and I respect that. Kudos to whoever posted it. But this is a response to the four individual people who modded this up and obviously need a response.

This is not a gnome application. I don't really know what it was doing on gnomedesktop.org in the first place, it really has nothing to do with gnome (or at least no more than it has to do with XFCE). It's a GTK2 application which uses wxwindows to abstract most of the GTK2 stuff anyway so it wouldn't be hard to port to another toolkit. You don't have to be running gnome to use it, you don't even need to have gnome installed.

GTK2 which is what it actually uses is a fairly good library to base such an application on. It provides a very nice user interface with only a bit under 5 or so megs of dependancies above the stuff that comes with X. (when everthing is compiled and installed)

Pango is really part of GTK. Freetype is pretty much used by everyone (gnome, KDE, games, most other things), and the rest of the stuff you mention comes with X (the ones that actually exist that is). Personally, I have no idea whatsoever what you are complaing about. Do you expect everyone to use Xaw or make their interface from scratch with raw X calls? Maybe you beleive that all sound editing should be done on the console. You are really putting a stupid expectation on developers and suggesting a course of action that would hold back creating good gui programs for linux for ages.

Personally, I suggest that you just go ahead and install GTK and QT as well as anything else apps you want ask for, as well as their respective dependancies. Then what I suggest you do after that is shut up. This process will only take you half an hour at the most and will allow you to run many more applications without having to complain about it.

Re:Not an unreasonable amout of deps.

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I suggest that you just go ahead and install GTK and QT as well as anything else apps you want ask for, as well as their respective dependancies. Then what I suggest you do after that is shut up. This process will only take you half an hour at the most and will allow you to run many more applications without having to complain about it.

It only takes half an hour if you

1. download the packages over no-so-very-broadband.
2. have to juggle install CDs a lot
3. must resolve dependencies manually

If you don't have broadband, then 2 can slow you down a bit. You don't use a distro that doesn't resolve dependencies for you (yum, urpmi, apt, yast, emerge, whatnot) unless you like laborious tasks like that!

sorry...

[Rage Maxis]

this app isn't "pro quality". Its tinker grade at best, alot of the bargain bin software at your local music store is better at being amateur grade than this product is.

1) Lack of good low latency options for the MIDI, etc.

2) Where's the vocoder? the pitch matching? the multipass filters? the FFT-based filter? the automatic noise reduction based on a noise sample?

3 examples (of many) of why this isn't *PRO* software. I already saw many posts "WOW! FINALLY ANOTHER REASON I CAN GO 100% TO LINUX!!!!"

This release and any number of previous sound software releases suggest that but I dont see anything from 1 hr of reading on the website about this package that suggests it even competes with Samplitude releases from 1995 or Sound Forge in 1995 in terms of even single channel editing.

Windows and Mac still and always will rule for "pro" sound editing, unless protools, samplitude, propellerheads or any number of other companies port to windows.

Re:sorry...

[fishbowl]

"Windows and Mac still and always will rule for "pro" sound editing, unless protools, samplitude, propellerheads or any number of other companies port to windows."

I would consider the job done once and for all, if there were Linux versions of Magix and FruityLoops, the two best kept secrets (and by FAR the best values) in audio software.

If you really need something not offered by the combination of these two programs, you're into a production realm where you can afford whatever you want anyway.

The kind of person who spends $3000 on a one-channel preamp for a $10,000 microphone can argue with someone else about this.

DSP farm?

[Fyre2012]

Hmmmm...

it's be pretty bitchin if there you could connect it with a cluster for effects / dsp and other proc heavy tasks...

Re:DSP farm?

[idlemachine]

I did find this interesting summary of the current (as of late October) state of running VSTs under Linux: http://www.djcj.org/LAU/quicktoots/toots/vst-plugi ns/

vstserver, while still heavily under development, could be worth keeping an eye on, it looks like it's aiming to be a VST-rack style app like Chainer: http://www.notam02.no/arkiv/src/snapshot2.png

Widgets

[labratuk]

What is it about audio software that the programmers always have to use their own crazy non standard widgets?

It is not an expensive piece of hardware. You're not going to trick us into thinking it is by using strange pixmapped widgets.

Always cool to see more Free audio software though.

Rezound

[Anonymous Coward]

I think one of the best available WAV editors for Linux is Rezound http://rezound.sf.net/

Re:the interface looks pretty bad

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary, I think the interface looks great. It is very clean, sharp and not bloated. I would not compare to Cubase even though this has virtual instruments. This looks like it is going the way of Reason. Bravo!

Brands

[Anonymous Coward]

I own a small post-production company. I edit commercials for TV and radio and have to fight with the idea of brands. My clients doesn't care if the application runs on Linux, OSX or Windows, they want me to say: "I have an expensive ProTools system" to feel I'm a pro.

Re:Brands

[Anonymous Coward]

I want someone to build me a bookcase but they can only use brand X hammers and brand Y nails :-)

There's nothing Pro Tools does that justifies the price, if someone wants that specific tool they can go find someone else to operate it for them, if they want me then I'll use a range of tools at my disposal. If you do a post job in ardour/audacity and tell them that it's YOU and not the software they're paying for, so long as you're working to a good standard you may be able to build a decent client base/reputation and dump PT.

I remember using sound tools for the first time and being in awe of it, then I went working exclusively with 1/4" tape and dats (later cdr) for 6/7 years. Protools didn't impress me when I first ran into with it along with someone elses unfinished project, IMHO people who trained on PT lack real world understanding of what they're doing and a whole bag of tricks that everyone picked up if they learnt 'the old way'.

Re:Brands

[VB]

My current project is sitting on an HD system on a Mac in Phoenix with 1 track on a TDM system in Gilbert, AZ. I've spent about $8,000 hiring musicians and paying these two sound guys to record and mix my stuff. There's a lot to be said for the pervasiveness of PT when I can bring a DVD with sessions from one studio to another without losing the mix / levels / plug-ins.

I agree in principle, but sometimes it's helpful to consider the practical implications of the tools (i.e. being somewhat standard in the industry) over the technical preferences of the sound guy.

And, at $800, I thought my DIGI-001 and LE 5.3.1 was a steal. I get a lot done with this painlessly.

My $0.02.

Re:Brands

[Anonymous Coward]

"There's nothing Pro Tools does that justifies the price"

Customer perception justifies the price. And it's just another case of vendor lock-in on a vertical system, which happens in every industry. It's good
that studio people can move around without needing to train, and there's an argument to be made for compatability with Digi hardware, RTAS plugins, etc.

Your customer doesn't necessarily just want a finished 2 channel mixdown of whatever you did. They probably want the whole project, intermediate files, hardware and software parameters, and an inventory of what was used, so that the job can be continued elsewhere (or in your place).

With a de-facto standard like ProTools, which is something that can be spelled out in a contract, you can do this.

I laugh at non-pros who think they benefit from protools or Digi hardware or anything like that.

The DAW in my home studio runs Magix, with a Delta 1010, and I could not be happier (and would not be happier with PT!)

Re:Brands

[fishbowl]

"And, at $800, I thought my DIGI-001 and LE 5.3.1 was a steal. I get a lot done with this painlessly."

You might have already read my posts bashing Digi/PT, but I understand your reasons. Trouble is, I don't think you can really explain this to most linux people, since most of us don't happen to be both computer engineers AND professional musicians and/or sound engineers.

99% don't even understand the problem after considering computer audio in terms of *playback*.
Most of the rest, don't really understand the specific needs of a pro -- who might have to work with other musicians, different studios for production and post, contractural obligations, requirements such as sync to specific video formats, that sort of thing.

Some who *do* understand the issues, still seem to think that "pro quality" begins and ends with the signal path, user interface, and stability of the software.

I've spent more on cables than most are willing to spend on their whole system. (I'm nearly at a half mile of cables, just moving 8 channels around!)

Tracktion/Juice

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an audio/midi DAW called Tracktion that is quite easy to use compared to the others (cubase/sonar). I believe that it was originally going to be ported to Linux, but now that doesn't look like it is going to happen. However the author has made publicly available A C++ class library called Juicethat I believe (not a programmer so the nomenclature confuses me)can be used to make a similar app that can be run on Linux.

JUCE is an all-encompassing C++ class library for developing cross-platform applications.

It's particularly good for creating highly-specialised user interfaces and for handling graphics and sound.

The intended users are developers like me, who are writing large, complex applications in C++ and who would like to use just one clean, high-level API rather than a bunch of different libraries for different purposes or platforms.

Anyone know if this is useful for developing a DAW that can be similar to Tracktion for use on a Linux box? If so I won't require dual-boot anymore.

So how long

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

So how long until they're pressured by Wired News/Magazine to change their name, and then finally settle on Spectrum only to find out that there already exists a company by the name of Software Spectrum forcing them to once again change their name ala Pheofirebirdfox.

Propellerheads Reason

[beakerMeep]

Another thing that might be nice to see on Linux would be an all in one set up like propellerheads reason. Some people really like this kind of all in one synth, drum machince, sequencer, effects processor set up - personally hate trying to go back to things like cubase after using it although I certainly see how those apps are perfect for some people. http://www.propellerheads.se/ There are things out there like buzz machine and reactor but the interface to reason is nice and easy :)

Re:Propellerheads Reason

[Anonymous Coward]

With stuff like JACK, though, an all-in-one is unnecessary, you can mix and match your applications as needed. It really is the Linux way...

Re:Propellerheads Reason

[BoneFlower]

IIRC, Cubase supports ReWire. So you don't have to go do something in reason, then bring it up in cubase... just run cubase as your sequencer, and have Reason up in another window, cubase will send commands to reason and the appropriate sounds will come up.

I primarily use Reason as a slave device under Fruity Loops, again via ReWire. Then slaving ReBirth to Reason via ReWire, so I can use the Scream 4 on the 303s for some really cool sounds.

It's too bad it's non-free

[Anonymous Coward]

we need a gpl version

OSX has this already

[totoanihilation]

"As this is GPL, there is nothing stopping ports to other platforms :)"

Since OSX already has most of this functionality built into the OS thanks to the CoreAudio framework, the majority of the source would be akin to reinventing the wheel. What we need for OSX is a comprehensive interface to tap into the power that's already there.

Re:OSX has this already

[Anonymous Coward]

Well? Go on then.

MOTU's Digital Performer

[Anonymous Coward]

is the bomb. But it is quite expensive, and Mac only, although it will work with any Mac-supported sound card/ input hardware, including ProTools.

Everyone talks about CakeWalk, ProTools (sw), etc. I'm an audio pro, and I work with (literally) Grammy-winning recording engineers and producers, and MOTU's "Digital Performer" is absolutely hand's down by far the best. The others (Windoze issues aside) are somewhere between limited and clunky (ProTools: horribly clunky UI, but has a few really good plugins.)

As a very serious Linux enthusiast and supporter, I'd like to see the community work together and produce one stellar Linux-based (or cross-platform) midi/sound recorder/editor, rather than so many mediocre efforts.

At the very least, use Digital Performer as the basis of how to do the functionality and GUI RIGHT.

And yes, I want to contribute- to a single combined project.

It's raining bile, hallelujah!

[billcopc]

I hate to rain on everyone's parade here, but every time a "great" linux app comes out, it turns out to be a pale mockery of some "great" Windows app. Here's my opinion on this project:

It is (at least to me) obviously mimicking Cubase. Cubase is a serious application, used by serious musicians and audio engineers. I use Cubase, almost daily, and I find it kind of backwards sometimes because it is designed from a musician's point of view, making it look like conventional rack equipment, while I am a code guru and I'd rather have extreme control over everything.

Now we have Wired, which is a virtual studio app built for a coder/hacker's operating system; why are we imitating the rich fool's interface when we could instead be designing one that is better suited to the target demographic ? I'm not saying this app does not belong on Linux, but instead of blindly copying an existing app's look and feel, why not start with a clean slate and build it RIGHT ?

And VST support ? that's a pipe dream if you ask me. Running Win32 video codecs in MPlayer is one thing, running Win32 VST plugs is a whole different ball game. One thing I learned over the years is that most people who are good at music, suck at code, and vice-versa. I am one sexy exception =) What I mean is that the typical VST plugin is kind of rough around the edges.. they look pretty and sound kinky, but under the hood it's grossly inefficient and poorly debugged code. VST plugs tend to crash often, and most likely depend on a few Win32 support DLL's for a handful of stupid non-audio tasks. Lots of nasty stuff to "emulate" if you want it to work good (and fast).

What I think Linux needs is for people to accept a common audio interchange format and protocol. VST is just a standard for software plugins, but it is Steinberg's intellectual property. What if Linux had a license-free standard for audio chains, let's call it LinVST for fun. Write one linux app that takes LinVST Input, does a few nasties then spits out LinVST Output. Then that conformant app can be plugged into any LinVST-aware host.

Try Mandrake

[Anonymous Coward]

Jack and alsa works fine.

cubase and logic

[Britz]

the largest 2 apps for midi sequencing with integrated audio support are Cubase and Logic.

You can choose between them. Since logic was bought by apple now for x86 there is no choice. Most studios run one of them (together with other, more professional apps). Those are like Photoshop for graphics. And like Gimp never caught up with Photoshop I have yet to see anything remotely similar to Cubase or Logic on Linux.

My friend does Cubase and as soon as something occurs I can install Linux on his comp, but until then ...

Re:cubase and logic

[m50d]

I'd say keep an eye on Rosegarden and the integration efforts they're making with Audacity.
Rosegarden is already the best free midi program anywhere, and is very nice to use if you have a real midi synth/keyboard. Since it relies on external softsynths that's not so good, but it's improving rapidly, and the UI is really very nice.
Audacity is pretty basic, but supports LADsomethingorother and the plugins are being made to do some very good stuff. My school, about as anti-linux as it gets, has standardised on it.
At the moment integration only goes as far as allowing you to open up audio in audacity, and then have rosegarden play it in sync with the midi file. But it's being worked on, and I think it will soon be good enough. The two together are already as good as I've seen for sub-£500, while they may not be "pro standard" they're good enough for anything I've ever wanted to do.

Re:cubase and logic

[fishbowl]

Before you spend $1000 on Cakewalk or Cubase, get a $75 copy of Magix Music Studio 2005, or even a $15 copy of the 2004 version (being clearanced).

I have the option of using Sonar or Cubase, or anything else I might want. I stick mainly to two tools, FLStudio (the Producer Edition) and Magix Audio Studio, plus a handful of free plugins, plus a few things that are specific to my outboard gear (synth programmers, mostly, and MIDI-OX which I could not live without). Oh, and also I'm becoming more of an EnergyXT power user and advocate every day.

I have a $10,000/year budget for music, that includes instruments, software, room treatment, and anything else in the category. My style of music ranges from classical to original/contemporary, but does NOT include euro/dance/techno styles.

I could use any software I wanted, and I've stuck with Magix, FLStudio, and EnergyXT. Not only that, it troubles me that more people do not arrive at the same conclusion!

Re:cubase and logic

[Britz]

I know what You mean. Another friend of mine makes a living selling soundcards. He is the mastermind when it comes to music and computers (did head audio techinician at Love Parade among other things) and he is essentially saying the same. Magix does some amazing stuff. They are not as good as Cubase, but 99% of the users don't need the stuff that is missing from Cubase.

This isn't the first

[Anonymous Coward]

They act like this is new... what about JACK, Ardour, JamIN, Rosegarden, ecasound, MuSE, and so on? They don't count?

What about Pure Data? && Reason/ProTools !

[bensyverson]

How come no one has mentioned pure data (pd)? You can't get much more "Pro" than that. The possibilities are endless...

Anyway, I don't understand the obsession with Reason and ProTools. People always go on and on about how much control and flexibility Reason gives you. Reason gives you the illusion of control, but always winds up making EuroDance/Trance. If you want real power, check out pd. Otherwise, don't bring up control.

Pro Tools is widely hated by audio professionals for its ridiculously bad interface -- the only reason they keep using it is that it can handle the throughput of massive mixing consoles, and there's a ton of money already invested in it. Why should Linux apps try to emulate the "Pros?" Start fresh and build something better.

-ben

It depends.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not necessarily a bad suggestion. It all comes down to budget, which in turn comes down to priorities. If he's already invested a lot into performing music, it may make sense to spend a lot of money on audio production products, and this may entail buying a new computer.

well done guys...

[advocate_one]

you killed it...

Sorry, this site is temporary unavailable.

[ Daily Bandwidth Limit Exceeded ]

PowWeb Hosting offers 5Gb of BandWidth a Day!

guess I'll check back in two days time after the story has dropped off the front page...

dd

[pikine]

Just for information, to rip ISO files in unix (Linux, Mac OS X, etc), just do a:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=~/cdimage.iso

Furthermore, on Mac OS X 10.3, "Disk Utility.app" will do the same. It also burns ISO images. I've also used cdrecord on Mac OS X with some success (specifying the device was a bit puzzling).

criticism is good, but ...

[pikine]

You see, you definitely have a lot of itch you want to scratch. Rather than whining about why they haven't scratched yours, why don't you make a program that will: !) have good low latency options for the MIDI 2) have a vocoder, pitch matching, multipass filters, FFT based filter. (sorry, automatic noise reduction is for the whimps, so as automatic gain control) 3) where is the third one? did you point out the third example? I'm missing something... There you go. And the program will be open source, right? You may as well stay in Windows Wonderland if that suits you the best. The least I want to hear from people is an extortion of features "or else I'll just stay on Windows." I'm glad you have considered open source solutions, but it's the wrong attitude, man.

Re:criticism is good, but ...

[rblum]

I can't really answer for the original author, but in my case:

I don't make those patches because I can (gasp!) buy the software that does all that stuff. Even if I were only paid at minimum wage, adding all those options would be more expensive in terms of work I couldn't get done than buying the packages I need.

I know, a strange concept for slashdot - but I've got a family to feed, and other side projects that are more important to me.

In short - anybody who really *needs* a vocoder and pitch matching is making more money using the commercial software (by leaps!) than he'd save by writing his own. If you want to pay me to create an OSS solution, feel free to go ahead.

answer: linux audio developer's simple plugin API

[pikine]

LADSPA has been around for a long time. It is not meant to duplicate VST, but it is a simple plugin interface just "good enough" to chain together effects like freeverb, compression, etc. It relies on the host (audio program that uses the plugin) to provide a user interface of the parameters to program the plugin. The plugins tend to come in a bundle, from dedicated plugin developers, such as Steve Harris and Richard Furse, who are experienced in DSP. There is also some kind of XML-based GUI description for LADSPA plugins around, but I'm not on the state of the art affair on that.

round buttons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are there so many round dials/buttons in applications like this? A computer screen is not a physical device, it is extremely difficult to turn these with a mouse. It's akin to using a match for turning the dial on a amplifier - you don't see people doing that and yet people insist on adding round buttons to software.

Re:round buttons?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because professionals are used to using consoles and mixers with real dials. Pros actually use real hardware and control surfaces, and use of those paradigms in software is an attempt to make them feel comfortable, which is what they want.

If you don't like it, then clearly you don't work in this arena.

answer: audacity

[pikine]

Several people above mentioned Audacity as a replacement on Linux. In fact, it has been ported to both Windows and Mac OS X as well.

Re:answer: audacity

[B1gP4P4Smurf]

What he said. The cool thing about Audacity is that it's small and self-contained, the Windows version runs great from a USB key drive.

Re:What about Pure Data? && Reason/ProTool

[dTaylorSingletary]

Reason gives you the illusion of control, but always winds up making EuroDance/Trance

Very wrong on that count. Some organically complex systems can be created with reason, with a little creativity you can create evolutionary synths that sound spetacular & complex. Reason is no illusion, it's the right tool for the right kind of creator.

What "long-standing reputation?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Windows has a long-standing reputation for latency problems in MIDI timing (especially with budget hardware), I can see how a new version of Wired with VST support could compel some Windows users to switch.

Windows had no such reputation. First off, you say "especially with budget hardware" which means the problem is your hardware and/or drivers.

I have a pro audio card and there are absolutely zero MIDI problems. Enough people use VST instruments controlled via MIDI on their Windows sytems that your claim of some sort of reputation is laughable. If you're having MIDI timing or latency problems, your card or your drivers are the problem and they specifically make zero latency cards for just these reasons. What would Windows even have to do with it? I forgot, this is Slashdot...

Re:What "long-standing reputation?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows had no such reputation. First off, you say "especially with budget hardware" which means the problem is your hardware and/or drivers.

That's funny, I could have sworn that Microsoft themselves called it a problem.
The article is about Win95, but the problem didn't really go away with Win98 or WinME, and today it's still virtually impossible to sequence (even with a pro-audio card) without using ASIO drivers.

Fact: DOS, Linux, and BeOS all offer substantially lower MIDI latency than Windows 9x and Windows XP without the benefit of special hardware or exclusive software. Steinberg had to create the ASIO driver standard to compensate for the fact that Windows' sound drivers are totally inadequate when it comes to MIDI performance. Unfortunately, most consumer sound cards don't have the benefit of ASIO drivers, and therefore are pretty much unusable for serious MIDI sequencing. Now, try doing some sequencing in Linux or BeOS with standard drivers, and witness the difference.

absolutely zero MIDI problems. Enough people use VST instruments controlled via MIDI on their Windows sytems that your claim of some sort of reputation is laughable.

I'd probably agree if I had as little knowledge and experience as you. "Problem" is a relative term, but when you go from a system that has sub-millisecond latency on a common sound card with standard drivers, to a system that requires a huge monetary investment and a unique driver architecture just to get great performance, you tend to look at it as a problem.

they specifically make zero latency cards for just these reasons.

If only we could all afford to spend $4000 on a sound card.

YAML

[ProphetPX777]

uh, you forgot to mention YAML http://www.yaml.org/ lol

Re:What about Pure Data? && Reason/ProTool

[bensyverson]

Well, based on all the Reason music I've heard, and based on the time I've put into it, I would say you can create "spectacular & complex electroPop" with it. All software affects and informs the kind of work created with it, and Reason is no exception. It may be a fast tool for creating unusual synth sounds, but the idea that it gives you this huge amount of control over your sound is, as a pd user, hilarious. You're still stuck with their knobs.

Abuse of the phrase "pro level"

[Anonymous Coward]

I just have to say this. I'm seeing a laughable repeated use of the phrase "pro level" in the comments to this article. There are absolutely no Linux audio programs you could consider "pro level." To be pro level would mean professionals are confident enough to be using it in droves on important projects. Sorry, folks, they're using Nuendo and Pro Tools. Logic and Sonar beneath that.

"Pro level" would be me being able to use my M-Audio card with no latency in 24-bit 96khz mode, being able to use the card's internal mixer for configuring the multiple inputs and outputs. Having an audio clip pool. Being able to stretch audio with algorithms like MPEX3; having advanced dithering algorithms like POW-r. Having superior bussing options and a plugin architecture that supports VST and DXi like all the others do. Being able to pan in surround sound. Having crystal clear digital summing that competes on the level of Pro Tools and Nuendo (take a look sometime at how many bits Pro Tools uses internally for its audio engine). Freeze options. Real, usable MIDI editing. Video sync editing. Etc. etc. etc.

Just look at the feature lists of Cubase SX 3 or Sonar 4, apps that are generally considered "high end consumer level" yet contain enough features that they are used in several smaller studios. Nobody's using Ardour in a pro studio! THAT would warrant the "pro level" label.

Pro level implies that professionals are using this for their professional projects. Linux audio apps are so horribly behind and featureless when compared to Nuendo, Logic, Pro Tools, Sonar, etc. that for people to keep repeating this mantra of "pro level" is hilarious and clearly illustrates that you people aren't actually using these professionally at all and don't even know what it means.

Look at the features, workflow, and capabilities of any of the top DAW apps and realize what pro level actually means before you start throwing it around to pat yourselves on the back for spending days getting your JACK setup to work.

Re:Abuse of the phrase "pro level"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm planning to use Ardour for my next session in place of the Studer, the client want's to try tracking digital. I figure I'll use UA and API pre's direct into a 1010, if you think the 1010 isn't pro level you probably never owned an adat! I won't be mixing in the computer but that's okay because digital summing totally sucks ass, doesn't it? I've not quite figured how it's going to work yet, I'll probably track up in ardour fix up the tracks and transfer out to 2" for mixdown.

Of course the tape machine doesn't support "MPEX3, POW-r, VST, DXi" and it's a wonder anybody managed to record music on the thing for the past 25 years without them, but I digress...

Re:Abuse of the phrase "pro level"

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the tape machine doesn't support "MPEX3, POW-r, VST, DXi" and it's a wonder anybody managed to record music on the thing for the past 25 years without them, but I digress...

In the past 25 years, they recorded in Neve consoles and real studios using real microphones and audio engineers who knew how to get good sounds. Studios employed their own professionally-experienced engineering staff that was always on hand to do this. Albums in the past sounded great because nothing comes close to the frequency response of the tape reels. But the bitrates and A/D converters of today have remedied that and the software has caught up.

Delta 1010 is fine, but "pro level" these days means Apogee converters, Digi DSP, and on the lower end at least Nuendo or Logic.

Digital mixing is just fine if you're using good software and good converters. I don't know what consumer-grade mixer you'll be going into, but I can guarantee it won't compete with the high-end pro consoles. If you're not concerned with audio quality, that's fine, but we're in an era of digital audio on the brink of moving over to 24/96 surround sound with SACD/DVD-A growing.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but if you're working with audio, MPEX3 is one of the best time-stretching algorithms out there, POW-r is one of the best for dithering from 24-bit to 16-bit for CDs (necessary if you don't want to drown your waveforms in noise...have fun), and VST/DXi allows you to use any virtual instrument you'd like and control it with MIDI for any sound you could dream of to make music. Dismiss them if you want, but it just illustrates that you don't work in modern studios.

Re:Abuse of the phrase "pro level"

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't know what consumer-grade mixer you'll be going into, but I can guarantee it won't compete with the high-end pro consoles."

It's a Neotek and I don't record Virtual instruments, I record real ones!

"but we're in an era of digital audio on the brink of moving over to 24/96 surround sound with SACD/DVD-A growing."

Didn't the chilli peppers recently have a hit album that was mixed to mono?

"I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but if you're working with audio, MPEX3 is one of the best time-stretching algorithms out there,"

So when was the last time you needed to timestretch an acoustic blues recording exactly?

"POW-r is one of the best for dithering from 24-bit to 16-bit for CDs (necessary if you don't want to drown your waveforms in noise...have fun),"

I'm not a mastering engineer.

"VST/DXi allows you to use any virtual instrument you'd like and control it with MIDI for any sound you could dream of to make music."

That's what they said about analog synths, then digital synths and now plugins.

"Dismiss them if you want, but it just illustrates that you don't work in modern studios."

I hear if you use ProTools with a Fairlight plugin on the drums and run all your 57's through a mic modeller set to U87 that it automatically makes any band sound better than the beatles?

Re:Abuse of the phrase "pro level"

[Anonymous Coward]

"pro tools" are for the creatively weak.

Back in my day, an analog synth, guitar, bass and an 8 track were all someone needed.

Should be Reason/ProTools != GOD

[bensyverson]

Subject line got cut off?

Wrong comparison

[De Bas Meister]

Comparing ACID to GarageBand is kind of like comparing the AVID video system to iMovie. One's a pro-level program; the other's an amateur, entry-level program. You should be comparing ACID to something like Digital Performer...

coralized link

[signingis]

Almost...

http://bloodshed.net.nyud.net:8090/wired

ASIO?

[BoneFlower]

Does Linux have ASIO support?

If not, its going to be problematic. You can work without ASIO, but the much lower latency of ASIO makes things much easier, you can drop latency by at least one order of magnitude, and that will be noticeable.

Re:ASIO?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are way behind the curve.

Linux has its own sound architecture, ALSA, which has been designed from the ground up to match the quality(non-resampling) and latency of Win32 ASIO/Kernel Streaming out of the box.

And it can mix, too.

Re:ASIO?

[BoneFlower]

Ok, I knew ALSA was a big improvement over the past sound systems in Linux, I just didn't know this little bit about it. In that case, the OS itself should be ready, just need to get the apps(and this one is a big step towards needed application support.

Thanks for the update.

Someone put aRts out of our misery, please!

[MsGeek]

aRts sucks. It really does. I can think off-hand of several apps that I have issue the killall artsd command before using.

The sooner KDE axes aRts and goes ALSA+Jack for everything, the better. It's one of the last remaining annoyances in KDE.

Re:Someone put aRts out of our misery, please!

[m50d]

Did you try running them through artsdsp?
IMO arts shows one of the best sides of KDE. They chose a working if limited solution (unlike the new and horribly buggy gstreamer/esd) in order to produce a working, useable desktop environment today, and it allows those with very cheap onboard sound (me) to play multiple sounds at once, easily. Now that they're reaching the limits and other stable solutions exist, maybe they'll switch. But I will miss arts. Jack is still unstable on my system, and I can't even compile any 9x version. And alsa doesn't let me play two sounds at once on my via82c686b.

Pro level, huh?

[J. Random Luser]

On a b/w limited server? Nitpick: at gnomefiles it says "aims to be a professional ..." Also warns this is a beta, and offers the Sourceforge forum as help. For a "pro-level" digital audio app I would expect to be able to pay money for help, GPL or no. Having run thru a mini zoo of daw apps in the past 15 years, we always come back to Digidesign. As an earlier post said, the tight coupling of h/w + s/w means it always works as advertised.

The list of dependencies for Wired is also a bit worrying, but with supreme confidence the ToDo file is empty. The source is available at Sourceforge so I'll try to buld it, and report back if there's anything interesting...

on-screen knob manipulation

[timothy]

How's that for a dirty-sounding subject line?

You're right that on-screen knobs meant to be manipulated with mouse-dragging are lame; however, as another responder has pointed out, knobs also take up far less valuable space, so your channel density can be higher.

That may not be a great tradeoff for everyone -- how many channels are most home recordists really interesting in playing with at once?* -- but it's one that a lot of audio programs' designers seem to think was wise.

The real point I'd like to make though is that while on-screen knobs are lame as a mouse-driven interface tool, they're *not* necessarily bad; for instance; a combination of mouse-over activation and a PowerMate or controlled by an external MIDI control surface, for instance, might be a really nice setup. It's not perfect for on-screen control elements to scream out for off-screen controllers, but not much is. I really wish keyboards could come with a rotary controller standard -- rotation is a nice motion!

timothy

* However, there might be quite a few who *do* want a lot, I'm not denying that ...

Re:on-screen knob manipulation

[Nurgled]

It could also be argued that packing so many widgets in such a small space makes it harder to lock on to a given widget and manipulate it. This is why most programs have (by default) huge toolbars with big icons and lots of text: it gives the user a big target and therefore lots of margin for error as they throw the mouse pointer around the screen.

I tend to reconfigure my apps to have small toolbar buttons, so I'm perhaps more accustomed to this than most, but for an interface like in this program where achieving an exact value is probably quite difficult I wouldn't want to accidentally shift the wrong "knob".

I think a good alternative, which would take up a little more space, would be to have a text field with arrows to the left and right of it. Clicking once in the text field allows the user to type a value, and clicking the arrows allows fine adjustments to be made, or the user can click and drag left and right anywhere on the widget to increase and decrease the value just like the rotary knob, but with some extra on-screen affordance in the form of the arrows telling the user in which direction to move the mouse.

Best of all, the above described widget would be rectangular, so there would be enough room to throw in a readable text label above it to make it square.

Buzz, Renoise, Skale

[Anonymous Coward]

I just posted about Renoise, and thought just now I should mention Skale while were covering trackers.

Skale.org

Skale is available for windows and linux, Renoise is available for windows and osx.

Both are free. They both are trying to fill the legacy of Fast Tracker 2 and the next generation tracker. I tried both and Renoise is far more advanced at this point. Both of these trackers are 100% free to use, although renoise has a string attached.

Renoise has a registered version at $45. on windows that gets you asio support and highest quality render support. So the 100% free version is slightly crippled. Me and all my friends registered. My personal take is that Renoise is so much better than everything else, that it is worth it to try and support the development effort.

Skale is a lot more like Fast Tracker 2, and in my opinion not as good as Renoise. Skale's big advantage is that they have a linux version. Renoise has talked about doing linux, but currently there are no plans for it. They just added Mac support.

So I hope this is helpful to someone. The sound quality in all these apps is great. Forget about people's personal bias and use something that you like. I warez Cubase for a while, and personally I prefer Renoise for what I do. The great thing about Buzz, Renoise, and Skale is that you can use them 100% free.

Re:answer: linux audio developer's simple plugin A

[fishbowl]

>It is not meant to duplicate VST

LADSPA is good and useful, but by not being a VST/VSTi host, it missed the boat.

There are hundreds of good VST effects and instruments, some of them are as if made in heaven by angels, indispensible already. The market has voted with its feet. VST is the ASCII of software plugins, and RTAS is the EBCDIC.

If it doesn't support my Emu card

[DaveCBio]

I use an 1820M as well as many DirectX and VST plug-ins. If it doesn't support all of that I'm not interested. If it doesn't support DX and VST plug-ins very few other pros will be interested as well.

The problem is

[Sycraft-fu]

ALSA and JACK are a pain, and often don't work like they should. It is often a real nightmare trying to get all your hardware to talk to all your software. Now while that's fine for computer geeks, audio people will not put up with that crap, mainly because they are audio geeks, not computer geeks.

On OS-X or Windows XP, the pro audio situation is just damn easy. Throw/plug in your soundcard(s), MIDI interfacts, etc and feed it the relivant drivers if necessary. Install the apps you want to use. Install the FX plugins you want to use. Done. It just all works together without bitching. Both OS-X and XP have excellent built in sound APIs, and adding something like VST or ASIO is easy.

That's what Linux really needs, before worring about trying to get apps. A system that makes it nice n' easy to get all the apps and hardware working together. Now that's what ALSA (for hardware) and JACK (for software) are supposed to do, but they don't do it near as well as CoreAudio.

'Day labor' programmers?

[Kadin2048]

Point taken -- but where would a person go to hire out a programmer for a day or two, at a rate that a 'garage band' could afford?

This is OT, but I've often thought it would be cool to have a website where individuals could post GPL "feature requests" and programmers could bid on them. The resulting code would go into the open-source code base. I was sort of inspired by looking at the Google Answers site, and thinking of how the same thing might work for code as it does for fact-finding and research.

It would be a great way for people to get custom code written cheap, and would give a lot of talented but un-credentialed programmers a way to gain skills and make some money on the side, without committing to a big project. It would sort of be the programmers' version of the "Work Today - Paid Today" labor agencies. Have a long weekend free and need a project? Log on, find something in your area of expertise, and make an offer; if it's at or below what the client is offering, the charge gets debited from them and moved into escrow. When you complete the project and post the code (publicly), you get paid.

There are a bunch of issues that'd need to be worked out, like dispute resolutions, trust and reputation building, but it's nothing that hasn't been dealt with before.

I personally know that there are a bunch of little things that I'd be willing to pay a programmer some money to do (mainly porting some obscure UNIX software over to Mac OS X) if I knew of someone who was interested in doing it. They're just not so critical that they're worth the opportunity cost for me to do them myself right now.

Working URL - wired.sourceforge.net :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Wired appears to actually be hosted on SourceForge: http://wired.sourceforge.net/

What kind of live work do you do?

[SonicSpike]

Hey - what kind of live audio work do you do? Where are you based out of?

Check out my site -
http://www.UltraSonicDesigns.com

Re:What kind of live work do you do?

[PasteEater]

I'm in Detroit, and I do whatever kind of live work comes my way. I work at a club in downtown Detroit, and will probably start working at a larger club within the next two weeks. Live sound isn't my main interest, and I do it mainly to pay the bills- the work is a lot more steady. I work at a studio on the "westside" of Detroit, but currently, I do most of my studio work from home.

Orlando, eh? I went to Full Sail in Winter Park. It's interesting to see that you are currently attending Middle Tennesee, as they are the only University who would accept my credits from Full Sail. I've toyed with going down there to finish my bachelors, but I'm almost done with a bachelors in Film at Wayne State in Detroit.

Best of luck in the industry. It's difficult but rewarding work (for me at least).

My audio engineering

[SonicSpike]

Well... I was born in Memphis, lived there for like 5 years, and then lived in Orlando for about 15.

I got my 2 year AA degree at Valencia (a cc in Orlando) and then decided to move upto Nashville to attend MTSU http://mtsu.edu/~record/ for a BS in the Recording Industry. I chose MTSU over FS because I wanted a 4 year degree in case I ever wanted to do something besides audio work.

The truth of the matter is that I am going to go into business as a synthetic oil distributor here in the Nashville area once I graduate and then keep my audio stuff as a supplimentary/hobby sort of income. I think the industry is too volatile at the moment for me to do it full time and expect to earn a decent living.

As a matter of fact I just flew down to OTown this weekend to mix monitors for two of my favorite Christian acts - Skillet and Disciple at a club down there (Last Wave).

Anyway man feel free to give me an e-mail next time or something. Good luck to ya.

Re:My audio engineering

[PasteEater]

Feel free to email me anytime!

callitaclue(removethis)@gmail.com

Yeah, the industry is very difficult right now. That's why I do a lot of my work from home- less overhead. Instead of bringing in clients to the studio and losing money, I do almost the same things from home. Of course, the studio has a Fairchild 670, a Neve console, etc.

Live sound is paying my bills right now, but it's not what I went to school for. I still have a lot to learn with live sound though.

Anyway, best of luck!

Re:answer: linux audio developer's simple plugin A

[Anonymous Coward]

google for libfst and you will find out that vst support for linux is already implemented.
we showed it at the last linux audio developers conference in spring 04

Re:answer: linux audio developer's simple plugin A

[billcopc]

This is the essence of what every audio app has done in its own way. A sound processor is like a black box: you put sound in, and pull it back out the other end. Then perhaps you can add automation in/outs for the tweaks and knobs, but really that's all there is. All the plugin "API" has to do is describe how many channels there are, and what they do; let the host app put it all together. All this involves is a simple init function in each plugin to tell the host what it wants. If you really want to call it an API then throw in some common audio-related functions, perhaps a nice I/O abstraction layer with elaborate buffering schemes for low latency, perhaps a simplified GUI toolkit, and in the end you'll have build a C++ based clone of Native-Instruments' Reaktor.

This is so ridiculously simple it should be a non-issue. People just need to agree on one standard that works for everyone, and stick to it.