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An Intro To Editing Audio On Linux
W-9z writes "Ars is running a guide to editing audio under Linux that I think is a great read for anyone trying to
find new ways to flex that Linux muscle. There are some outstanding FOSS tools out there. They look at Ardour, Audacity, and SND. The author talks a bit about why Linux is a
superior platform for this kind of work: 'FOSS software is, almost by definition, a work in process. If Ardour doesn't have a feature I need, I can code it myself. With this
possibility, the software no longer defines what I can do -- it's just a point of departure.' It's an interesting companion to the /. discussion of video editing earlier this year."
fervent software
Offers a Linux distribution based on Debian designed for audio work.
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
Offers packages to be installed over Fedora for audio.
Same thing that would happen with non-free software, except here you can hire any coder to fix it, and there you could only hire one company.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I didn't see a phone number, but www.rentacoder.com does have email and web forms.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
True, but Ardour does an advantage. It runs quite well on OS X where it can make use of any of the hardware available to OS X. I use it regularly my PowerBook. ProTools will remain a standard, though, but hopefully Ardour can make a dent.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
partial linux support, if you read the fine print. as in "a few easy classes work on linux, but none of the hard ones. i hope someone will find the time to implement them for linux".
Well, the article itself touches on a few of my reasons. Ardour, specifially, is very "Linuxy" in its interface layout and design, reminding me in many ways of the old Dos version of 3D Studio. It definitely looks like a programmer-designed UI, it's very stark and bare-bones, and things are never quite where you expect them to be. It's clearly a Cubase/Logic inspired design and layout, but without the years of fine-tuning those have had to get to their current states. I prefer Ableton's more unorthodox approach anyway, but that's just me :)
Ardour's UI is based almost entirely on ProTools, which most casual users of audio s/w have never used, and many have never even seen. The people who use ardour professionally (and there are a few!) comment that its UI is the most efficient they have used, including ProTools, which most people say is the most efficient in the proprietary world because of its extensive use of keyboard shortcuts. Ardour's development and design has been geared toward learning as much as possible from the years of fine tuning done with other DAWs, although we have been a little hampered by some issues with our GUI toolkit (GTK+ v1). We are currently about 60% done porting ardour to GTK2, and plan to be quite focused on usability issues after that (among many other things).
Re: h/w DSP support: first, DAC's don't have anything to do with this, and even when they are internal to the audio interface, they use no CPU cycles - they are always h/w! But more generally, see: my position on this issue.
I record an average of 2 to 3 nights a week at 24bits/96khz using a Sound Devices 722.
Unfortunately, the tools under Linux just don't come close to those under Windows. Linux lacks good dithering tools. Audacity does not work well at 24 bit. It lacks multiple levels of undo and many, many other basic UI features. It will take a great deal of time to implement those features with comparable attention to detail and reliability. Ardour is interesting but seems focused on
I've been using UNIX for 20 years and as my desktop for 18. The only other thing I use windows for is Visio. I hate having to use windows.
The article states that Audacity supports VST plugins. This is only partially true. VST plugins run (with the VST enabler installed), but they use a default interface - not the interface that was designed for each plugin. Many of the designed (non-default) interfaces have data displays that give feedback on the setting being adjusted (such as a meter showing audio levels relative to an adjustable threshold). Using these plugins without the feedback from the data displays can be difficult. I believe few new users would put up with this limitation if they have used competing apps that fully support VSTs and their interfaces. Saying that VST plugins are supported without explicitly mentioning this limititation, as the article does, is quite misleading.
Also, another easy way -- next to Debian -- to use Ardour, Audacity, Jack, LADSPA or anything else, is to use Stanford's Planet.CCRMA project for Fedora.
It contains just about any decent audio app for GNU/Linux, including the ones mentioned in TFA, but also has custom kernels with the real-time patches and everything.
Definitely worth checking out!!
h357
This is why Pro Tools owns the market. The other apps run all their processing on the CPU, while Digidesign does what gamers have been doing for the past ten years, use dedicated hardware to run all that processing and free up the CPU as a host. Back when Pro Tools was getting big, this was really the only way to do the kind of recording that is done in the pro audio world.
There may be a way to cluster some slave workstations or something to provide the required horsepower, but some time-sensitive situations are going to require that such a system be very, very stable.
Logic is good about this. You can chain together a bunch of Macs and use them as Logic Nodes.
"Sufferin' succotash."
What do Apogee converters have to do with the prosumer cards that were listed?
You plug them into those cards. Digital data moves between them. The sound is phenomenal (mostly because 95% of audio quality issues arise from the sample clock and related issues, and apogee have probably the best clock in the business.
Oh...okay, I'll believe what "most reviewers" say. :) Let me know when you name them.
i never saw a single review of HD that was really glowing about the sound quality unless it was clearly just pulling from the PR. people like it, but nobody in Mix, EQ, TapeOP or SoundOnSound thought it was that compelling, at either 96 or 192 kHz, especially when compared to other systems at the same SR.
> Yeah, probably the same PT HD setup that you paid US$10-20,000 for, to get some overpriced DSP power that a dual opteron can walk over in its sleep?
Haha. Try recording 80 simultaneous live tracks as someone else posted about. Your dual opteron will never "walk over in its sleep" hardware-based DSP. Or do you play your 3D games entirely on CPU? No, you use a dedicated 3D card.
One of our beta testers regularly records 32 tracks live on a small laptop, and runs sessions with 80 tracks. People have used Ardour to record 100 tracks simultaneously onto a RAID5. Simultaneous track count for recording is disk-io limited, not DSP related. For playback, it obviously depends on the FX level, but see below for a link to my take on this.
Pro Tools doesn't even have a "freeze track" feature. It doesn't need one, like the other DAWs do. DSP is processed off the CPU so you can keep working without having to stop what you're doing and keep your computer from coughing blood when you're pushing Ivory, Rebirth, BFD, Ozone, etc.
My take on DSP vs. native.
I love how anyone who points out that cheesy little prosumer products don't compare with the high-end stuff are suddenly "junkies" or "shills," which tells me you don't know how to argue in a debate. Ended with the classic "Do some research." Why don't you offer me some research? You're the one claiming I'm wrong.
If all those cards have really exceeded and matched today's top studios, nobody would be using Pro Tools as the industry standard. You just can't beat Pro Tools, and it's a standard for a reason...get over it.
I never called you a junkie or a shill, and I actually regret the tone this has taken on. But seriously, PT h/w is nothing particularly special, and everyone I've spoken too who knows anything about their technology agrees. In fact I find it interesting that I've never met anyone who actually likes PT at all, even though I've met many people who use it. PT's h/w is acceptable, but supports the profit margins digidesign needs, not what smaller studios and other organizations should be paying. Their s/w's audio capabilities have always been excellent, the MIDI is so-so and getting better, but there is very little in PT that isn't done better by someone else (problem is, its always different other systems). Studios that I know who care about quality sound use apogee converters and skip the PT h/w for that functionality entirely. Studios who care about modularity, flexibility and lack of vendor lock in certainly don't go the PT route, they use Nuendo, Sonar or others that can be used with various h/w. I've not heard any of them complaining that their stuff is worse quality than PT, in fact, I've heard the opposite.
As crude as this comment is, I agree on some points.
.flac file).
When working with like 40 tracks at once, LOTS of vertical scrolling is involved, which seems unnecessary. Frequently, audacity will chew up disk space saving a million possible 'undos' (can be handy, though...)
It doesn't always get timing perfect on recording, and if playback is interrupted momentarily (another process grabs the cpu, etc), the tracks will get out of sync. The compressor plugin needs work (it actually seems to function as an expander most of the time!!), there needs to be a sliding window extension to the normalize plugin (and some better way of finding a DC offset than taking a pure average, which is what I think it does?), and I wish I could make the equalizer remember my settings.
All of that being said, I don't think the GUI is bad. Audacity has tons of really nice features. It is a shame it moves so slowly, though.
I managed to record something with it recently, though; in fact, most of my recent recordings (yes, i know, i suck) have used audacity (most anything with a
ecasound does some things audacity doesn't do, or ecasound does them better, though, so mixing the two can prove helpful.
I used to use purely ecasound, but you just can't go in and align things, or easily apply plugins to fractions of a file, not at least without a lot of effort...
Audacity isn't protools, but it has the possibility of getting most of the way there (to be honest, most of protools' fancy features come from 3rd-party plugins, anyway).
Also, it's very difficult to scrape out eyeballs with a spoon; usually, a spork, or grapefruit spoon, yields better results, while still retaining the scooping effect.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Audacity being the one major exception that I can think of where a FOSS pro-grade audio app will run on windows, Audacity also has a weakness on the linux platform that the other FOSS Linux-only tools don't have: compatibility with the Jack Audio Connection Kit.
Jack also runs on OSX but for some reason beyond my research/understanding does not run on windows. Jack allows you to route audio and midi data through virtual channels between other jack compatible clients, making it an extremely powerful audio environment. Rosegarden and Ardour, the two most critical apps to doing pro-audio on linux, are generally dependant on jack (rosegarden will do midi-only without jack) and therefore Linux (or OSX) would be required to use either of these (very powerful and professional) tools.
that clarify things?
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
The audacity project is actually just gearing up for some new releases: a 1.3 beta and 1.2.4. The latter mostly just fixes some long outstanding bugs in 1.2.3 (such as problems with the compressor ^_^.)
1.3 introduces some new features such as multiple clips per track. (And I think you can now minimise the tracks verticly to save space.) Although there was a long gap between releases, the project now seems to be getting back up to speed.
The Sound & MIDI Software For Linux site is a useful reference for all things Linux/Audio. (Yes the site is ugly but there is a lot of good info available there.) Here's their link to several audio-centric distros. One that I have not used but would love to try is Studio To Go! by Fervent Software. An installable LiveCD that is supposed to be end-all of Linux audio solutions. It's a pay-to-play disc, so you'll have to shell out some cash to give it a go. Sight unseen, I'm betting this distro is probably the most refined option available...