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."

Comments

Wow

[Legendof_Pedro]

Wow, I never knew Linux was so good for that kind of thing. In fact, I might just stop using SONAR (Windows) and switch to Linux.

I guess that means that the 1% market share just got a bit bigger.

have to admit

[CDPatten]

I usually don't turn to linux for day to day tools, but I have to admit, it is pretty good for editing large audio. Tools are lacking, but its pretty stable doing.

The best quote from the article...

[chill]

On proprietary platforms, eventually you'll run into "you can't do that." On open platforms, you'll run into "you have to learn more to do that."

That applies to so much more than just audio programs.

  -Charles

Re:The best quote from the article...

[Qzukk]

The problem with convincing people to use open source software is that when they hear "you can't do that" they say "Oh. Darn" and go on with their life. When they hear "you have to learn more to do that" they throw a temper tantrum then throw the computer out the window.

Re:The best quote from the article...

[torpor]

The problem with convincing people to use open source software is that when they hear "you can't do that" they say "Oh. Darn" and go on with their life. When they hear "you have to learn more to do that" they throw a temper tantrum then throw the computer out the window.

Interesting observation. So, the proper respons might be more effective were it modified slightly: "oh, you can learn how to do that, if you want to..."

i mean, 'can if you want', versus 'have to or its nothing' is quite a different kettle .. no wonder people fuse up over it. "do what you have to or have not" versus "can if you want to, or have not".

Re:Yeah

[bcat24]

Find someone who is a coder and bribe them with money/pizza/Mountain Dew/etc?

Warning: rant approaching at high speeds

[nifboy]

If Ardour doesn't have a feature I need, I can code it myself.

Unless, of course, you don't know how to code it yourself, either because you don't have the technical know-how or the willingness to invest time investigating and learning how it works.

This is becoming a pet peeve of mine when people espouse the benefits of FOSS; it only applies to tech-geeks. Great, programmers can do things with it that they can't do with closed-source. Now how about everyone else?

Re:Warning: rant approaching at high speeds

[Em Adespoton]

Everyone else has their pick of tech-geeks to hire to do it for them, instead of relying on a single company to decide to add the feature.

Re:Warning: rant approaching at high speeds

[RatBastard]

Agreed. Most users are NOT programmers and wouldn't know a function if it bit them on the ass. This whole "do it yourself" mantra is just justification for things not being finished. I have used so many "0.9x" versions of software on Linux that never get to 1.0 it makes me sick. Is it too much to ask that a developement team actually finish a release before sending it out in a non-dev package? Or is it assumed that everything Linux is a developer release? If that's the case Linux is doomed as the vast majority of users don't want to program, don't give a damn about programming and wouldn't be good at it in the first place.

After years of being sick of Windows and repeatedly trying to get into Linux I finally bailed last year and bought a Mac.

Re:Warning: rant approaching at high speeds

[RatBastard]

First off coding is something anybody can learn

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You don't know many "regular Joes", do you? Most people don't have the time or energy to devote to learning to program. And by the time the average non-inclined person gets good, they've long since given up and paid money to some company that made a product that does what they needed and have left Linux and the FOSS comunity behind and haven't looked back.

But I fear for society in a world where people refuse to learn because they don't want to, instead of can't.

People don't learn specialized (and to them esoteric) skills because they DON'T HAVE THE TIME! Most people have lives. They have things to do. Kids to feed. Jobs. Houses to keep in order. Lawns that need to be mowed. Friends. Relatives. Etc... It's not that people won't learn (well, the current state of the educational system does make it harder to learn new things, but I digress), it's that they have things they'd rather be doing instead of mastering a specialized set of skills to add some functionality to someone else's unfinshed work.

Have you taken the time to learn how to fix every problem you might have with your car? I'm willing to bet money you know the absolute basics, at best. You can put fuel in it, check the radiator, fill the tires, change a flat, you might know how to check your fluid levels and maybe refill anything that's low. But can you rebuild the transmission? Fix the breaks? Probably not.

Is it because you are lazy? No. It's because you have better things to do with your time. Please, for the love of Pete, stop thinking that everyone should have the same interests as you. That's the attitude that's kept Linux off of most desktops for the last 12 years.

Re:Warning: rant approaching at high speeds

[njh]

BByak, one of the lead developers for Inkscape knew nothing of programming until he wanted a better tool for his graphics business. He simply started with something simple, and learned the kinds of patterns needed for writing programs. It's not that hard if you are an intelligent, creative person. Try it sometime, you'll be surprised.

(all the musicians in my band are computer programmers or scientists - and that is purely coincidental)

What about hardware?

[mOoZik]

ProTools is industry standard, period. No FOSS is going to conquer their market share. In fact, outside of the /. crowd, this will remain small. Lack of hardware support for most popular interfaces will doom it so, not to mention Linux's inflexibilities to the average user.

Re:What about hardware?

[paulbd]

its interesting that this was said about 1 or 2 "industry standard" video editing suites when apple released final cut (pro). final cut pro is now probably the most widely used video editing suite, even including all the big video studios. it has simply evolved to the point where it pushed the existing "industry standards" out of the way.

i doubt that ardour can do this (and i wrote ardour so i know what i am talking about), but we'll give it our best shot, ok?

Re:Ardour is moving in a big way

[stubear]

"What's insane is the pro proprietary companies charge prices in the four figures just for some of their software alone. Can't be justified when you have the same abilities free."

$1000 is a drop in the bucket for most professional studios whose bread and butter work utilizes these tools. Photoshop is expensive but with the amount I make using teh software, it's nothing. if you're looking to purchase this software to goof off and do some amature stuff, then I can see you having a problem with the price. If you're a professional, these licenses are nothing in the overall scheme of things.

Re:Mid level editing, yes

[paulbd]

Unfortunately you don't really know what you're talking about. Or maybe fortunately.

RME Hammerfall and HDSP series (26 channels), M-Audio Delta 1010 (10/12 channels), AudioScience (8 channels) and at least 4 others fully and well supported on Linux are at least equal to the quality of ProTools HD. In fact are generally up with the best you can buy (for all digital interfaces, quality is most defined by your A/D + D/A converters, which have nothing to do with what you install in the computer. They cost significantly less than PT HD hardware. I leave it up to you to figure out why that is.

Linux does have a gaping hole right now with Fireware-based external audio interfaces, which is soon to be filled in by the FreeBob project. Linux also cannot support h/w from several manufacturers who refuse to provide information required for drivers (MOTU is a particularly blatant example). Note that you cannot use your PT h/w with non-PT software, at least until very recently and even then only on OS X with particular caveats. Wanna take another guess at why it costs so much?

Disclaimer: author of Ardour, the RME Hammerfall & HSP drivers, and an RME reseller

When stability counts - it's the hardware

[flinxmeister]

An engineer friend of mine just recorded 80 tracks of audio simultaneously using protools (dual G5 mac)...over an hour solid. It was a large live event with no second chances, and it went without a hitch.

I think one huge advantage of the commercial apps is the associated hardware. The DACs and off board procs do far more than a single workstation could do, and unfortunately open source hardware can't really be free. For big tasks, professional recording is much more than software.

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.

Re:Yeah

[pe1rxq]

Unfortunatly the incentive is LOTS of money....
A single request is going to be ignored as a wast of time and their money.
And once this one company has said no it though luck, with open source you can find someone else to do it for a more reasonable price.

Jeroen

Hmm...

[MaestroSartori]

I spend a great deal of time doing home audio stuff, and I was interested to read the article. I've used Ardour and Audacity for a little while in the past, but I find I'm still using my Windows audio apps (Ableton and Soundforge, if you're interested). Why?

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 :)

The other is, as always, hardware support. Getting less important now in some ways, for some uses (I use quite a lot of virtual instruments, so not a huge deal for me) the lack of hardware DSP support is a killer. Proprietary developers are to blame here, in fairness, but it's still a problem.

Probably most importantly for me is the real killer, and I suspect the reason most audio folks won't move to Linux for some time to come (and coincidentally the reason so many of them use Apple machines): we don't want the software to get in the way of the creation of music any more than it has to. At the moment, many parts of Linux are unhelpfully complicated, especially to non-technical people.

A final thought, based on the quote from the article repeated in the summary:

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.

Quite apart from ignoring the fact that almost every major audio app can use various forms of plugin, which have relatively easy to obtain SDKs, and that various generic programmable plugins (like MaxDSP) exist for which one can do the same, it ignores maybe the most obvious point of all: not all musicians are programmers.

Re:Mid level editing, yes

[paulbd]

The same PT HD setup that crashed for Maria Carey before she sang in the superbowl, so they had to transfer the stuff onto a RADAR system (with their own proprietary audio interfaces that sound better than almost anything) ?

Or the same PT HD setup that can't touch apogee converters with a 10 foot pole? Or the same PT HD setup that most reviewers don't think is actually that much better than a mid-level A/D-D/A setup?

Oh, and is this same PT HD that is marketed to waste 2 times the disk space without a single verifiable double blind test showing 192kHz SR's to be detectably different from 96kHz?

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?

That must be the one. Now I know why it costs so much.

The "prosumer" cards (coupled with appropriate A/D-D/A converters, of course) that you dismiss with a wave match or exceed the quality and specifications in use in any top end studio worldwide as of 5 years ago; they match what almost all but the most capital-rich studios have today. Stop being such a junkie for Digi's marketing BS, and do some research.

Linux Audio.. What its really like

[zenbot]

This is one of those areas where Linux frustrates me the most. I would not use Windows at all if the audio/midi apps for linux were more mature. Ardour for example is great if all you want to do is multitrack audio, but even in this area it does not come close to say Cubase or Sonar. For example Ardour does not feature hitpoint detection, non-destuctive time stretching, audio warping, groove templates, offline per-clip effects, track freezing and on and on. MIDS is coming but who knows how many years that will take. I'd add it, but I'm not a good programmer and dont have the time. The features it does have work great but it still doesnt really compare to the commercial offerings. VST support.. This is a joke. Last time I checked there were three or four different alternatives for linux here, all using wine and all have dead for at least a year.. MIDI? Linux has some good midi apps which still dont have near the features of the windows ones. Some of these, namely Rosegarden and Muse, even have audio track support but these features are so primitive that they are nearly useless and really Ardour is the better choice here.. But someone will then say but Linux has Jack and you can hook together whatever apps you want. Jack is sort of like Rewire on steroids. So you load Qjackctl which is a nice app for connecting Linux audio apps. Ok. So you load up Muse for its midi capabilities, maybe load up some soft-synths in it, maybe the ones you want to are plugins for Muse, but probably not so you load up two or three external soft-synths and route muses midi output to those one at a time, then you hook the output of those soft synths into ardour via jack. So now there are 5 programs loaded, took you 30 minutes to load and connect everything. You make some changes to the patches in the soft-synths, write some midi tracks in muse and then record a bit of it into ardour. Then think gee I'd like to save my song so I can unload all these programs and do something else with my computer. So you save in muse, save in both synths, save your hookups in qjackctl, save your session in ardour, write a little note so you remember everything you need to do to load your song again. This takes you another 30 minutes.. But really whats more likely to happen is: you will hook everything up and one of the crappy soft synths will crash before you have a chance to save everything and take out the other audio apps forcing you to start over or your whole computer will crash because you were using the realtime-lsm patch to make the thing responsive. Or you will close Ardour before disconnecting it from muse and muse will crash. etc etc. There are nice proposals like LASH, formerly LADCCA which would let all Lash compliant apps be saved in their current states and then reloaded that way but most programs dont use LASH. Not to mention the time it takes to get all there programs and a proper kernel compiled and downloaded if you are not using some pre-made solution like CCRMA, Demudi or Studio to go. Many distro have these apps as packages, but something is always out of date. I have been watching Linux audio grow for years and years and really its going to take years more before all of the features I listed above exist in a single app. With Cubase I open one app with synthesis, sampling, Midi and Audio editing under one roof. When Im finished I save and close, done. I am a huge Linux fan, but I really hate Linux audio. Maybe next year.. Ardour really is awesome though..