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An Intro To Editing Audio On Linux

Posted by Zonk on from the talk-a-good-talk dept.

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."

13 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by Legendof_Pedro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. The best quote from the article... by chill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    1. Re:The best quote from the article... by torpor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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".

      --
      ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
  3. Re:Yeah by bcat24 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. Warning: rant approaching at high speeds by nifboy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?

    1. Re:Warning: rant approaching at high speeds by RatBastard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
    2. Re:Warning: rant approaching at high speeds by RatBastard · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --
      Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
  5. What about hardware? by mOoZik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    A blog like any other.
    1. Re:What about hardware? by paulbd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

  6. Re:Ardour is moving in a big way by stubear · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

  7. Re:Mid level editing, yes by paulbd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  8. Hmm... by MaestroSartori · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Game dev and music blog
  9. Re:Mid level editing, yes by paulbd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.