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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."
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.
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.
A friend in the industry tells me he's converted at least a dozen pro audio editors to ardour, leaving behind pro tools and logic for good. This looks like it's one of the killer apps that's going to take linux far. We already have several that are making F/OSS well known in the wider world like apache, blender, gimp and the rest.
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.
RST
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.
Find someone who is a coder and bribe them with money/pizza/Mountain Dew/etc?
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?
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.
Real men flex their muscles by editing raw sound:
% cat /dev/audio > /im_the_man/raw.snd /im_the_man/raw.snd
% hexedit
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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?
But, what if you aren't a coder?
What are you some kind of ignorant n00b!? RTFM idiot! RTFC for goodness sakes. How hard is it to learn C, learn all 28 of the relevant libraries, learn how the code was implemented, write the code, test the code, and convince the maintainer to add the code to the core code base? You must be some kind of lazy ignorant wretch.
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.
Record withPlay with
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
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.
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
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
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:
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
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.
Hammerfall is top notch and I didn't realize it had solid Linux support, so I'll look into it. I know numerous people who had problems with alsa and HDSP even very recently.
M-Audio Delta I know has been supported for years (4Front? Can't look it up easily from my PDA) but I didn't think it was pro quality. Did they get ADAT support stable yet? I figured they lost the battle with PT at the highend and were going to chase the LT market. I've seen numerous studios dump Midiman over the years due to product constraints and limited end user support.
AudioScience seems very friendly for the not-for-profit studios (and churches) on a budget, but I think the higher end hardware is priced out of the picture. Radio stations and high budget companies seem to love it. I don't know anyone in my area using it in the studio, Win nor Lin.
I guess that's my problem with many of the companies I've seen supporting Linux: end user support problems. PT's end user support is fantastic even for small budget studios. The interface is known by every producer and engineer.
For me, initial cost means little. Low training costs, good support, and user friendliness are just as important as sound quality.
Ardour is a good product with, IMHO, the brightest future. We've screwed with it, and I believe are integrating it in a cheap portable studio.
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.
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.
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.
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..