Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu Studio Announced
lukeknipe writes "Ubuntu has set up a page for the April release of the Ubuntu Studio. An ambitious project, it is described by Ubuntu as a 'multimedia editing flavor of Ubuntu for the Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional who is already familiar with the Ubuntu-Gnome environment.' They've set up an Ubuntu Studios Wiki for the project, and their stated goal is to have a the package ready for use in time for 'Feisty Fawn'."
Linux audio is maturing at a rapid pace. Where at one point I considered it not mature enough for studio use, this is rapidly changing. With Ingo Molnar & co's low latency patches being integral part as of kernel 2.6.18, the hard part is taken care of.
The rest is a matter of finding the right audio and music software. Here's a list of the software that I've actually used personally and that I consider the best of breed audio and music software for Linux. You will find these packages to fulfill most any audio need you might have. If you are going to get started on Linux audio for the first time, check these out before anything else.
Transport:
JACK audio connection kit: supported by almost all linux audio software.
Allows routing audio between jack-enabled applications. Use with qjackctl.
Mixing:
Ardour: Multi track Digital Audio Workstation. Very complete and definitely very usable. Main downside: Not all mixing parameters can be MIDI-controlled by an external mixer (yet), this is currently my main obstacle to integrating my mixer into my linux audio chain.
Audio editing:
Rezound: A decent wave editor. Feature rich, although not very suitable for multi-track work.
Audacity: Another good wave editor.
mhwaveedit: A small wave editor, which, although a bit limited, I've found very reliable for recording jack streams.
Gnu Wave Cleaner: To remove noise, pops and crackle from recordings. Works well, but unfortunately is rather unstable. Make a backup of your audio before denoising it.
Soft synths:
ZynAddSubFX: A very nice virtual analog synth
fluidsynth: Sample-based synth, use with qsynth or (better) java-based fluidgui
LinuxSampler: More powerful sampler than fluidsynth, albeit with higher latency
Aeolus: A virtual pipe organ. Believable to the untrained ear.
Composition:
soundtracker: IT-tracker style music editor
hydrogen: A drum machine (or more accurately, a drum sequencer).
Rosegarden: A MIDI sequencer. Use in combination with one of the above soft synths. I've experienced some trouble combining both MIDI and audio inside the same project.
Real-time processing:
LADSPA plugins: Effect processing for almost any purpose. Most prominently absent is a good pitch corrector/auto tune.
freqtweak: Create all kinds of interesting effects by tweaking parameters in the frequency domain.
Jack-rack: Process incoming JACK audio in realtime.
Other:
amidi: Command line utility to dump incoming MIDI traffic and send MIDI traffic.
Very useful for MIDI diagnostics
hd24tools: A jack-enabled suite that allows playing disks recorded on Alesis HD24 recorder.
Main things I feel are still lacking:
- Replacing audio peaks by drums: I've written a small tool, drumreplacer, which does this for a single audio channel. However it is rather limited and uses a lot of CPU. Still a far cry from the capabilities of drumagog.
- Auto tune
- A tool to 'unwobble' wobbly drum tracks in real time
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I fail to see the point of forking an entire Operating System for the sake of haveing 4 or 5 applications installed on it.
To us pro-audio guys this is great news. My guess is you're not into pro audio. You must have missed my other post. You'll see, the number of applications is significantly bigger than that.
Secondly, pro audio is a field that places some very specific requirements on the OS. For years on end, I've needed to manually rebuild my kernel to include Ingo Molnar's low latency patches. Without these patches, linux audio will either suffer dropouts (not a huge deal for gaming but intolerable for pro audio) or feel sluggish. For quite a while, doing pro audio on Linux meant following endless HOWTO's, patching the kernel, and so on. A fork prevents this, without bothering other users with features that are not ready for prime time. *That* is the point.
I'm thrilled to see that after years, a lot of the progress that has been made has found actually ended up finding its way into the mainstream kernel, and I'm sure this will keep happening. I'm particularly happy about ALSA being part of the kernel now. I've also gladly welcomed the O(1) I/O scheduler, and recently, at last, as of kernel 2.6.18, Ingo Molnar&co's low latency patch finally made it into there. No more re-compiling the kernel for realtime support!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Let's see I'm a pro and I use:
3D Studio Max, XSI, Maya, Zbrush, Avid, Fusion, Nuke, Combustion and Photoshop.
Only one platform runs all of those: Windows.
None of those programs are included in this "multimedia pack for professionals". So uhh yeah, my complaint is with the parent... this isn't a professional package at all.
If you use Photoshop day in and day out you would know that Gimp isn't acceptable. And it's not because it doesn't load obscenely large files it's because it's a sub-par application.
You can actually create some pretty professional quality stuff with Cinelerra. I took a few new media classes when I was in school. I used both Cinelerra and Adobe Premiere. I found Cinelerra to be FAR easier to use, and supported some things that Premiere just didn't do.
Pixar doesn't render their movies on Macs or Windows PCs. Wanna take a wild guess what they use? Same goes for ILM. Linkie. So yeah, take your uninformed opinions and shove them.
it is oo-bun-too. There is no You in Ubuntu
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
AFAIK it's completely missing.
The reason for this is because its nigh impossible to add it at this point since the gimp was build with only RGB in mind (AFAIK again)
this is one of the main reasons they are rebuilding the nitty gritty of the gimp from scratch.
the project name is GEGL and currently in a 0.0.6 release.
feature list now on the website contains:
* 8bit, 16bit integer and 32bit floating point, RGB, CIE Lab, YCbCr and naive CMYK output.
* Extendable through plug-ins.
* XML, C and Python interfaces.
* Memory efficient evaluation of subregions.
* Tiled, sparse, pyramidial and larger than RAM buffers.
* Hit detection.
* Rich core set of processing operations
o PNG, JPEG, SVG, EXR, RAW and other image sources.
o Arithmetic operations, porter duff compositing operations, SVG blend modes, other blend modes, apply mask.
o Gaussian blur.
o Basic color correction tools.
o 32bit floating point for intermediate values.
o Text layouting using pango
If this hits a stable release and gets incorrperated in stable gimp, it will probebly wipe away more then half the arguments most 'pro photoshop users' have with the gimp.
Offcourse it wont do away with the 'the ui of the gimp sucks' argument, but as someone who works with the gimp daily for webdesign i can throw that right back at them. imho photoshops ui sucks.
But meh, where talking about people here who can also make statements like "You can't design on a pc, only on a mac"
In the Linux community if you want something to happen, get involved. They've got an irc channel listed there so that you can come in and drop some input. Get an RC and help sort out some of the bugs. Give them a hand. I hate developing when I'm getting paid. I can't imagine how it must be to have a thankless development job.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
It all depends on which pro. Sure all advertising professionals will prefer Photoshop to Gimp, but what if you're an experimental artist working with computerised visualisations? Then you'll probably appreciate Gimp's superior scriptability. Or more likely, you'd use something like Pure Data, which is about as far as you can come from Adobe's CS suite in usability and slickness. Some professionals use power tools, and know their tools well. Power tools are crude.
They didn't start at A anyway, Warty Warthog > Hoary Hedgehog > Breezy Badger > Dapper Drake > Edgy Eft > Feisty Fawn. There's nothng stopping them from having another release with the same letter. Besides, it's only a codename, there's still the year.month system they have to distinguish releases.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
No prospect?
From The ubuntu marketing mailing list:
"As we've seen with open-source projects before, with market share comes business opportunity."
"Let's see I'm a pro and I use:
:) It is a reasonable replacement for many professional users and we do get people who are migrating from those various packages (although more are coming from Lightwave, Cinema 4D, Truespace, and other lower end packages) As a professional 3D artist you will find Blenders mesh modeling tools fairly comparable for SubD modeling; sculpting tools fairly comparable to zbrush (although with tradeoffs and limitations - we have native retopology currently but lack masking capabilites so you can only hide mesh); uv unwrapping that is superior to all of those listed; node based texturing is fairly comparable - it lacks certain shaders specifically a SSS shader. But given the list of software it sounds more like it will tend to be work that Blenders internal renderer is suited for (really it depends on a case by case basis). Its node based compositing and non linear editing (sequencing) are quite good - but not likely to knock any of the top end software out currently. While I don't expect current users of other major 3D packages to migrate to Blender as a replacement for their existing software (why go elsewhere when they already have a pipeline that meets their needs). Blender is already quite well suited for many professionals needs and is already in heavy usage by a number of small and mid sized studios for commercial 3D work (print and video advertising, architectural rendering, scientific visualization, feature animations, etc). It also is being used in some major studios unfortunately most are requiring NDAs about software used in their pipeline although we are seeking permission to do interviews with some artists on major projects that it has been revealed that Blender was used for.
3D Studio Max, XSI, Maya, Zbrush, Avid, Fusion, Nuke, Combustion and Photoshop.
Only one platform runs all of those: Windows.
None of those programs are included in this "multimedia pack for professionals". So uhh yeah, my complaint is with the parent... this isn't a professional package at all."
You clearly haven't tried the latest version of Blender
Of course Blender isn't suited for all 3D animation tasks currently - I'd recommend against it for photoreal rendering involving animation of people; and against if for special effects work involving smoke and flame (ie volumetric rendering) and certain complex particle effects.
However that is a subset of all animation work - and those can and ofter are handled with specially dedicated software.
Just because a set of software that meets your professional needs isn't provided, doesn't mean that the professional requirements of others aren't being met.
LetterRip
Ardour, Jack and Sweep are not "professional level"? Pixar use and sponsor development of sweep, Ardour is supported by SSL and Harrison. When I was at college, professional level for video editing was a pair of hi-band decks. We trained on VHS with a crappy Panasonic vision mixer and I shot and edited a short on Super8 cine. Tools don't make someone a professional and "professional level" work has been done on systems far less powerful than those offered by linux.
I work in audio and I'll tell you this; being able to use plug-ins in pro-tools has as much to do with being a sound engineer as running a macro has to do with being a writer. Keep your bizarre definition of "professional-level" to yourself.
That is a dumb question because all of these branches with specific purposes all get a meta package in the repositories. What that means is if you install Ubuntu and want to try EDUbuntu, you just install edubuntu-desktop; you want to try xubuntu, you install xubuntu-desktop. It will be the same for Ubuntu Studio too, you just install ubuntustudio-desktop.
Some of the meta packages get an ISO made for people to install directly to that branch, but not all do. Ichthux is a community branch and they produce their own ISO. Fluxbuntu is another community branch that works the same way.
- rmjb
While I cannot comment on Kino, Cinelerra has a "community version" which is an unofficial fork(?) of the project. This version is generally recommended over the official release because it is easier to build and contains bugfixes that the original may not have incorporated yet. The projects goal is to provide more timely bugfixes/patches to the original Cinelerra as developed by Heroine (which only releases updates every several months). More information can be found here.
For those unfamiliar with the history of Cinelerra, the developer(s) are anonymous so as not to jeopardize their current employment status; apparently the author(s) believe there might be a conflict of interest with regard to their day job(s). Regardless, Cinelerra is an excellent product though it is probably overkill for most home users. The learning curve is relatively steep as well. There is a slightly dated (circa 2003) yet interesting article which has an interview with "Jack Crossfire" (pseudonym for the developer(s)) that covers some of the directions the software is taking which can be found here.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Not forgetting: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/ for Redhat. Also noone has mentioned the fact the Windows VST's (virtual instruments) can now run in linux with a combination of Wine, jack and Vsthost. http://ladspavst.linuxaudio.org/
You're missing something subtle. Ubuntu-studio is a metapackage, just like Kubuntu and Xubuntu. You can install Kubuntu *after* installing ubuntu by installing "kubuntu-desktop" and you can do this for Xubuntu too. If Ubuntu-studio is planned properly, it should be just as easy to install the Ubuntu-studio desktop.
Basically, it's the best of both world.
They use Gnome (which I don't like) ...
You don't have to use Gnome.
Just download Kubuntu and enjoy KDE. We use it on five machines, and it is great.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
What? Imageworks didnt use Blender for Monster House. Imageworks doenst use Blender for ANYTHING. I worked on the movie for over a year. The commercial apps used were: Diva -> MotionBuilder -> Maya -> mArny Arnold pluging / Arnold renderer -> Bonsai (proprietary compositing) No Blender. As far as I know, Blender hasnt been used on ANY feature films. I have tried it out, and it's certainly educational to have an open source 3d app, but comparing it with XSI, Maya, and other commercial products simply isnt viable.
From their site:
pure:dyne has been created to provide a complete and ready made environment for artists and developers who are looking for a free operating system dedicated to realtime audio and video processing.
pure:dyne is a GNU/Linux live distribution based on the new dyne:II core. You don't need to install anything, pure:dyne is running from the CD itself. It can directly boot from virtually any PC machine, or Intel Mac, and the optional hard-drive or USB-key installation is just a matter of copying one folder.
This particular live cd brings you the latest exotic FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software - read more) such as Supercollider, Icecast, Csound, Packet Forth, Fluxus and much much more, including of course Pure Data and a great collection of essential externals and abstractions (PDP, PiDiP, Gem, GridFlow, RRadical, PixelTango
I've always prefered a command line interface. GUIs are such a cursory way to interact with a computer.
Over the past 6 years or so, I've used Cinelerra (and its predecessor, Broadcast 2000) to create around a dozen videos, mostly consisting of pan/zoom stills (up to 800 in a single video) with fade transitions and multiple sound tracks. Final product runtimes have ranged from 15 minutes to 2 hours. I know what you're talking about regarding the stability, but I've had few problems in that area with the community version. I've built it several times over the last year or so (mostly on Kubuntu, but previously on Mandriva also) with no build problems and only the occasional runtime crash.
I've mixed captured video with stills, using around 100 video tracks and 4 audio tracks, applying various video effects, with little difficulty. The various keyframe controls (fades, camera, projector, effects, etc.) take a little getting used to, and until recently, the documentation was quite lacking. But the documentation seems to have improved significantly over the past year, and once you get the feel for the controls, they seem easy enough to work with for me.
I've found the render farm capability easy to work with and a real time-saver (using the 4 PCs in our house).
I'm not a professional video editor, just an enthusiast/hobbiest, so I don't have any comparison experience with other, proprietary apps. But I do know that it works fine for me, and I appreciate the fact that it works with an XML EDL file format, which has allowed me to write a few scripts to pre-build project files to save myself many hours of otherwise manual layout.
I hope this small bit of information encourages you to try the community version. And I hope you experience the same results as I. As I said, I have no comparative experience with other apps, but for me, Cinelerra works great.
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.