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'."
I am so waiting for "Zany Zebra"
This will really help attract even more dedicated linux users. As a multimedia enthusiast, I left Linux because of the lack of multimedia support that was integrated to some level and that worked. Hopefully this will bring back some others who may have left for the same reasons.
Anyone can plan to do something, but how many of those projects are finished?
Anyone can plan a well-polished gnome based distro, but Ubuntu are one of few who've delivered.
I'd give alot more credence to a well funded organisation with a proven track record than the announcement of YALM project.
If they're announcing, they're probably confident about delivering.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
... is what was desperately missing within the Linux/OSS community. Just looking at that splash page of the Ubuntu Studio project made me utter a sigh of relief. Visual and outer skin consistency are things that Linux has seruiously lacked up to now. Ubuntu - basically a not-like-shit-looking version of debian - is what OSS needs to finally succeed in the real world. They use Gnome (which I don't like) but if they continue to improve it style as they did I couldn't care less.
Seeing this, one knows that OSS will prevail and Ubuntu will be at the helm. Nice prospects indeed.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This really is a great idea for a distro. In my own experience, I've found that keeping workstation task (web, e-mail, programming, etc) and multimedia tasks (DVR, editing, etc. as well as games...) on seperate systems works out for the best of both tasks. The two have a terrible tendancy to conflict with each other...
One may be working on a job that will take hours, while the other may need a quick reboot ASAP. One may need 99% uptime, while the other serves it's purpose just as well at 95% downtime. One needs quite high-end hardware, latest drivers, and frequent updating of software, while the other is better handled by older, lower-power, more reliable hardware and old, known-good software. One can be tucked away in a corner, while the other often needs to be nearby. etc.
Plus, it's no secret that many multimedia tools are a serious hassle to get up and working in the first place. Different toolkits and widely varying interfaces abound in this space. Good luck trying to INTEGRATE them with each other, on your own. My multimedia system is filled with shell scripts, which do the job pretty well, but aren't very elegant solutions. Doing something in a convoluted way is sometimes quicker and easier than trying to adapt the scripts that, for example, convert between formats for different editing tools.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
No I know people who use: FCP, Shake, Pro Tools, Smoke, Inferno, Gimp (but he admits he only uses it as a hobby, for real work he switches back to XSI), Modo, Mudbox, Cinepaint, Vue, Audition, Zeno and a million other applications large and small. Proprietary and Free. I use hundreds of open source tools. I even have some scripts that I wrote for 3D Studio Max that run off of a MySQL server.
I've tried Gimp. I worked at a start up studio and for a while they were still even in the buying phase and hadn't picked up a copy of Photoshop yet for the modelers. So we all used Gimp. It was obnoxious. I don't hold any sort of dogmatic appreciation for one piece of software over another. I am constantly changing software and hold no allegiance to manufacturer, distribution model or OS. I use Shake on Linux and Mac (the linux version is much much faster, or at least it was before 4.1 and Intel processors, I havne't used that release yet.). I use any tool I can find that does cool stuff and helps me work faster. If Photoshop became "Gibbed" and was released as open source, and Gimp got renamed as "Photoshop" I would migrate to Gibbed. If something really cool was as good or better than photoshop and was Open Source or even just free I would grab it immediately. I just learned Zbrush after several years and now Mudbox is out. After playing with it I want to add it to my toolset as well.
When it comes to editors: There is Avid, Smoke, Premiere/FCP (practically the same application) and Vegas. Vegas is annoying as hell to edit with on anything longer than 10 minutes so that leaves two options. The current offerings in the Open Source market are useless. Although Smoke does run on Linux, so that would be my preferred "Linux Video Editor". Avid/Premiere/FCP is just a matter of preference and platform choice.
So while I don't say what I use are the only options (far from it, and even then I didn't even list all the stuff I use. I'm using premiere right now at work while editing a reel. I've used FCP on projects in the past. I've sat at a smoke station briefly.) I do know what my options are because I've tried just about all of them. I've talked to people who have also tried them. I research products. I read reviews. And this package is not all that useful for a working professional right now in the visual fields. And not just because of small things like when a Nuke compositor is annoyed with Fusion. These are big huge deal breaker problems in just about every single selection.
"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
What he's saying is that the needs of people doing pro audio on Linux are considerably different from the needs of someone using Linux as a server or general purpose desktop OS. Serious pro audio users NEED the realtime patches to the kernel--trying to track something and hearing what you've played in your headphones a quarter of a second after you've played it is simply not acceptable for something that needs to be perfect down to the millisecond. So in this case, yes a fork is necessary. It's this attitude of "You don't really need that, do you?" that hurts Linux in the eyes of many people who know what they're talking about. The same can be said for the repeated claims of "You don't really need CMYK support" for the GIMP. Because in order for Linux to be taken seriously in certain fields, these issues need to be addressed. And when I say "seriously", I mean widespread professional adoption, not just hobbyists or people willing to pull their hair out to get something working right.
This guy's the limit!