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Interviews with Linux Sound Folks
Hexdancer writes "Linux MusicStation currently has an interview with Jaroslav Kysela from the ALSA sound drivers project as well as some words from the author of SLab (one of the two free HDD recording systems for Linux)"
This page is a good place for music/sound software for Linux.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
There is a small and powerfull sequencer package for Linux called Rosegarden. It's GPL'ed unlike all the other MIDI sequencers for Unix that I've seen. It may look outdated (it uses nothing but Xlib for the GUI), but it is intuitive and *very* fast.
Check it out at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/rose.html
A new version using the GTK+ and Gnome libs for the interface is at the conceptual stage.
Chris Wareham
Having been involved with him for the last 3 years as a driver tester, it is nice to see Jaroslav (or Perex, his old handle) getting some attention and credit for his hard work. He is truly a quality human being and is one of the unsung hero's in the Linux world.
/dev/dsp emulation was almost perfect, and it had a very, VERY nice /dev/sequencer emulator that did patch management, MPU-401 emulation to the Ultrasound's onboard synth (which allowed the use of ANY MIDI program written for linux). I was quite happy.
.3.1 However, the PCM interface is pretty much completed and working great. The mixer interface is pretty much completed (after a recent major overhaul). The sequencer interface is currently under major development, and the onboard synth support for soundcards, with patch management, etc. is just starting to get going.
About three years ago, I had a Gravis Ultrasound. The DOS/Windows drivers were buggy, and the OSS drivers weren't much better. I suffered along awhile, having to load Windows to to anything sound related, until I found the UltraSound Project, Jaroslav's first driver project.
The UltraSound Project was an attempt to provide an OSS compatible driver, written from scratch, that 1) worked, and 2) supported all the features of the Ultrasound cards.
The project was wildly sucessful in both goals. At the end, the
On the sucess of the Ultrasound Project, Jaroslav started ALSA. The nice thing about ALSA, though, was that it was no longer a project to create an OSS compatible driver , but to create a better sound system (with backwards compatibility) with features like full duplex for every card that supports it, hardware mixing of multiple sound streams, RT (or close to it) recording, and an professional quality MIDI subsystem; along with an API (alsalib) for programmers to easily write software for it.
At this moment, ALSA is at version
I have found it very usable over the last year or so for day to day work, and I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to try it out. Here is a short list of supported soundcards (note this is PCM, no MIDI. MIDI support (as stated) is just starting for soundcards):
Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, Max, ACE)
AMD Interwave (Gravis Ultrasound PnP)
CS4232,CS4236,CS461x
OPL3-SA
SoundBlaster 8,16,AWE
es1688
es18xx
ess solo1
Ensoniq AudioPCI, SB PCI {32,64,128}
Trident 4DWave {DX,NX} (I have one of these! Works great)
S3 SonicVibes
MSS
And more coming all the time. And in case no one mentioned the web site, it's http://www.alsa-project.org. There are also developer and user mailing lists available..
Anyway nice article, and if you want to help, please do. Users and testers welcome.
jf