Linux-audio-user January 2006

linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org

193 participants
189 discussions

Re: [linux-audio-user] Miscellaneous hardware/software questions

by Gabriel Brachtel

>>>it's easy for non-programing people to bring "visions" regarding >>>interface design. (and i love do so :) as i know programers, it's quite >>>hard to establish a new standard. but imho the interface standards >>>(buttons, dropdown boxes, scrolling, menu-structure, etc.) are now a >>>couple of years old, and there might be better solutions for specific >>>tasks. audio seems to me like a good point to start. > > > i wasn't talking about such rudimentary stuff. of course there are > alternatives to these basic widgets and several audio applications (even > free ones) have begun to support them. > > the point about a visual interface is that it acts as a "memory buffer" > for the user: you do not have to remember much about the structure of > the session because the structure is made visible on the screen. can't > remember precisely where you put a certain sound? how many copies of the > bridge riff did i put in? is the door slam before or after the creak? > its all there on the screen, just waiting for you to look at it. > > as soon as you move away from a visual UI, you have to find some way to > avoid requiring the user to remember everything about the session. when i try to remember a poem my brain creates images and i walk trough them, when i reproduce it. when i learn a piece of music it does other stuff (i'm a pianist and singer) but in the end i have a very complex thing in my mind, just think of a bach fugue. i have the fugue also in "the fingers". different areas of the brain work together. i have the same oppinion as you, we are very good in using a visual UI. we trained it for a long time. but there could be other combinations that work nearly as good as "mouse-to-eye". > the visual interface offers another hard-to-replicate feature as well: > trivially variable precision. if you try doing cut-n-paste based only on > audio feedback, you will find it quite hard/laborious to be as precise > as you might want to be. with the visual interface, its much easier to > use visual information to get the rough location of an edit and then > get to precisely where you want, without many steps. with audio feedback > based approaches, i think you will find yourself needing many more > iterations through the edit-play-edit-play cycle before you get the > location correct. i think it's all a matter of training. you do the "display-keyboard-mouse-combination" for long years and you became professional in speed and precision. watch a pro-gamer gaming with mouse.. what's about data-gloves? whats with feet-controlers and other "non-standard" devices? greets, gabriel (sorry for my clumsy english)

17 years, 4 months

[linux-audio-user] Miscellaneous hardware/software questions

by Jason White

I am looking for suitable hardware to handle digital i/o between a Linux system and an RME ADI-2 ad/da converter that I just bought. I don't need lots of channels, but reliability of the data transfer is important, including jitter reduction. An RME card would be excellent but it is somewhat outside my budget. Also, connectivity to a laptop would be desirable, suggesting either a USB interface or waiting until http://freebob.sourceforge.net/ (the Alsa firewire project) matures. I don't plan to run any OS besides Linux with this hardware, so Alsa support is crucial. As this is for home/personal use I'm not in a hurry. M-Audio hardware is high on my list of possibilities at the moment. Now to the software question: does there exist any sound editor with a non-graphical interface, i.e., one that can be operated from the Linux console for inserting, deleting, copying and otherwise editing audio? Due to a vision-related disability I can't use a graphical display and therefore need a text-only solution - but all the sound editors appear to require X11. Surely it should be possible to design an audio interface to a digital sound editor. Suggestions welcome. I've discussed hardware on this list once before, and the USB options weren't highly regarded at the time.

17 years, 4 months

[linux-audio-user] hello gentoo? speed up please...

by Aaron Trumm

hello all - got a question - I've only recently been stopping and taking a look at my studio computer's performance and in the almost year since I change from Red Hat 9 to gentoo, it's been more solid on some things, but I notice a huge latency difference - ie: I have to run Jack at -p 8192 to get anything done in Ardour Anybody have any tips on what to look at to tweak it? Seems like it should do better than that... I didn't see it as a problem until in the last few days I started playing with playing softsynths live directly into Ardour - you've gotta be running at -p 1024 or there's a latency that screws up your playing - at 8192 it's a downright 8th note delay... Here's some vitals that I can think of: OS: gentoo 2.6.6-rc1 kernel (alsa built in) jack: 0.99.0 ardour: beta28 jack command line: jackd -R -d alsa -d hw:0 -r 48000 -p 8192 <------- (or whatever) harddrive: multicount on io support: 32 bit unmaskirq on use dma on keepsettings off readonly off readahead on chip: 2ghz amd (I THINK - not at computer now) ram: 512MB thanks for any ideas! :) --------------------- Aaron Trumm www.nquit.com -----------------------

17 years, 7 months

[linux-audio-user] Making Audio on Linux Just Work: (1) defining the goals

by Paul Davis

( LAU folk: this is an initial outline of an email I want to dispatch to the desktop-architects list in the very near future. Your comments are eagerly sought. Note that this section specifically seeks to avoid any discussion of implementations or specific approachs. I would like to fully flesh out the list of tasks ASAP ) Making Sound Just Work ------------------------ One of the "second tier" of requirements mentioned several times at the OSDL Portland Linux Desktop Architects workshop was "making audio on Linux just work". Many people find it easy to leave this requirement lying around in various lists of goals and requirements, but before we can make any progress on defining a plan to implement the goal, we first need to define it rather more precisely. DEFINING THE GOAL ================= The list below is a set of tasks that a user could reasonably expect to perform on a computer running Linux that has access to zero, one or more audio interfaces. The desired task should either work, or produce a sensible and comprehensible error message explaining why it failed. For example, attempting to control input gain on a device that has no hardware mixer should explain that the device has no controls for input gain. PLAYBACK - play a compressed audio file * user driven (e.g. play(1)) * app driven (e.g. {kde,gnome_play}_audiofile()) - play a PCM encoded audio file (specifics as above) - hear system sounds - VOIP - game audio - music composition - music editing - video post production RECORDING - record from hardware inputs * use default audio interface * use other audio interface * specify which h/w input to use * control input gain - record from other application(s) - record from live (network-delivered) compressed audio streams MIXING - control h/w mixer device (if any) * allow use of a generic app for this * NOTE to non-audio-focused readers: the h/w mixer is part of the audio interface that is used to control signal levels, input selection for recording, and other h/w specific features. Some pro-audio interfaces do not have a h/w mixer, most consumer ones do. It has almost nothing to do with "hardware mixing" which describes the ability of the h/w to mix together multiple software-delivered audio data streams. - multiple applications using soundcard simultaneously - control application volumes independently - provide necessary apps for controlling specialized hardware (e.g. RME HDSP, ice1712, ice1724, liveFX) ROUTING - route audio to specific h/w among several installed devices - route audio between applications - route audio across network MULTIUSER - which of the above should work in a multi-user scenario? MISC - use multiple soundcards as a single logical device

18 years, 1 month

[linux-audio-user] Call for help for LinuxTag2006

by Arnold Krille

Hi all, as every year the famous german LinuxTag is taking place. This year in Wiesbaden from 3. to 6. May. Yes, this is just one week after LAC2006, which has several advantages and disadvantages: + It is a good chance to come to Germany for LAC, have one or two days of holiday and then join the LA-Group at LinuxTag! + Maybe even repeat your LAC-Talk at LinuxTag? (see www.linuxtag.org for details on the Call-for-Papers but be aware that it ends January 15...) + Wiesbaden is more in the center of germany so perhaps some LA-folks from the north of germany can join us? - The new place for LinuxTag together with LAC being a week before enforce two of the main-booth-members of the last years (Christoph Eckert and Frank Neumann) to be only a visitor at LinuxTag or even less... That leaves a hole in the organisational part. :-( So here is my call: I am willing to do some work organizing a booth and a group of staff but I need YOUR help! If you are a german LA[DU]-member and have some spare time, join in! A booth at LinuxTag is a good opportunity to present Linux Audio to the people, not only to developers but more to users. The crowd is mostly industry (producers, technicians, musicians) at the weekdays and home-recording-users at the weekend. Don't be afraid, there won't be much questions about setting up drivers for consumer-cards (and If there are, we usually send them to their distributions booth :-) ). But there will be a lot people thinking about using your app in studio! So you definitly don't want to miss this chance! If I get positive answers from at least two other people by weekend, I will apply for a booth and things start rolling, so don't hesitate, check your calendar, plan for another week of holiday and join me (us?). So long and thanks for all the fish, Arnold -- visit http://dillenburg.dyndns.org/~arnold/ --- Wenn man mit Raubkopien Bands wie Brosis oder Britney Spears wirklich verhindern könnte, würde ich mir noch heute einen Stapel Brenner und einen Sack Rohlinge kaufen.

18 years, 2 months

[linux-audio-user] [offlist] Re: Mellotron sounds

by Juhana Sadeharju

>From: Neil Durant <lists(a)sphere3.co.uk> > >I'd be happy to sample the full lengths of all 35 notes for all six sounds, >storing them as wavs. I don't have a lot of spare time these days, so I'll >let someone else have the pleasure of cropping/editing! Please do so. Make the files available from your site or upload to ftp://ftp.funet.fi/incoming/audio/ Note: If we end up to conclusion that the samples cannot be put freely available, then I could make the samples privately available for the following kind of project. Research experts should analyse the sounds and come up with synthesis method which generates as similar sounds as possible. I'm aware of such research teams and I could ask them to analyse the samples. I also have a plenty of research papers on such analysis/synthesis methods. I could place the papers privately available for anyone who wish to write the analysis/synthesis software. Regards, Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software

18 years, 2 months

[linux-audio-user] LAD site, linuxdj.com needs a new home

by Benno Senoner

Hi LADers, During the last months the LAD website ( http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad ) was hosted on the lionstracs.com server. Domenico from Lionstracs told me that he does not want do host the LAD site anymore since it consumes so much bandwidth, 200 GB in January, see here. http://www.linuxdj.com/webstat1/ its probably due to the audio/video material from the conferences (100MB a pop). Anyone willing to host the site ? As I did in the last years, I'll pay the for the linuxdj.com domain fees. cheers, Benno

18 years, 3 months

[linux-audio-user] Musix GNU+Linux 0.31

by Marcos Guglielmetti

http://musix.k-maleon.com/Musix_GNU-Linux-031.iso http://musix.k-maleon.com/Musix_GNU-Linux-031.iso.md5 Musix 0.31 news * Soundcard installation system upgraded * New backup system * MMA Musical MIDI Accompaniment * Band in a box Converter * gmma (graphic interface for MMA) * Qsampler (gigasampler host) * Ceres3 (audio editor) * New Kit Hydrogen + Bass Tutorial Lilypond by David Asorey Álvarez Tutoriales MMA by Gilberto André Borges * Realtime module now loads fine at boot time * Help! desktop * Bugs fixed and more... -- Marcos Guglielmetti (www.pc-musica.com.ar) Coordinador del desarrollo de Musix GNU+Linux (www.musix.org.ar) (www.musix.distrux.net) ___________________________________________________________ 1GB gratis, Antivirus y Antispam Correo Yahoo!, el mejor correo web del mundo http://correo.yahoo.com.ar

18 years, 3 months

[linux-audio-user] 192kHz

by Carlo Capocasa

Hi, I've been planning to buy an RME MultiFace sound adapter for quite some time now, but now I see all these 192kHz devices on the market. My question, how useful is 192kHz for practical purposes? How quickly is that likely to change? I'd really appreciate some advice here, thank you. Carlo

18 years, 3 months

[linux-audio-user] Some various questions about system configuration..

by Dana Olson

I am still new to a lot of this stuff, and I searched back a bit through the archives (manually, as I don't know of a search functionality) to see if there was any discussion about it. First question, /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. Is there an advantage to setting this to anything than the default for my distribution, which is 60? I have heard that settings of either 100 or 0 are good for different reasons, but strictly thinking in terms of using my system for music production, what would you recommend? Second question, elevator=cfq. I am thinking that CFQ is not good for music purposes. Would that be correct? I've read it speeds up general desktop usage, but this might work against realtime-preemption, wouldn't it? Third question, ReiserFS vs Ext3 vs XFS vs JFS etc. Is there a filesystem that should or shouldn't be used with realtime-preemption? Fourth question, CONFIG_DEBUG_DEADLOCKS. DeMuDi has it enabled, but it gives a warning when you boot up that it could introduce higher latencies. Is it safe to turn off? I'm sorry if these have been asked before, but I didn't see anything. If you want to just link me, that's fine, I checked on Google and got conflicting results, and not a lot specific to music production. Thanks in advance. Dana

18 years, 3 months

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Linux-audio-user January 2006