[linux-audio-user] Mastering deck mix

tim hall tech at glastonburymusic.org.uk
Sat Dec 4 05:57:44 EST 2004


Last Saturday 04 December 2004 06:40, Robert Persson was like:
> On Thursday 02 December 2004 17:26, tim hall wrote:
> > Last Thursday 02 December 2004 19:40, Ben Edwards (lists) was like:
> > > Secondly was wondering if there was any way of using audacity/jamin
> > > together.  Idealy I want to use ardour/jamin but audacity is a lot
> > > simpler and is a good fallback.
> >
> > For what you want it may work out easier to use Ardour with JAMin. I
> > guess you need to run Jackd, I've never tried it otherwise.
> >
> > > Thirdly - and this is the most important question - any advide as to
> > > how to master a deck mix for recording/streaming.  I am planing to use
> > > jamin to do this but general advice/other options also good.
> >
> > JAMin really is _the_ mastering app.
> >
> > tim hall
> > http://glastonburymusic.org.uk
> > (close enough for laying on of hands if need be ;-)
>
> IMO there is a place for a simple recording utility that works with jack.
> Ardour isn't intuitive the way audacity is.  This evening I managed to
> record 30 minutes of nothing with it.  

Sorry to hear that.
Does arecord not work with Jackd? I confess I haven't really looked, I would 
have thought there was a simple command-line utility. I use ReZound for 
stereo and either Ardour or Ecasound for multitracking. I think it may depend 
on how your intuition works. I don't understand Audacity.

> Today's job was to try and get vst 
> instruments working under linux.  Learning Ardour was going to happen some
> time next week.  

I would have thought it would be less work to learn to use Ardour with LADSPA, 
but clearly YMMV.

> I can't do everything at once, but if there are no easy 
> tools to take away some of the pain you end up having to be an instant
> expert in order to be able to do any creative work.  There is also the
> instablity of many of the linux audio packages to be considered,
> particularly if you made an unfortunate decision somewhere along the line
> (SuSE 9.1 in my case - it's fine for a business desktop, but not for
> audio).  

People do make music successfully with SuSE, but as you say it's not what it's 
designed to do out of the box. I use A/DeMuDi, which is the only distro I've 
seen so far that configures not only ALSA, but also launches QJackCtl, 
running Jackd by default. The system is optimised for audio with low-latency 
kernels and most of the software works out of the box. You might want to 
consider double-booting.

> The more complex and minority-user-targeted the application the 
> more problems you are likely to have.  For what I needed to do this evening
> I would have used kRecord if it worked with Jack.  Something simple that
> works (unlike me - I am both intensely cerebral and unemployed).

Then you have lots of time for reading documentation. ;-)

> Is there Jack support in the Audacity source code?  If so that may push me
> that bit closer to ditching SuSE and going back to Gentoo because Gentoo
> builds usually do actually build (except on macs).  If the audio
> applications I've got running now are as unstable as they seem and won't
> play ball with each other I might as well do audio work with a casstte deck
> and an abacus.

I never really worked out how to mic up an abacus. ;-]

A lot of the music software is still in development, but recently I've found 
most of the ALSA/Jackd based stuff to work and be fairly interoperable. Most 
of the bigger applications will exit or freeze up if pushed too far, but 
generally I've found that they recover well enough to be able to work. My 
main problem recently has been finding time for composition or recording. I'm 
hoping to make time during the Yule holidays.

cheers

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk




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