[linux-audio-user] Acid-Gigasampler-Vegas-Audio Mastering

[Paul Davis]

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 19:43 +0300, Mehmet Okonsar wrote:
> As a prospect Linux user I'd like to get a better idea on the following:
> 
> 1-is there an Acid on Linux? I mean an audio multitrack with beat detection
> and synchronization

No. There no good timestretching libraries for open source applications
at this time. There are good people working on this and beat detection
code, but its not ready yet.

> 2-Where is the LinuxSampler in its development stage? Does it read Giga
> files without any or some trouble(s)?

Others know much more than me, but I get the sense that the engine is at
about the 99% level with regards to Giga files; the GUI may not be as
far along.

> 3-is there a Vegas alternative with audio and video multitrack effects
> etc..?

there are no good combined audio/video multitrackers. ardour is a
powerful audio multitrack environment, without video. cinelerra is
powerful (some say hard to use; it requires major CPU horsepower) video
non-linear editor with audio, but its audio facilities are primitive
compared to ardour, and it does not use JACK (the last time i looked,
anyway) which means it cannot be integrated with other linux audio tools
like JAMin.

you can sink xjadeo, a simple single-format video player, to ardour or
other JACK apps.

so it depends on what you want to do.

> 4-how any reverb, dynamic processing and EQ plugins in Linux compare with
> the most professional (i.e. expensive) audio plugins? How one can compare
> them with the acoustic modeling reverb, "Ozone" suite of mastering tools,
> "Waves" mastering tools and dithering?

It depends mostly on what you actually think of expensive plugins. Most
people tend to think that nothing really compares with the Waves stuff,
on any platform, and they might be right. The better of the existing
LADSPA plugins are at the level of the best free/lowcost plugins for the
most part, a few of them are very very good and compare favorably to
costly plugins (though perhaps not waves). JAMin, which is what most
people use for mastering on linux, is very powerful as long as you need
what it does.

if you are a productive and/or professional user of "pro-sumer" or "pro"
audio software on the mac or windows, linux will probably be less useful
to you at this time. the apps that we have are cool, but are generally
not positioned to compete well with products developed explicitly for a
paying studio engineering market. your mileage may vary.

--p