[LAU] Software for recording digital audio?

[Joel Roth]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 05:03:41AM +0100, Andrew C wrote:
> Wow, thanks for the replies guys!
> 
> Of the software mentioned here, my biggest wish is for syncability with JACK
> transport, so I can send the output of one of the linuxsampler instruments
> to the recording software, hit the play button from inside Rosegarden and
> have a perfectly synced audio copy of one particular instrument output which
> I can then drop back into the sequencer timeline and continue with another
> section of the song, thereby freeing up system resources.

Ecasound can probably meet your sync requirements.

According to the Ecasound User's Manual:

    JACK's transport control interface allows controlling the
    transport state of all the apps connected to one JACK server
    from a single application. Ecasound can support this
    functionality in four different modes ("notransport",
    "send", "recv" and "sendrecv").

For Ecasound to respond to external transport controls, you
need to set:

    -G:jack,eca_slave,recv      # responds
or 
    -G:jack,eca_slave,sendrecv  # sends as well as responds

 
> Of course, this rules out jack_capture I'm afraid!
> 
> I'll take a look at Ecasound/Nama, the tk interface for nama doesn't look
> too bad and it's relatively lightweight.

Yours is a minority opinion on looks. :-) 
Even this mother is not especially enamored of them.

To get the Tk interface via Debian, you'll need to:

    apt-get install perl-tk

Or if by CPAN:

    cpan Tk

To get Ecasound/Nama to respond to JACK transport you'll
need to set the configuration variables above in $HOME/.namarc
(created on the first run). I would suggest starting with:
    
    ecasound_globals_default: "-z:mixmode,sum -G:jack,eca_slave,recv"

and deleting the line for 'ecasound_globals_realtime', which is 
unnecessary.

> Arnold, I can't find any link to time-machine as audio recording software
> via google, just as a filesystem snapshotting app.
> 
> Traverso is perhaps a bit overkill for my needs. Also, isn't audacity JACK
> aware via pulse audio or somesuch?

FWIW, audacity clocks in at 54MB at startup, and
automatically detects (but does not start) JACK.
Did not test JACK transport sync.

Regards,

Joel


> Thanks again,
> 
> Andrew
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 10:36 AM, Andrew C <countfuzzball at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hey list,
> >
> > I'm in a bit of dilemma here, my machine has only 1 GB of RAM and I'm
> > running linuxsampler, rakarrack and bristol with rosegarden sequencing all
> > of them together. As you can imagine, this does stretch my machine's
> > resources a fair bit, so I find myself needing to bounce-to-audio. Any
> > software out there that can do this relatively painlessly?
> >
> > This might be a bug in Rosegarden (10.04.2) or my version of jackdmp
> > (1.9.6), but when I try to do it in Rosegarden, I found that the recorded
> > audio tends to record previously recorded wav files and other such oddities.
> > So I am looking for a relatively lightweight alternative or is this just a
> > case of 'Yep, just use ardour!'?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Andrew.
> >


-- 
Joel Roth