LAC2008 -- The final countdown
The Linux Audio Conference 2008 is prepared. The organisation team of
LAC2008 is looking forward to welcoming the international Linux audio
community in Cologne. The conference is taking place at the Academy
of Media Arts (KHM) from February 28 to March 2, 2008. For detailed
information visit the LAC2008 website at http://lac.linuxaudio.org
The Conference
Participants of LAC2008 will experience four days crammed full
with presentations of new developments in Linux audio software. 20
talks by international experts are planned. The Soundlab of the
Academy is delighted to have Miller S. Puckette from San Diego as a
keynote speaker on Saturday. Admission to all presentations is free.
Remote visitors can follow the entire paper session plus selected
extras by means of our audio and video streams and can participate via
IRC channels.
The Concerts
There will be three concerts at the "Stadtgarten" in Cologne. Two of
these are "classical" concerts with a mixture of experimental,
improvised or taped music all made using Linux as main platform. A
third one, the "Club Night" will be an allnighter focusing on
electronic music with a club background. Artists from the USA and
Canada, Austria, UK, Poland and many other countries will play at
these events.
The Exhibition
The exhibition at LAC2008 will present sound art by students of the
Academy of Media Arts plus site-specific works by invited artists.
The Workshops
Learning is fun: the LAC2008 will host several exciting workshops for
your Linux audio brain training pleasure held by experts in the
respective fields. Topics include hardware hacking with a custom
Arduino board and software soldering using Pure Data and
SuperCollider. Additionally, space is available for adhoc workshops
and self organised meetings.
Further details including a full timetable is available on
http://lac.linuxaudio.org
Make noise, Tux!
--
Frank Barknecht and Martin Rumori
Chairs of LAC2008
[Note: this announcement is about closed-source software]
Version 1.4 of the QM Vamp Plugins -- a set of audio analysis plugins
in the Vamp plugin format, developed at the Centre for Digital Music
at Queen Mary, University of London -- is now available for download.
This release is a major update including new plugins and numerous bug
fixes. Note onset detector, beat tracker, tempo estimator, key
estimator, tonal change detector, structural segmenter, timbral and
rhythmic similarity, chromagram, constant-Q spectrogram, and MFCC
calculation plugins are included.
For downloads, please see:
http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/downloads/index.html#qm-vamp-plugins
The plugins are available in binary form only and may be freely used
for any purpose, and redistributed for non-commercial purposes only.
Supported platforms are 32- and 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Windows, and OS/X
10.4 or newer (Intel/PPC universal).
For more information about Vamp plugins, please see
http://www.vamp-plugins.org/
Chris
Version 1.2 of Sonic Visualiser, an application for viewing and
analysing the contents of music audio files, is now available.
http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/
This is a significant feature release, containing a number of new
features over the previous release including a handy audio alignment
capability. For more details, please read the release notes at
https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=578145
Sonic Visualiser contains advanced waveform and spectrogram viewers,
as well as editors for many sorts of audio annotations. Besides
visualisation, it can make and play selections based on the locations
of automatically detected features, seamlessly loop playback of single
or multiple noncontiguous regions, synthesise annotations for
playback, and slow down playback while retaining display
synchronisation.
Sonic Visualiser supports the Vamp plugin API for plugins that extract
descriptive or analytical data from audio. Vamp plugins for onset,
pitch and note detection and tempo tracking using the Aubio library
are available, as well as further plugins for tempo tracking,
chromagram analysis, constant-Q spectrogram, spectral centroid, power
curve, key estimation, tonal change detection, harmonic spectrogram,
structural segmentation, timbral similarity, audio alignment
calculation and a large number of low-level spectral features. There
is also a comprehensive SDK for use by developers of Vamp plugins and
hosts. For more information about Vamp plugins, please see:
http://www.vamp-plugins.org/
Sonic Visualiser is Free Software distributed under the GNU General
Public License. The 1.2 release is available now in source code form
or as binaries for Linux, OS/X, and Windows.
Chris
After some time in quarantine, meaning that it just passed almost 40
days since its last public appearance, the frivolous debutante has
matured a bit but not that much. Truth is, it is not quite healed and in
fact, it is getting seriously bloated ;)
Qtractor 0.1.1 (futile duchess) has been released!
Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application, written in
C++ around the Qt toolkit. Its primordial target platform is Linux,
where the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) for audio, and the Advanced
Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI are the main infrastructures to
evolve as a fairly featured Desktop Audio/MIDI Workstation GUI specially
dedicated to the personal homestudio. It sits confortably tagged as for
the techno-boy bedroom home-studio. There's no genre segregation here,
it also applies to techno-girls ;).
Now seriously, it even has its own Wikipedia entry already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qtractor.
Back to business, these are the major highlights for this release:
- Draft user manual, contributed by James Laco Hines.
- Native Linux VST plug-in support.
- Initial DSSI plug-in support (audio effects only atm.)
- User configurable keyboard shortcuts.
- JACK server auto-start.
- Clip fade-in/out relative resizes.
- Auto time-stretch now optional.
- MIDI capture/record input quantize.
- Major plug-in infrastructure rewrite.
- Seamless plug-in drag-and-drop.
Check it out, from the official project web site:
http://qtractor.sourceforge.nethttp://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor
Direct link for the source tarball download:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.1.1.tar.gz
The new user manual draft is also made available:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.1.1-user-manual.pdf
Literal change-log follows. since the last 0.1.0 (frivolous debutante)
alpha release:
- After some great user demand, keyboard shortcuts are finally
configurable, as found provisionally under Help/Shortcuts...,
for the main application menu and for the MIDI editor as well.
- Debian package gets SSE optimization disabled as default.
- At least some transport actions get to be non auto-repeatable
when pressed for much too long, as Play and Record, avoiding
the tumbling imposed from the keyboard.
- For the first time ever, jackd auto-start is now allowed (!).
- OSC service support through liblo gets optional at configure
time, now leading the way to proper DSSI plug-in hosting.
- All plug-in widget controls count are now capped to one hundred.
- Plugin paths setup is now made available on the options dialog,
overriding each of respective default settings, as implicit from
the LADSPA_PATH, DSSI_PATH and VST_PATH environment variables
(see View/Options.../Display/Plugin Paths).
- Clip fade-in/out lengths are now kept relative to tempo changes
and also to clip offset and length changes (clip resizes).
- Automatic time-stretching for all audio clips when session tempo
changes, may now be disabled/enabled as a global session option
(see View/Options.../Audio/Playback/Automatic time-stretching).
- Double-clicking on an empty area (de)selects all clips on track.
- MIDI capture (record) quantization is now an option, possibly
handy for some jerky performance musicians, as the one found
in myself ;) (see View/Options.../MIDI/Capture/Quantize).
- The global options dialog (View/Options...) has seen its Display
tab page being moved back and to the right.
- Major rewrite of the plug-in infrastructure, adding primordial
support for DSSI and native VST plug-in flavors.
- Drag-and-drop of plug-in instances are now allowed intra- and
inter-mixer strip chains, either on tracks or buses.
- Turning track record off while recording is rolling was leaving
the session in a inconsistent recording status, now fixed.
- A random but instant crash upon audition/pre-listening player
onset was hopefully fixed.
Cheers && Enjoy
--
rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela
Version 1.3 of MMA - Musical MIDI Accompaniment - is now
available for downloading. Included in this release:
Extended MIDI voicing now supported -- it is now easy to
set any voice you have on your sequencer!
A SWELL command (increase then restore volume over a number of bars),
A number of minor bug fixes and enhancements.
See the entire change log in the included CHANGES-1.2 file.
MMA is a accompaniment generator -- it creates midi tracks
for a soloist to perform with. User supplied files contain
pattern selections, chords, and MMA directives. For full details
please visit:
http://www.mellowood.ca/mma/
If you have any questions or comments, please send them
to: bob(a)mellowood.ca
--
Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA **
EMAIL: bob(a)mellowood.ca
WWW: http://www.mellowood.ca
LAC 2008: bandwidth to burn and volunteers needed
The 6th annual Linux Audio Conference is taking place in Cologne, Germany, Feb
28th to March 2nd, 2008. As with each previous year this year's conference will
be streamed live over the internet in ogg theora via icecast. The stream server
is up at: http://lac2008.khm.de:8000/
There is nothing to see at the moment, but keep checking over the coming days
as we hope to have a test stream up soon.
This year we are in the unique situation of having a Gigabit link donated by
CITIZENMEDIA: http://www.ist-citizenmedia.org/ They have asked us to use up as
much of their bandwidth as we can so they can see how well the link performs.
This year the core team, Joern Nettingsmeier and myself, are recruiting
volunteers to spread the workload. To that end we have set up a mailing list
and irc channel to coordinate our efforts. We will also have a wiki shortly.
If you will be coming to Cologne for the conference please consider signing up
to help. If you are not coming, please enjoy the fruits of our labors by
watching the streams and participating via irc.
stream team mailing list: http://zhevny.com/mailman/listinfo/lac-streams
general conference chat: #lac2008 on irc.freenode.net
stream team tech talk: #lac2008-tech on irc.freenode.net
Thanks,
Eric Rz.
--
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The Aqualung development team is pleased to announce the latest
release of the Aqualung music player.
Aqualung is an advanced music player originally targeted at the
GNU/Linux operating system, today also running on FreeBSD, OpenBSD and
Microsoft Windows. It plays audio CDs, internet radio streams and
podcasts as well as soundfiles in just about any audio format and has
the feature of inserting no gaps between adjacent tracks.
The ChangeLog is included below.
Please note that our website has moved to http://aqualung.factorial.hu
Please update your links and bookmarks.
Enjoy,
Tom
2008-02-10 Tom Szilagyi <tszilagyi at users dot sourceforge dot net>
* Aqualung 0.9beta9.1
http://aqualung.factorial.hu
This is a bugfix, stability and performance oriented release also
containing a few updates to existing functionality. By using this
version, your Aqualung will be more stable, and in some cases
significantly faster. All users are encouraged to upgrade.
The project homepage has moved to http://aqualung.factorial.hu
Please upgrade your pointers and bookmarks.
Notable changes:
* Playlist code refactoring for improved performance. Please note
that incompatible changes have been made to the playlist format:
this means that your old playlists won't be parsed, you'll have to
re-create them.
(NOTE: Music Store contents are unaffected. If we ever change the
Music Store format in a backward-incompatible way, we will provide
tools to migrate your precious store data.)
* Fix threading problems that caused random crashes for some users.
* Fix lurking bug that sometimes resulted in getting stuck at the
beginning of a track when Sinc interpolator sample rate converters
were used.
* Modified the way of opening ALSA output to achieve non-exclusive
driver access.
* New, more versatile title string generating templates. Make sure
to check the documentation.
* Added option to periodically save playlist.
* Several fixes concerning command line file and playlist loading,
esp. with the -L flag.
* Better metadata handling for external files in playlist.
* Increment CDDB revision number on resubmitting an existing
disc. This is essential for correcting existing CDDB entries,
otherwise the CDDB server rejects the submission. The latest CVS
version from http://libcddb.sf.net is required for this to work
(Aqualung-Win32 is built with this version).
* OpenBSD-related portability fixes. Aqualung should now compile
cleanly and be fully functional OOTB on OpenBSD 4.2.
* Updated German, Hungarian and Italian translations. Added
Russian translation.
We are jubilous to announce CLAM 1.2 'GSoCket plugged-in release'.
We had to wait for some months to make this release as we had to
redeploy the multiplatform release infrastructure [1]. Thus, the
feature buffer for this release is pretty full. It incorporates both,
the results of the Summer of Code [2] students work and the
involvement of David and Pau with Barcelona Media Foundation Audio
Research Lab[3].
We want to thank the involvement of GSoC students Hernan Hordiales[4],
Bennet Kolasinsky[5], Greg Kellum[6], Andreas Calvo, Roman Goj[7] and
Abe Kazemzadeh, Google Inc, and Barcelona Media audio lab members
for their precious involvement in CLAM.
[1] http://clam.iua.upf.edu/testfarm/
[2] http://clam.iua.upf.edu/wikis/clam/index.php/GSoC_2007
[3] http://www.barcelonamedia.org/index.php/linies/10/en
[4] http://h.ordia.com.ar
[5] http://bennettdoesclam.blogspot.com
[6] http://gregkellum.com
[7] http://ro-baczek.blogspot.com
A summarized list of changes follows. See also the CHANGES files[8]
for details, or the development screenshots[9] for a visual guided tour.
As usual binary packages for Windows, MacOSX and several flavors of Linux
are available to download.
[8] http://iua-share.upf.edu/svn/clam/trunk/CLAM/CHANGES
[9] http://clam.iua.upf.edu/wikis/clam/index.php/Development_screenshots
Summary of changes:
The most exciting feature is the new plugin system (acalvo)
which enables third party algorithms to be distributed separately
from the core binaries. LADSPA plugins support has been enhanced
and a first iteration on FAUST[10] integration. The wiki[11] contains
very nice how-to's that cover most of that.
[10] http://faust.grame.fr/
[11] http://clam.iua.upf.edu/wikis/clam
Most of the GSoC work come as plugins: a SMS Synthesizer (gkellum),
a Voice synthesis/analysis (akazem) and some some cool guitar effects
(hordia). Also not included as plugins but in the main repository
several enhancements have been done on the SMS transformations (hordia)
and the tonal analysis (rgoj).
Some interesting work has been done on the Barcelona Media Audio Lab
on having a system to simulate 3D room acoustics which can be reproduced
on several exhibition systems. Some precomputed room databases are
available to try. Check the wiki NetworkEditor Tutorial for more
information.
Regarding the applications, Network Editor incorporates new usability
enhancements, a new on-line Tutorial and a new Spectrogram like view.
The Annotator received Bennet Kolasinsky attention improving its the
flexibility of its interface, the practical effects are multiple
segmentation and low-level descriptors panes and that we are pretty
close to visualization and auralization plugins.
Enjoy.
The CLAM Team
