Hi all,
I just wanted to share with you a quick report from the ICMC. The conference
was much fun although many events were overlapping and therefore it was
impossible to attend everything.
A number of new open-source audio-oriented software was demoed many of which
are also available for the Linux platform.
My Linux demo went relatively well (apart from the 2 consecutive X-server
crashes, courtesy of the crappy binary-only ATI's driver, and an odd issue
where disconnect of hdsp pcmcia did not yield acknowledgment from the 2.6.7
kernel and therefore subsequent reconnect did not recognize the card's
presence). There were ~20+ people in the audience at any given time
throughout the presentation (some of them were there only for a portion of
the presentation, so people kept coming and going).
Stuff I demoed (in no particular order):
*Jack
*Freqtweak
*Jamin
*Pd/Gem
*Latency tests
*Ardour
*Sweep
*Rezound
*Audacity
*gAlan
*Rosegarden
*Qsynth/fluidsynth
*ZynAddSubFX
*VKeybd
*Cinelerra
*Blender
*Xine/DVD playback
*Spiral Synth Modular
*KDE productivity
Stuff I wanted to demo but ran out of time:
*Hdsp latency/performance
*RTcmix synthesis language
*Supercollider
*Csound
Etc.
Stuff I observed preparing and doing this demo (please understand that I
have no idea whether these problems are result of my own setup or are
justifiable bugs -- nonetheless I am including them here in hope they may
shed some light towards their resolution):
*ZynAddSubFx crashes when a lot of polyphony is created even though the cpu
utilization is not topped-off
*Jamin crashes when pushing limiters to the extereme (not consistently)
*fluidsynth has some weird looping problems (I am trying to track this one
down as apparently this is specific to my setup)
*Ardour's real-time preview via sliding the timing bar does not work (I do
have one release prior to the latest, though)
*Spiral Synth Modular crackles a bit even with large buffer sizes when using
OSS (haven't had the time to do exhaustive tests nor did I try using Jack
object as of yet)
*Audacity has some instabilities when used in conjunction with Jack
*There is a real need for Jack to be able to restart (should a need for its
restarting ever arise) without losing all of the connections
Stuff that really rocked:
*I was able to run Jack on my via82xx laptop soundcard using rt mode with
64x4 buffers (5.33ms at 44.1KHz) *almost* rock solid (there is still some
issues due to crappy ATI driver and obviously 2.6.7 kernel that is still
sub-par to the 2.4.x kernel series performance, but that mainly amounted to
perhaps a 1 xrun/minute).
*I was able (although after the demo) to run hdsp with 64x2 (2.9ms at
44.1KHz) *almost* rock solid (random occasional xruns but no xruns when
adding new connections and/or apps to the Jack session).
*I tested the PD with the hdsp's 64x2 buffer size and used the latency test
patch by connecting audio out with audio in on the multiface and got ~6ms
:-).
The general reaction from the audience was quite positive as many of the
users who even were familiar with the Linux Audio scene were impressed by
the diversity and quality of the software offering as well as the
flexibility of the Jack's framework and the overall user-friendliness of the
UI/desktop environment.
I would like to therefore use this opportunity to once more thank all of you
for being such active and generous contributors to this great community.
Without you none of this would have been possible!
----------------------
The panel on the "Standards from the Computer Music Community" was very much
interesting as it covered many of the important facets of today's computer
music scene, but also more importantly revealed some of the greatest
strengths of Linux, including (but not limited to):
*openness of the standards and therefore ability to generate umbrella
meta-standards (i.e. LASH)
*longevity
*ability for a new standard to supersede the reigning old standard solely
based on its merit (i.e. Alsa vs. OSS), and not due to its commercial PR
and/or widespread use
*Minimization of the misrepresentation of the standard's features and/or
abilities
Having had this wonderful opportunity to be a part of such panel (many
thanks to Matt Wright for inviting me!) has truly reinforced and clearly
defined the advantages as well as strong reasons for being a part of this
community.
Many thanks go to all of you who have generously offered your insight in
these issues.
Time permitting, I will post a more in-depth list of the ideas I've covered
during the panel. Matt Wright should also have slides ready on his site
sometime soon.
Best wishes,
Ivica Ico Bukvic, composer & multimedia sculptor
http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/
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Hi!
The aim is to make measurement mini-laboratory, in particular, to measure
distortions of audio amplifier. Using JACK, I can route line ins/outs, find
clean sine signal and get amplified one, and then route last to... Well,
the questions are:
- are there some graphical FFT frontend to see signal harmonics?
- has anybody success experience here?
- are there some caveats and traps in such measurement?
I have 24/96 card (Terrateck Aureon 7.1) with (as I think :-) good
DAC/ADC. So, I hope, measurements may be done at least for few first
harmonics.
P.S. Have tried LAU list without any response :-(
Thanks!
Andrew
dssi-vst 0.3 released!
======================
The 0.3 release of dssi-vst is now available.
dssi-vst is a DSSI plugin wrapper for VST effects and instruments
with GUI support, allowing them to be loaded into any DSSI host.
It requires a fairly recent version of Wine (this calendar year at least).
dssi-vst is available from the download page at
http://dssi.sourceforge.net/
The main improvement since the initial 0.1 release is that dssi-vst
now works correctly with plugins with complex GUIs that use
back-channel information to communicate things like patch data to
the audio plugin. In practical terms, this means that VSTs with
test keyboard widgets, patch load and save, and other natty features
in their GUIs should work properly as DSSI plugins without losing
automatability for the true automatable parameters.
OK, a new stable release after a long while... This one has loads of new
stuff vs previous stable.
libDSP is a C++ library of digital signal processing functions. It also
contains a wrapper for C. Assembler optimizations for E3DNow!, SSE2 and
x86-64 (SSE2).
Either http://libdsp.sf.net or http://www.sonarnerd.net/projects/libdsp/
--
Jussi Laako <jussi.laako(a)pp.inet.fi>
I believe there are many C++ implementations of JACK API, but I'll add
my 50 cents to the game anyway.
I created this for my own applications, and this is very new and
untested piece of code. Anyway, I welcome any comments on this and
hopefully this code could be useful to someone else too. A basic JACK
application made using this library works OK anyway.
Current implementation is available from:
http://www.sonarnerd.net/linux/libjackmm-071104.tar.gz
--
Jussi Laako <jussi.laako(a)pp.inet.fi>
Hi,
(Cross-posting to fluid-dev list, just in case someone is listening there
too, and have some comment into play)
I don't seem to notice this behavior, but strange enough, I don't have
that many soundfonts to try. Maybe if you point us a specific soundfont
file (url?), bank and program numbers of the patch where the issue is
exposed...
Probably not on time for your presentation, but I would like to confirm
whether it's an internal fludisynth bug (qsynth is just a Qt frontend to
libfluidsynth) or a side-effect from from your ecosystem.
Distro and fluidsynth/qsynth versions would be welcome for the record. If
you compiled from source, the configure command line optimization options
are known (by just me?) to have a relevant impact to the fluidsynth build
stability and behavior. Just check it out.
Bye now.
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [linux-audio-dev] QSynth/fluidsynth having problems with looped
soundfonts
From: ico(a)fuse.net
Date: Wed, November 3, 2004 4:12
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi all,
Just a quick question before my tomorrow's presentation. I am hoping to be
able to present fluidsynth/Qsynth but one of the issues I encountered
using two different versions of fluidsynth and a number of soundfonts is
that the sound of soundfonts is fine until they begin to loop (i.e. long
flute sound eventually starts to loop the sample) and then at every loop
cycle there is a kind of a clicking noise as if the loop points are either
badly designed (unlikely, since I tried 5 different soundfonts that were
downloaded from different places), there is something weird with the
tested versions of fluidsynth, or this is a bug?
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Best wishes,
Ico
Announcing the first public release of the hexter DSSI plugin.
http://dssi.sourceforge.net/hexter.html
hexter is a software synthesizer that models the sound generation of
a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. Now you can have the sparkling, richly
evolving sounds of this classic FM synth on your Linux workstation!
There are a few things still missing from hexter's emulation of the
DX7 (and it doesn't attempt more general FM synthesis like Native
Instrument's FM7), however, even at its current stage of
development, it is quite useable and recreates the sound of the DX7
with greater accuracy than any previous open-source emulation (that
the author is aware of....) It can easily load most of the thousands
of DX7 patch bank files available on the Internet, and can accept
patch editing commands via MIDI sys-ex messages from your favorite
DX7 editor/librarian.
hexter operates as a plugin for the DSSI Soft Synth Interface. DSSI
is a plugin API for software instruments (soft synths) with user
interfaces, permitting them to be hosted in-process by Linux audio
applications. More information on DSSI can be found at:
http://dssi.sourceforge.net/
The latest hexter version (currently 0.5.7) can be obtained at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?
group_id=104230&package_id=134428
hexter requires a working DSSI host, liblo, GTK+ 1.2.x, plus the
ALSA headers and LADSPA SDK.
hexter is written by Sean Bolton, and copyright (c)2004 under the
GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. hexter benefited
greatly from previous open-source efforts, most notably Juan
Linietsky's rx-saturno, and FluidSynth by Peter Hanappe, et al.
DSSI v0.9 released
==================
I'm happy to announce version 0.9 of the DSSI plugin API.
http://dssi.sourceforge.net/
DSSI is an audio plugin API designed for software instruments with
custom user interfaces.
DSSI is based on the LADSPA effects plugin API, the ALSA sequencer
event types, and OSC (Open Sound Control) communications. It's
intended to be easily understood, GUI-toolkit-agnostic, and slightly
biased towards familiarity with MIDI. The DSSI distribution package
contains a JACK/ALSA-sequencer reference host and some plugins as well
as the specification and header. DSSI 0.9 was constructed by Steve
Harris, Chris Cannam, and Sean Bolton.
New in 0.9
----------
The main improvements in 0.9 are to the reference host implementation
and sample plugins.
The 0.9 API itself is binary compatible with the previous 0.4 release.
A new convention for plugin-global (rather than instance-local)
configuration data and a convention for setting a plugin's project
working directory have been introduced, and 0.9 clarifies certain
implementation points in the documentation.
Available hosts and plugins
---------------------------
Two hosts are currently known to include complete or nearly-complete
DSSI support: the reference jack-dssi-host included in the DSSI 0.9
distribution, and versions 0.9.9 and later of the Rosegarden-4
sequencer.
Currently available plugins include:
* a FluidSynth soundfont plugin included in the DSSI distribution
* Xsynth-DSSI, an analog-style (VCAs-VCF-VCO) plugin
* dssi-vst, a wrapper plugin enabling the use of many Windows VST
instruments and effects
* hexter, a Yamaha DX7 modeling plugin
* three smaller example plugins (two synths and a sampler) that are
also part of the DSSI distribution.
Hi all,
Just a quick question before my tomorrow's presentation. I am hoping to be able to present fluidsynth/Qsynth but one of the issues I encountered using two different versions of fluidsynth and a number of soundfonts is that the sound of soundfonts is fine until they begin to loop (i.e. long flute sound eventually starts to loop the sample) and then at every loop cycle there is a kind of a clicking noise as if the loop points are either badly designed (unlikely, since I tried 5 different soundfonts that were downloaded from different places), there is something weird with the tested versions of fluidsynth, or this is a bug?
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Best wishes,
Ico
Hi all,
A couple of us are thinking of putting together an open source focussed music
and visual performance night in London (UK), with the aim of making it a semi
regular event with a bit of a workshop feel to it - so people can share ideas
and have some fun.
We're just wondering what the interest for such an event would be, whether
people would be interested in participating, or indeed if there is already
something going on we've missed. Also if people are already doing similar
nights in other places, if you have any tips.
You can contact us directly at:
leechun(a)leechun.freeserve.co.uk
dave(a)pawfal.org
or reply to the list...
cheers,
dave