Linux-audio-user June 2006

linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org

150 participants
123 discussions

Re: [linux-audio-user] Miscellaneous hardware/software questions

by Gabriel Brachtel

>>>it's easy for non-programing people to bring "visions" regarding >>>interface design. (and i love do so :) as i know programers, it's quite >>>hard to establish a new standard. but imho the interface standards >>>(buttons, dropdown boxes, scrolling, menu-structure, etc.) are now a >>>couple of years old, and there might be better solutions for specific >>>tasks. audio seems to me like a good point to start. > > > i wasn't talking about such rudimentary stuff. of course there are > alternatives to these basic widgets and several audio applications (even > free ones) have begun to support them. > > the point about a visual interface is that it acts as a "memory buffer" > for the user: you do not have to remember much about the structure of > the session because the structure is made visible on the screen. can't > remember precisely where you put a certain sound? how many copies of the > bridge riff did i put in? is the door slam before or after the creak? > its all there on the screen, just waiting for you to look at it. > > as soon as you move away from a visual UI, you have to find some way to > avoid requiring the user to remember everything about the session. when i try to remember a poem my brain creates images and i walk trough them, when i reproduce it. when i learn a piece of music it does other stuff (i'm a pianist and singer) but in the end i have a very complex thing in my mind, just think of a bach fugue. i have the fugue also in "the fingers". different areas of the brain work together. i have the same oppinion as you, we are very good in using a visual UI. we trained it for a long time. but there could be other combinations that work nearly as good as "mouse-to-eye". > the visual interface offers another hard-to-replicate feature as well: > trivially variable precision. if you try doing cut-n-paste based only on > audio feedback, you will find it quite hard/laborious to be as precise > as you might want to be. with the visual interface, its much easier to > use visual information to get the rough location of an edit and then > get to precisely where you want, without many steps. with audio feedback > based approaches, i think you will find yourself needing many more > iterations through the edit-play-edit-play cycle before you get the > location correct. i think it's all a matter of training. you do the "display-keyboard-mouse-combination" for long years and you became professional in speed and precision. watch a pro-gamer gaming with mouse.. what's about data-gloves? whats with feet-controlers and other "non-standard" devices? greets, gabriel (sorry for my clumsy english)

17 years, 10 months

[linux-audio-user] Miscellaneous hardware/software questions

by Jason White

I am looking for suitable hardware to handle digital i/o between a Linux system and an RME ADI-2 ad/da converter that I just bought. I don't need lots of channels, but reliability of the data transfer is important, including jitter reduction. An RME card would be excellent but it is somewhat outside my budget. Also, connectivity to a laptop would be desirable, suggesting either a USB interface or waiting until http://freebob.sourceforge.net/ (the Alsa firewire project) matures. I don't plan to run any OS besides Linux with this hardware, so Alsa support is crucial. As this is for home/personal use I'm not in a hurry. M-Audio hardware is high on my list of possibilities at the moment. Now to the software question: does there exist any sound editor with a non-graphical interface, i.e., one that can be operated from the Linux console for inserting, deleting, copying and otherwise editing audio? Due to a vision-related disability I can't use a graphical display and therefore need a text-only solution - but all the sound editors appear to require X11. Surely it should be possible to design an audio interface to a digital sound editor. Suggestions welcome. I've discussed hardware on this list once before, and the USB options weren't highly regarded at the time.

17 years, 10 months

[linux-audio-user] hello gentoo? speed up please...

by Aaron Trumm

hello all - got a question - I've only recently been stopping and taking a look at my studio computer's performance and in the almost year since I change from Red Hat 9 to gentoo, it's been more solid on some things, but I notice a huge latency difference - ie: I have to run Jack at -p 8192 to get anything done in Ardour Anybody have any tips on what to look at to tweak it? Seems like it should do better than that... I didn't see it as a problem until in the last few days I started playing with playing softsynths live directly into Ardour - you've gotta be running at -p 1024 or there's a latency that screws up your playing - at 8192 it's a downright 8th note delay... Here's some vitals that I can think of: OS: gentoo 2.6.6-rc1 kernel (alsa built in) jack: 0.99.0 ardour: beta28 jack command line: jackd -R -d alsa -d hw:0 -r 48000 -p 8192 <------- (or whatever) harddrive: multicount on io support: 32 bit unmaskirq on use dma on keepsettings off readonly off readahead on chip: 2ghz amd (I THINK - not at computer now) ram: 512MB thanks for any ideas! :) --------------------- Aaron Trumm www.nquit.com -----------------------

18 years

[linux-audio-user] [ANN] bcx2000edit: Editor for BCR2000/BCF2000

by Pieter Palmers

Hi all, I had to familiarize myself with python for work, and I took it as an opportunity to hack on something I've want for some time now. I have these behringer control surfaces, and they are pretty cool, but there is no editor for them on linux. And using the device interface itself is a little cumbersome. So I figured out the sysex format (the patch dump format from "edit + >") and wrote a parser for it in python. I also have a small PyQt inteface (had to learn that too) that allows you to load files, change the values and save them as a new file. Note that this is very basic & non-bugfree software. No checking whatsoever is performed on the sysex files, so if your control surface displays "ERR" when you send a sysex file, you're probably violating the format. The GUI is also limited to changes on existing files only. I put this code online because I think it might be a nice starting point for somebody that want's to write a real editor. It shouln't be that hard (mostly GUI design), and they can use this code to further explore the sysex format. I'm not planning to work on this any further because (1) it serves my needs and (2) I need my time for other projects (most notably freebob). Anyway, you can find the code here: http://freebob.sourceforge.net/old/bcx2000edit.tar.gz Let me know if you start something with it. Greets, Pieter

18 years, 4 months

[linux-audio-user] which graphics card?

by R Parker

Hi, I need a display card that supports dual monitors out-of-the-box. This is for an audio box so 3D or whatever fancy features aren't needed. I'm running FC5 with Planet CCRMA and have no interest in changing distros. Experimentations in the xorg.conf file are unacceptable. Is that realistic? I'd like the thing to be OSS and licensed GPL so Lee Revel doesn't rip the jewels from my body when I ask for help configuring it. Of course the card you recommend is gonna work out of the box so Lee would never know if I'm sleeping with the devil... It took alot of time to configure the ATI Radeon 9500 to properly span dual monitors in FC3. I saved the xorg.conf file but of course it's back to the same old configuration nausea with FC5. And google searches return confusion and depressing news. I'll search a little more while waiting for some good advice. Thanks much, Ron I love Linux, I hate Linux...it never ends. I'm gonna poke out one of my eyes, fill the socket with salt and run around preaching the virtues of open source software to anyone I can get to listen to me. OK, I don't feel any better but will shutup. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

18 years, 4 months

[linux-audio-user] [ANN] Aqualung 0.9beta5 released

by Tom Szilagyi

Aqualung: Music Player for GNU/Linux http://aqualung.sf.net Release 0.9beta5 It is our greatest pleasure to announce the fifth official beta release of Aqualung. Some features you'd rarely stumble upon in other players (at least not too many of them at once): * Gapless playback (designed for this from the ground up) * High quality decoders (eg. libMAD for mp3), many supported formats * High-quality sample rate conversion support via libsamplerate * LADSPA support * Music Store for organizing your music * And much, much more... We hope you will enjoy this release. The release ChangeLog follows below. 2006-06-30 Tom Szilagyi <tszilagyi at users dot sourceforge dot net> * Aqualung 0.9beta5 http://aqualung.sf.net This is a new milestone release after 17 months of silent development. Large parts of the program have been rewritten, refactored, fixed, etc. A multitude of new features have been added to the software, which now weighs into Open Source with about 30,000 lines of GPL'ed source code, all written by a handful of free-time developers (no, you won't need your whole hand). It won't make too much sense to precisely list every change made to the sources during this period - the list would be prohibitively lengthy. For the curious, the mailing list archive is recommended. The most important, high-level changes are summarized below. * Group CDs in the Playlist via "Album mode". Shuffle between records but play their contents in order! * Statusbars in Playlist and Music Store display statistics and other data. * Multiple Music Stores are supported - useful for separate genres, file formats or for music mounted from different file servers via NFS. * CDDB support! * iFP driver support for integrating with iRiver HW players! * Completely reworked Settings dialog, the new control center! * Embed Playlist into Main window for a more compact look! * Search facility for Music Store and Playlist. * Add support for Musepack (via libmpcdec), Monkey's Audio, Ogg Speex. * Rudimentary album art (cover display) support. * RVA-related work, improved metadata support. * Fixed a boatload of bugs concerning cyrillic filenames, etc. * MP3 improvements (file recognition, clipping, seeking...) * Better fault tolerance in Ogg Vorbis decoder. * Various GUI fixes, new command line options, etc, etc. * Improved build system for skins, icons, etc. * New skins (Ocean, Plain), new Logo (see About box)! ;-) * Better RT behaviour with Jack output. * Compiles and runs on AMD64 (thanks to Mark Knecht for testing)!

18 years, 4 months

[linux-audio-user] AMD64 question

by Dave Phillips

Greetings: Not long ago I mentioned that a student had traded an MSI mobo (socket 939) for some lessons. I'm ready to start building a system around that board, and I have some questions for this list: 1) I can get a new AMD64 Athlon 3800 2.4 GHz for (US) $145. Is the Athlon 64 a good chip for audio work, and is that a good price ? It's the best listed on Pricewatch. 2) Recommended case/power supply ? 3) The MSI box says it includes an nVidia nForce3 chipset, which I assume means that there's an audio/video chipset on the mobo. I'll probably disable the audio, and I have a gForce AGP video card to put in the machine. Question: Am I better off using the integrated video or should I use my card instead ? (Btw, I use the kernel nv driver, not nVidia's binary driver). 4) I assume I'll have to buy new RAM. What should I buy ? 5) The CPU includes a fan, but should I get something more powerful ? 6) How can I best reduce the noise from this system ? 7) Am I correct to assume that this system runs in a 32-bit more as well as the 64-bit ? How do I determine which mode I'll run in ? This system will replace my ancient desktop machine, so also I need to know if there are any precautions or warnings re: running Linux audio software on it. The distro of choice will be Debian Etch a la Demudi 1.3.0. Sorry for all the questions, I'm completely new to the 64-bit game. As always, any & all advice will be vastly appreciated. :) Best regards, dp

18 years, 4 months

[linux-audio-user] Intel HDA and Jack

by I. E. Smith-Heisters

Hi all, I'm having problems with my Intel HD Audio chipset and jack, and was wondering if any of you might have some tips. I'm running Ubuntu Dapper, and everything works fine out of the box. ESD works, aplay works, etc.. When I start jackd the xruns fly by about as fast as they can. If I start it with RT enabled, it just times out and crashes. I've experimented with lots of different flags, but this is an example: jackd -dhw:0 -p256 -r48000 -n2 Of course, the snd-hda-intel module is loaded, or basic alsa stuff wouldn't work. Also, I've been sure to start in fluxbox and do a 'ps ax' just to be sure no other audio apps were interfering with device. I've never run into this sort of thing before, where jackd won't work, but aplay will. Any suggestions for troubleshooting? Thanks, Ian Smith-Heisters -- http://0x09.com

18 years, 4 months

[linux-audio-user] [desktop] volume-control dockapp?

by carmen

wmix, wmmixer, and wmsmixer: portage's short description claims all 3 support ALSA. one fails on "XpmError: XpmOpenFailed (.1986-2)" and the others fail on "no such device /dev/mixer", while -d hw:0,0(,0) just sends them for a loop gnome-panel has the perfect volume control, but then gnome-settings-daemon launches and screws up all the fonts, not to mention chews 15 or 30 mb of ram. and when you kill gnome-settings-daemon, the volume control button _disappears_ from the panel, while the other stuff stays in summary, is there a volume control for fluxbox that actually works?

18 years, 4 months

[linux-audio-user] [admin] linux-audio-* maintainer wanted...

by Joern Nettingsmeier

hi guys! due to post-academic stress syndrome (read: i'm getting a real job ;), i would like to resign from being maintainer of the linux-audio-* lists. lately i haven't been able to keep up with the lists as much as i would have liked to, and i feel it's time for new people to take over. if you'd like to volunteer, holler now :) i'm leaving on a four-week iceland trip in about a week, and if no-one has expressed their interest by then, i would be very glad if somebody could at least step forward to tend to the lists for a month or so... as an added bonus, there is also the job of cleaning up the old lad.linuxaudio.org page, throwing out all the obsolete stuff (i.e. everything except the subscription information and the contrib/ section) and maybe linking to all the excellent documentation efforts elsewhere :) i hope to stay in contact with the linux audio community in the future, and i will definitely do some volunteer work for next year's linux audio conference in berlin, but my life has moved away from studio work to live audio engineering, systems administration and (ugh) web content management... all the best, jörn -- jörn nettingsmeier home://germany/45128 essen/lortzingstr. 11/ http://spunk.dnsalias.org phone://+49/201/491621 if you are a free (as in "free speech") software developer and you happen to be travelling near my home, drop me a line and come round for a free (as in "free beer") beer. :-D

18 years, 4 months

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Linux-audio-user June 2006