I've been asked to help put together a PA system for a small bar/club. I know nothing about how to do this, other than running sound for my own bands when needed. But I'm trying to do the best I can. It's too small a club to justify hiring a really experienced sound engineer.
They mostly book acoustic artists, but need enough power in the PA such that when they have a live rock band, the vocals can be heard over the din of distorted guitars, basses, loud drums, etc. They also sometimes run DJ stuff through it, though not very loudly.
The club layout is a long, deep bar space, with the band set up near the middle, and the audience on the sides, a low wall creating a narrow corridor at the entrance, and very high ceilings. The walls are plaster/wood, with (very cool) art hanging on them. The street side has an entrance and windows covering nearly its entire surface. There are side entrances too that go to the kitchen and restaurant.
Top view here: http://www.restivo.org/misc/topview.png
Elevation view here: http://www.restivo.org/misc/elevation.png
They already have a nice Mackie mixer and a couple mics. They were using a set of Bag End fill-in speakers and a Crown power amp, but that just didn't have enough power and clarity when used with a band situation. So they just need to replace the speakers and power amps.
It's a small room so it's not like they need any kind of massive system. But they do want clarity and headroom, and the ability to handle the occasional rock band.
I'm thinking of recommending they buy a pair of these, and mounting them where the existing speakers are:
http://www.guitarcenter.com/JBL-EON315-15--280-Watt-Powered-PA-Speaker-1051…
Do you think that's the right call for this room? Is that the right location for them too? Any ideas what kind of research I should do in order to determine what would be the right thing for them?
Way off-topic, but I've played this room and it's a wonderful space from a vibe/attitude/audience standpoint, the people who own it are fantastic, and I want to make sure they get the best sound possible out of it.
-ken
Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 11:32 AM, frank pirrone <frankpirrone(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Mark Knecht wrote:
>>
>>> <snip>
>>> that's the case then by all means do WHATEVER works!
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Mark
>>>
>>> P.S. - Anyone listening to Mike Bloomfield these days? I'm on a retro
>>> kick lately... :-)
>>>
>>>
>> Oh, yes, Mark, and f you haven't gotten to Electric Flag's "Long Time
>> Coming" be sure to stop there along the way. Eclectic Flag would have been
>> an equally suitable title.
>>
>> Frank
>>
>>
>
> I don't know them, or don't remember them (I barely remember the 60's
> anymore!) but I'll check it out. Thanks!
>
> - Mark
>
We know Bloomfield from his collaboration with Paul Butterfield among
others, but here's his work with Electric Flag:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=electric+flag&aq=f
Frank
Hi,
I have just spent the past few days working on a project to sync a badly
recorded a/v track.
In the process I have had to do a crash course in Linux Multimedia apps.
It's like going back 5 years compared to Linux Audio. I haven't had to
do this kind of compiling for quite some time with Linux Audio apps due
to the Fedora yum repository being upto date and the stability issues
for basic operations have been sorted. Most of the audio apps I use just
work on 64 bit for basic editing tasks.
I have used several programs in my quest for a/v sync.
Avidemux
openmovieeditor
kdenlive
LiVES
cinelerra-cv (community version)
kino
I have also used
ffmpeg
mencoder
mplayer
gmerlin
I also would have liked to try out jahshaka /cinefx and cinelerra-4 but
I couldn't get either installed. I ended up using avidemux and
openmovieeditor.
I had to install several apps from source due to various bugs that
happen on my dual core amd , fedora 10 x64 packaged versions. Many of
the apps have got Fedora 10 rpm builds but it took several hours of
searching google to find the links and details for installing them. Then
I had the headache of figuring out why libs that were compiling and
installing were not being found as deps. Why does Fedora not setup the
qt4 and pkgconfig paths by default? Has that been fixed in Fedora 11?
For a development install this seems like a prerequisite.
In the end after 30 hours of trying to use the various apps above to
realign a single audio track the best I could do was to extract the
audio track from the original with mplayer -dumpaudio, cut the original
mpg with avidemux, render (export) the new track to disk, split off the
audio track with mplayer, import the original audio track to audacity,
cut it to the right start points, export it to wav, import the new
tracks to openmovieeditor, align them, export them to .mov.
I would have preferred to use one app but none of them could do all of
the above or if they could they were buggy and kept crashing or couldn't
read the mp3 or couldn't export the file in a readable format, etc....
Kdenlive looked like it would be almost perfect but it kept crashing,
openmovieeditor is also good but editing is limited and buggy, of them
all avidemux was definitely the most rock solid performer and the
interface was a pleasure to work with. LiVES has a nice clean interface
too but is not really an editor. The other apps left a lot to be desired
in the visual appeals dept. Why do multimedia devs insist on using the
gui libraries like sdl and tkinter?
BTW, why the different jargon for audio (export) and video (render)
processing?
What I am sorely missing is a video time stretch function as the final
edit is still badly out of sync. At least now it starts in sync but the
drift sets in after about 5 seconds. Maybe I could do it with liVES or
ffmpeg but I was surprised that none of the apps I tried offered
"Stretch" as a core feature/tool.
Through all of this process I have been consistently amazed at the state
of Linux Multimedia apps. Maybe it's just my Fedora 10 64 bit system but
it seems to me that Linux Audio Apps are a good 5 years ahead of Linux
Multimedia. However I was glad to see that most of the apps had JACK
support which made editing and listening a lot easier.
I still had to close all the apps occasionally because the fedora
mplayer doesn't have jack support and pulseaudio jack support isn't
obvious to setup. If the multimedia devs can get jack support right why
can't the pulse audio team?
I have a new level of respect for the amazing progress that Ardour
represents for Linux Audio and *cough*soon*cough* to be multimedia
(xjadeo). Ardour is without a doubt the most advanced and stable editing
system we have to work with.
I can see now that Ardour could well become the defacto "multimedia"
editing suite for Linux if work continues and we continue to support the
developers.
I would like to give cineFX (jahshaka) a shot too once I get the
openlibraries to install.
Cheers.
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd
Hi,
I have searched elsewhere but not found:
How can I change the default audio device of the VLC plugin in browsers such
as iceweasel? There are no options / settings at all in the browser plugin.
Just "use" it. Is the VLC plugin using the same options as the VLC player
itself and using the same config file(s)?
I have got an external USB card - everything appears to be able to use it,
apart from iceweasel + VLC plugin. Where can I set that?
I have got sidux linux running on a notebook.
Thanks for any hint and kind regards,
Crypto.
> Hey there, Ico!
>
> Were you in Parma last month for the Linux Audio conference?
> As you may recall, I am the News and Announcements editor for CMJ.
> If you have any good CMJ-type photos or a paragraph of news to report, I
> would be happy to include them in the next issue. If you send photos,
> please send them in the highest resolution possible with captions and
> photo credits.
All,
If anyone has some cool photos/news from Parma (Dave?), this might be a good
opportunity to get it published. Please contact Lonce Wyse with your
materials at lonce.wyse(a)nus.edu.sg.
Best wishes,
Ico
envtag-0.4 has been released.
What is envtag?
===============
envtag is a simple audio tagger for use in shell scripts.
See the README¹ for more information.
What's new in this release?
===========================
* Modular architecture, exporting tag functions to Lua.
* Proper exit codes
* Update alt_getopt to 0.6
Where to get it?
================
tarball: http://alip.anapnea.net/envtag/envtag-0.4.tar.gz
sha1sum: a74c84286e1b61dfe9522635b2f7970589793fe0
¹: http://github.com/alip/envtag/blob/master/README.mkd
--
Regards,
Ali Polatel
Hi
I'm building a few apps (seq24, ams, specimen, jackbeat, ardour) from
source. Some of them are lash aware, some not. Which is the current,
recommended version to use, both for compiling the above apps and if one
were to lash'ify some not supporting lash ATM?
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lash lists the latest release as
0.5.0 from 2005! That seems a bit old :-)
--
Atte
http://atte.dkhttp://modlys.dk
On Thu May 7 4:27 , Justin Smith sent:
>On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 5:17 AM, Olivier Guilyardi ml(a)xung.org> wrote:
>> Crypto wrote:
>>> Hi @LAU people,
>>>
>>> I would like to open a discussion about the MIDI capabilities of LAU
>>> applications here.
>>>
>>> There is quite a number of great LAU software of course and we have seen
>>> frequent announcements of new versions or even complete new applications.
>>>
>>> But from a particular point of view their use sometimes is a bit limited.
>>>
>>> I have found that most applications require the user to work (record, program,
>>> finetune etc.) from behind the computer on which the application runs. But that
>>> limits the usability in case someone is actually playing an instrument with
>>> MIDI interface, especially in a live playing environment, and needs something
>>> more convenient to handle parameters etc.
>>>
>>> I have seen few applications that allow for using MIDI commands let alone
>>> allow me to enter a custom made (be it SYS EX message or any controller
>>> message) MIDI message to trigger a particular action within the application.
>>>
>>> There have been a number of hardware controllers available for some time that
>>> come with numerous drawbars, pushbuttons and similar stuff to ease controlling
>>> mixer applications, drum applications or anything else, so having a flexible
>>> MIDI input interface (software) seems to me to be a really great idea.
>>>
>>> At the moment things I would like to do force me to use a MIDI programming
>>> language instead of using all these new fancy GUI applications with much more
>>> and much better options apart from their MIDI support than the simple
>>> programming environment has. I have to program nearly everything on my own.
>>> And I find myself running against walls because there are just too many things
>>> that simply do not work.
>>>
>>> I wonder if noone else has a MIDI "Start/Stop" feature on their wishlist for
>>> their favourite drum computer program, or "Fill
>>> 1/Fill2/Ending1/Ending2/Variation" etc. (which applications like hydrogen do
>>> not yet have but they are on their way).
>>>
>>> I wonder if noone else prefers a real hardware turning knob over a GUI mouse
>>> slider (which cannot be moved from keyboard, as there is no MIDI controller
>>> input for the slider...).
>>>
>>> What do You think? Anything worth adding for You here? Is better MIDI input of
>>> applications worth asking for?
>>>
>>> Would like to learn more...
>>
>> In my particular case, as the developer of Jackbeat, MIDI support has been
>> postponed until I get a clear idea on how to do it right. I would like to
>> achieve something as user-friendly as possible, but that can still be adapted to
>> various hardware.
>>
>> So, I need ideas and feedback, and yours would be appreciated as new tickets or
>> by commenting the relevant ones:
>>
>> http://jackbeat.samalyse.org/ticket/20
>> http://jackbeat.samalyse.org/ticket/21
>> http://jackbeat.samalyse.org/ticket/19
>>
>> Here are the questions that come to my mind:
>> - what would be the best MIDI configuration system in Jackbeat?
>> - how to achieve *both* easy and flexible bindings with a control surface?
>> - should a hw knob control a fixed track and/or the current GUI active track?
>> - what hardware do/would you use, and what are their peculiarities?
>>
>> --
>> Olivier
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Linux-audio-user mailing list
>> Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org
>> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
>>
>
>regarding your first two questions: I use a device with multiple knobs
>(as I am sure do many others), so it makes sense to have multiple
>assignable knobs, one option being the current active track makes
>sense.
>
>Regarding flexible/easy setup, implement midi learn, it is simple:
>user presses learn button on GUI control (ie. a right click context
>menu on each knob or slider), then moves a slider or knob on midi
>device, software takes the fist cc it sees from the external device,
>and assigns it to that software control. IE I right click and select
>"learn" on the track 3 fader, then I move a slider that sends CC 6,
>from now on CC 6 controls the track 3 fader (and for bonus points,
>have anything other than midi that changes the track 3 fader
>(automation, gui activity, etc.) SEND a CC 6, for those of us with
>motorized or LED-ring knobs/faders).
>_______________________________________________
>Linux-audio-user mailing list
>Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org
>http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
>)
I will try to give you some detailed feedback later.. but the ardour
implementation of controllers (including learn) as well as MIDI clock sync
operations are fantastic.. sequencing is getting there...
Current CVS version of MusE or the 1.0rc2 version (which I think are the same for
today) are a great show of the sequencing and implementation features..
On Thu May 7 6:36 , Patrick Shirkey sent:
>
>
>James Cameron wrote:
>> On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 06:04:31PM +0700, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
>>
>>> I'm looking at blender again and it appears that the reason it won't
>>> load a movie for me is because the Fedora 10 version was compiled
>>> without ffmpeg support.
>>>
>>> WTF?
>>>
>>
>> Certain libraries trigger license or patent issues in some countries,
>> and so Fedora won't package them. As a result, they must compile
>> Blender without a critical feature.
>>
>>
>>> mplayer without jack support and blender without ffmpeg support.
>>>
>>> I hope they fixed both in Fedora 11.
>>>
>>
>> Don't bet on it.
>>
>>
>>> Do all the distros have this policy?
>>>
>>
>> No. Several distributions have a more relaxed policy. Hunt around.
>>
>> Some distribution communities also provide a secondary repository for
>> restricted formats or libraries.
>>
>>
>
>
>The annoying thing is I already have ffmpeg package installed and I
>assumed that if I have that package then I should also get a version of
>blender compiled to use it. What's the point of making a non ffmpeg
>blender that has priority over a compatible version if the ffmpeg
>packages are already installed?
>
>Jack is included in fedora core IIUC so I have no idea why anyone would
>compile mplayer without jack support.
>
>To me it just highlights the state of multimedia support in Fedora and
>possibly other OS's where there is still a level of disconnect that IMO
>has been overcome in the LAD community and is shown by the people who
>package the audio apps.
>
>
This also highlights the advantage of source based and more customisable distros
such as Gentoo or Arch.. where you can set these options yourself. Sure a little
more work, but you get what you want.
Of course also the jacklab, ubuntustudio, and 64studio distros...
Hi,
Am I missing something?
Why doesn't pulse audio have a simple config gui for choosing the
default sound server and card order?
I tried using pulse device chooser but it doesn't list any cards or
devices or server options for me to choose from. Just has a radio button
for "default" or "other" and then asks me to input a name for the
"other" option.
Is there another gui that I could be using or is it expected that
pulseaudio users don't need to set anything as it will all be handled
magically by the system files?
Is this a planned feature on someones todo list or are desktop Linux
users just expected to edit config files manually for audio?
Cheers.
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd
