Hi all,
Thought I'd report on my first live gig experience with linux (or anything
else for that matter) at the placard headphone festival:
http://state51.org/placard/
For those that don't know, the festival consists of lots of performers doing
20 minute sets back to back - all listenable to on headphones only.
I was running jack and my apps as root using SHED_FIFO on my Thinkpad r31
running slackware 9.0 and the audioslack ll kernel and alsa packages:
http://www.audioslack.com/
I'd set up jack on a huge buffer (4096) as latency wasn't important for me, I
had no live input and just wanted 100% glitch free playback. Also enabled
softmode to stop the server ejecting apps if anything went too wrong.
Before the gig I went through my cron jobs commenting them all out just in
case. slocate is particually annoying - I guess most people disable this
anyway - even with jack using such a large buffer, all the disk access caused
problems.
I wanted to keep the setting up as quick and simple as possible, so I'd
written a shell script to launch jack with the right settings, launch my apps,
load samples and connect them all together with aconnect automatically.
The applications I was using are new software I have yet to release, a midi
sequencer/sample playback engine that uses a lot of generative and alife based
processes, and a very small polyphonic multitimbral synth based on the code
from SpiralSynthModular. I'm trying to get the synth into a releasable state
very soon.
There is audio here of the 20 minute set:
http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=opensource_aud…
cheers,
dave
I'm quite familiar with a wide range of high-end studio headphones, but
i'm much less familiar with studio monitors.
So, what do you guys own or use? What do you recommend?
I own a pair of near-field Alesis M1 Active MkII. It seems like they're
"value" monitors, which means they're mediocre-sounding (in the studio
monitors league) but they didn't punch a hole in my wallet.
http://alesis.com/products/m1active/
They're bi-amplified and, yes, that you can tell: the transition between
the bass cone and the treble bullet is smooth and there are no
out-of-phase artifacts. There's no smearing like with passive filters on
the output high-current lines.
They're a bit bass-heavy and i actually think they're intentionally made
like that. Alesis has a weird recommendation in the manual, saying that
you should plug one of the holes with a cloth if bass is too fat, or
even both holes if bass is waaay too big. I kinda feel that they
intended them to typically have one hole plugged at all times. That's
something for a bass-control knob to adjust, i know, but for the price
($400) i guess i have no right to complain.
It's actually very weird how such a small bass cone can deliver so well
at such low frequencies. Even if i turn up the volume, they're still
crisp and controlled. I never turned it up into the distortion zone, my
neighbours are not exactly fans of electronic music. :-)
Treble is good, but definitely not as transparent as, say, high-end
Beyerdynamic or Sennheiser phones. They're a bit harsh and lack sparkle
(although certain narrow bands in the mid-high i'm pretty sure are
actually over-emphasized), but not too much.
I didn't see a frequency response graph yet, but i'm pretty sure there's
a "noodle" with all kinds of curls in the treble zone. Nothing
impossible to live with, it's just that it feels like it's there.
Midrange is ok, but not remarquable in any way. It's not too quiet or
anything, it's just that it's kinda tasteless.
I keep them in my bedroom (no laughs please) and actually they're close
to a corner (ok, now you're allowed to laugh).
No, the fat bass is not because of that, they're fat anyway (but the
corner may make the situation worse - i'll have to fix that one day).
The ideal listening zone is ok, if not exactly too big. If the two
monitors and my head are making a triangle 2 meters (6 feet) across, the
ideal zone is the size of a medium-to-small beach ball.
I can use them to fill a room with sound and they're still ok. Not
studio-monitor-ok (they're barely that in the ideal zone), but
hifi-speaker-ok. That's odd for such small boxes.
I don't know enough about monitors to tell whether this is typical for
near-fields or not. I know it would be typical for mid-fields, not to
mention main monitors.
Now the inquisitive comments:
I'll be curious to hear how Alesis' flagship ProLinear 820 DSP sound
like, just to compare them with my M1 Active MkII.
But, well, Alesis is not the best in the field of monitors, so i'm not
too worried about that.
I've heard some people saying that the Adam monitors are the best thing
since sliced bread (especially the mid-fields and above, such as the
S3A). Quote: "more accurate than most high-end headphones" which i find
hard to believe.
Anyone using them? The technology certainly looks interesting.
http://www.adam-audio.com/
Also, i've heard a lot about Genelec, but never had a chance to listen
to them. Comments?
How about Mackie?
--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/
>From: Sampo Savolainen <v2(a)iki.fi>
>
>I propose:
> - To move: press left button on knob, while the button is pressed,
> vertical movement moves the dial (left -, right +)
I propose horizontal movement.
No, it should be configurable. Perhaps environment variable
or a rc file (of GTK?). Environment variable would be better as
a quick standard.
setenv KNOBS_CONTROLLED_HORIZONTALLY
setenv KNOBS_CONTROLLED_VERTICALLY
unsetenv KNOBS_CONTROLLED_HORIZONTALLY
unsetenv KNOBS_CONTROLLED_VERTICALLY
#include <stdlib.h>
if (getenv("KNOBS_CONTROLLED_HORIZONTALLY") != NULL) {
// Horizontal movement.
}
if (getenv("KNOBS_CONTROLLED_VERTICALLY") != NULL) {
// Vertical movement.
}
Juhana
hi list,
for recording dj-sets in clubs (which we present at http://www.play-fm.net)
I'm currently looking for a small & nice linux command-line app. which can
record from line-in. it has to support both .mp3 and .wav-format and has to
be stable for let's say 10h-sessions as well ;)
can you suggest me some tools?
thx in advance,
mike
---------------------------------------------------------------------
PLAY-FM
quartier21/MQ
Museumsplatz 1
A-1070 Vienna
mobile: +43-699-11607923
http://www.play-fm.net
michael.kamleitner(a)chello.at
michael.kamleitner(a)play-fm.net
}Thanks for the quick reply. What are the particulars on installing FC2
}with apt-get? Does it just upgrade the entire FC1 install?
} Rick B
change the "1"s in your sources list to "2"s.
...
Brought to you by jEdit ...Which rocks massively.
I just acquired a Zaurus 5500, and I'm wondering if anyone has gotten
farther than I have using the Audio capabilities.
What I'd like is to use it to play MIDI files, record
practice sessions, and as a tuner and a metronome.
Recording the practice sessions worked out of the box, with the single
point stereo microphone I use with my minidisk recorder, and playing
back with the compact portable speakers.
There's an entry in the http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/ software index
for something that works as a tuner and a metronome, but the links are
broken.
And there are tantalizing references to using the libsdl mixer with
some patches to do MIDI via timidity. Has anyone tried this?
--
Laura (mailto:lconrad@laymusic.org , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097 fax: (501) 641-5011
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139
Thanks for the help. Apparently 'urpmi' is the real tool under
'rpmdrake' (the avoid-the-evil-command-line Mandrake GUI for package
installation). Boy, wouldn't it be nice if we had a search engine that
could take a description of what we want to do, and suggest a list of
possibly interesting manual pages, html links, PDF documents, etc. I've
sometimes spent days with Yahoo/Google scanning thousands of irrelavent
pages to find the info I want. I've gotten a lot more useful info about
linux in general on this mailing list by accident than I have
searching. Unfortunately, I have limited time to deal with email lists.
Maybe we need a search engine like Yahoo, which only finds linux-related
documentation pages (I know I'm dreaming).
e. j. branagan
The MUSE - Nashville, TN
->Mr. Barber,
It kind of seems that everyone (myself included) was distracted from
the original subject that you posted. Anyway, on the CCRMA website it
does say that some machines won't be able to run the "ll" kernel. As I
said before, I just stumbled upon the fact that while my athlon won't
run the "ll" athlon kernel (I had the same lockups you describe) it will
run the "ll" i686 kernel. I don't have any idea what this does to system
performance as far as music production goes, since my limited amount of
music recording experience is on Windows and Cubase, and my boss won't
even entertain the thought of using Linux, or at least giving it a try.
So I don't have anyway of testing the i686 kernel with the athlon in a
realworld situation.
Rick B<-
I will keep this in mind. I imagine this requires installing the kernel
and ALSA RPMs from the website rather than with apt-get. For now
passing "nolapic" to the kernel at boot-time seems to be working like a
charm, but not when I overclock. I don't really have any need to
overclock right now, though - just wanted to test its stability. And it
ain't stable.
Thanks,
Matt
Mr. Barber,
It kind of seems that everyone (myself included) was distracted from
the original subject that you posted. Anyway, on the CCRMA website it
does say that some machines won't be able to run the "ll" kernel. As I
said before, I just stumbled upon the fact that while my athlon won't
run the "ll" athlon kernel (I had the same lockups you describe) it will
run the "ll" i686 kernel. I don't have any idea what this does to system
performance as far as music production goes, since my limited amount of
music recording experience is on Windows and Cubase, and my boss won't
even entertain the thought of using Linux, or at least giving it a try.
So I don't have anyway of testing the i686 kernel with the athlon in a
realworld situation.
Rick B
->I looked through your manual and I think you can't really go any
higher
without doing anything that could be considered overclocking *shrug*.
You could for example up your fsb to 75 mhz but your memory and
everything else may not like it. Don't blame me if you blow up your
computer.<-
Be careful doing something like that, especially with old boards. I
think setting the fsb clock to "no man's land" will set the pci clock
(and AGP if you have AGP on your board) to something unusable, unless
BIOS locks the PCI/AGP clock to a certain range of values. PCI
generally wants to run at about 33Mhz (unless you have a very new board
with PCI-X or some such), and AGP at 66Mhz, and these values will
generally be a fraction of the fsb. So if your fsb is 66Mhz, PCI will
be 1/2FSB. If it's 100Mhz, PCI will be 1/3. Setting it to 75Mhz may
cause it to still be in the 66Mhz realm as far as the division is
concerned, and set PCI to around 38Mhz, which may cause a lot of
problems. I know some BIOS will take care of this by locking AGP and
PCI to a certain value, but I wouldn't count on it with an older
board/bios.
I see no problem with 100Mhz if your processor and memory both support
it. Before fooling around with stuff, make sure you know how to clear
your CMOS (on most boards there's a little jumper, I think) to the
default values, in case you set it to something that doesn't even allow
your bios to start.
M