Linux-audio-user

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20662 discussions

Help with configuring a laptop for Linux Audio work

by Louigi Verona

Hey guys! Recently I've bought a Lenovo IdeaPad B590 laptop. As it is announced as an Ubuntu-certified laptop (here<http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201208-11535/>), I did not think twice if buying it and thought that there would hardly be an audio problem - I've used Lenovo laptops before and audio worked very well. However, I was disappointed. Not only had I to use wired Internet, as wi-fi does not work without installation of proprietary drivers, not only had I to install a later kernel, as video card was freezing the system, but Linux Audio does not work well at all. I am using Xubuntu 12.04 with kernel 3.8 now. Here's what has already been done. 1. All real-time priorities and audio group and such standard stuff set up, checked and rechecked by myself and other people at LAC. 2. Autostatic was kind enough to help me turn off bluetooth and webcam, which did seem to help a little bit. His tutorial on this is here<http://linux.autostatic.com/2013/12/29/resolved-jack-issues-on-notebook> . However, my problems persist. There are two distinct problems. *Problem 1. Xruns.* Even if nothing is done on the computer and/or with audio, xruns are generated. For instance, since I started writing this letter, JACK was on and right now I have an indicator of xruns in qjackctl which says: 7(13). Note, no audio programs are open at all. If I do nothing, just turn on JACK and leave laptop running, xruns are also generated. *Problem 2. USB interruptions.* This problem occurs when I am using USB soundcard or USB headset. I get regular audible interruptions of audio signal. It has no bearing on xruns and occurs even outside of JACK, just when I am listening to Audacious, for example. I tried switching from PulseAudio to ALSA, same result. I though do not remember checking this with YouTube videos, for instance, and right now have no usb devices at hand to check. I would be very grateful for all the suggestions as it would be a pity if this laptop would eventually turn out to be not suitable for audio work. But I would rather find that out sooner than later, while I can still sell it and perhaps buy another model. Cheers! -- Louigi Verona http://www.louigiverona.ru/

11 years, 6 months

no pastebin etc. please...

by Jörn Nettingsmeier

hi *! i'd like to suggest that people refrain from using pastebin and other ephemeral upload mechanisms for mailing list discussions, because that will make the list archives next to useless. imagine the frustration of a user who googled a problem and was getting her/his hopes up, only to find that all relevant information was on pastebin and has since gone to the bit bucket. i'm a big fan of pastebin for IRC and the like, but it kinda defeats the purpose of mailing lists. best, jörn -- Jörn Nettingsmeier Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487 Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio) Tonmeister VDT http://stackingdwarves.net

11 years, 6 months

qjackctl bubbles

by Peter P.

Hi list, dear Rui, I am a happy qjackctl user. Nevertheless after more than five years I must say that I have already learnt that jackd will continue to run if I close the qjackctl main window and leave it there as system tray. The same goes for the bubbles that announce a problem, or the need to restart after doing changes. Is there any chance this might be addressed in a future update, like as a configurable option? Could one at least try to comment it out in the source code and recompile? Thanks to the list for support and to Rui for writing and maintaining qjackctl! best, Peter

11 years, 6 months

Ground lifts, TRS, etc. to PA? USB/other signal crossover to audio?

by Jonathan E Brickman

Last night I came to at least a working resolution of a really weird problem. I'm hoping others can tell me what is really going on here, and what best to do about it. I am not an electrical engineer or electrician or anything like that, I just learned a lot from my dad and friends and trial and error. This has to do with my MIDI synth, which is a headless Linux box, often used with three Yoshimis running simultaneously. Input is just MIDI, either through USB direct from keyboards or through USB MIDI adapters. The problem is other really odd high-pitched non-static signals which are contaminating the audio, when plugged into any of three different PAs. The contamination has occurred no matter whether I use motherboard 1/8" jacks, FrontX RCA jacks wired into the motherboard, custom-built Switchcraft 1/4" TS jacks wired into the motherboard, a Prosonus USB, or a Behringer FCA202. It occurs to varying degrees, not predictably, with all of them. AC power ground lifts sometimes have helped, sometimes not, but not predictably: plugging into the same PC, one week the extra signals will be there, the next week about 75% less, et cetera. Same with different MIDI methods. Once I knocked out 90% plus by going from USB direct to MIDI through the Presonus, and then two weeks after that it went up again (still using the Presonus) to about half what it had been. I have tried AC ground lifts on amp, keyboard, and the box. Sometimes the signal goes away when there is nothing connected via USB; sometimes not. Good AC grounding has been explicitly made excellent and tested very thoroughly by at least two professional musicians at one of these locations. Perhaps the oddest thing I have noticed about the extra signal, sometimes, is when it comes. I usually connect the synth box through a Roland volume pedal to PA. If the pedal is entirely absent, it always comes. But if the pedals are there, about half of the time, the extra signal comes in most when the pedal is in the lowest/zero volume position, and least/zero when the pedal is in the highest/maximum volume position. The other half of the time, the signal is always there and always the same volume, no matter what the position of the pedal! About three days ago, reviewing for the umpteenth time the whole memory-history of this project, I remembered one thing I did a long time ago which seemed to knock out the extra signal altogether (back then, it was a 60-cycle hum): I used a Radio Shack inline-audio ground lift device, a 2" black barrel with two short double-RCA-male cables. I wore out several sets of adapters on that thing which is why I abandoned it. But it had worked more positively than anything else I tried. And I found other reports on the WWW of similar setups not necessarily involving 60-cycle in the problem signal. So I investigated the state of the art of inline audio ground lifts, found a whole lot more easily findable options than there had been then (might have been ten years ago), found that Behringer among others is making one using 1/4" TS/TRS, ordered the Behringer, tried it last night, and voila, lovely gorgeous silence until the Great Key-Pressing!!! So. I would like to rigorize this outfit a bit more; right now I have to play using the box plugged via Firewire into the FCA202, thence via TS into the ground-lift, and then to the PA via another TS. Here are a few questions. 1. I would love to be using 1/4" jacks built into the box. But clearly clear grounding is a terrible problem. Sounds like I have to have the 1/4" jacks on a non-metal plate; do you think? 2. What is the real advantage of TRS vs. TS? Some of the audio ground-lifts advertise TS/TRS conversion and/or problem resolution; what is the deal??? Does TRS handle longer runs better? Whenever I have the case plate reengineered, should I have it done with TRS? 3. The 96 kHz audio available via Firewire is clearly helpful in the upper registers. Fitting it along with a 1/4" double inline audio ground lift device into my box, is somewhat less than appealing, especially because the metal cases of both the Fireware and the ground lift devices, will be in contact with PC case metal, possibly resulting in more contamination. What to do ???!??? Jonathan E. Brickman Ponderworthy Music | jeb(a)ponderworthy.com<mailto:jeb@ponderworthy.com> | (785)233-9977 | http://ponderworthy.com

11 years, 6 months

LV2 note2midi plugin

by Lucas Takejame

Hello guys, recently I assembled note2midi LV2 plugin based on the ‘aubionotes’ from lib aubio's example folder. You can find it at this link https://github.com/portalmod/mod-utilities/tree/master/Note2Midi and I'm hopping you guys could help me to improve this plugin so it can be more reliable for using with guitar and bass. The majority of the tests were made using pure sine waves. I barely know how the algorithms ‘onset’ and ‘pitch’ detection works, that’s because I don't know much more how the note2midi can be improved. I appreciate if someone could give me some tips =)! Att, Lucas

11 years, 6 months

LAC

by Will Godfrey

Had a really good time there. Great community spirit and lots to see (and talk about!) -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

11 years, 6 months

96 kHz -- a bottleneck somewhere

by Jonathan E Brickman

I decided to try 96 kHz audio with the S.R.O. (Supermega Rumblic Organ), my slightly Aslan-like synth (it is not a tame device really), and found items which may be of interest: 1. At 96 kHz, schedtool definitely matters. Taking it out increased xruns a lot. I tried to figure out what was interfering via htop, but it was very unclear. So I'm keeping the schedtool for now. I could believe that if I reengineer for a zero-X default setup (likely to happen in the future) this problem might go away, X and the desktop certainly do have lots of demands. I *think* the only big piece missing for me in this is keymapping, I use F-keys to switch patches, quite easy in both LXDE and MATE. 2. At 48 kHz, I could run stereo, i.e., all three Yoshimis' dual outputs combined by Jack separately, so each output of my FCA202 had a separate signal, with different separations as Yoshimi is prepared to do. But at 96 kHz I started to get rare xruns doing this. Tried a number of things, didn't figure out why. So I tried using just one output of each Yoshimi and then having Jack copy them all to both outputs; xruns gone. Some of my patches -- especially strings-related -- are quite a lot improved by the shift to 96 kHz, the audio detail at the high third of my 88 is much better. Not very surprising from a mathematical point of view of course. I don't use stereo output anyway, I play in ensemble and I need to leave some of the ambient audio thought-room for others, so I'm leaving things as they are unless a solution arises for possible use in recording. 3. The Jack-internal MIDI ports are enormously more handy for portability, because since they retain the same Jack port names for any ALSA MIDI hardware, I can plug in any USB MIDI adapter or USB keyboard and expect things to work without getting into GUI at all. So based on the input from excellent LAU folks, I decided to try an alsarawmidi slave driver via jack_control, thinking that perhaps I mightn't have to worry about the jitter at 4GHz; and lo and behold, all working well so far. For any who may be interested, here is START-INITIAL (run at boot) and patch script START-SRO: ---- begin START-INITIAL, run at boot ---- #!/bin/bash echo '' echo 'Initiating environment...' echo '' nohup /home/jeb/startx11vnc.sh & echo '' echo 'Cleaning up old logs...' echo '' rm ~/.log/jack/jackdbus.log rm ~/.log/a2j/a2j.log rm ~/.log/lash/lash.log echo '' echo 'Starting jackd via dBus and configuring...' echo '' jack_control ds firewire jack_control dps capture 0 jack_control dps playback 0 jack_control dps rate 96000 jack_control dps period 64 jack_control asd alsarawmidi jack_control start jack_control eps realtime true jack_control eps realtime-priority 75 jack_control eps clock-source 1 /home/jeb/START-SRO & ---- begin START-SRO, run to start patch SRO ---- #!/bin/bash # Stop any running audio elements echo "Stop any running audio elements..." killall -9 -w yoshimi fluidsynth zita-j2a aj-snapshot guitarix calfjackhost non-mixer rakarrack mididings lashd killall -9 -w yoshimi fluidsynth zita-j2a aj-snapshot guitarix calfjackhost non-mixer rakarrack mididings lashd # Remove all connections # echo "Stopping a2j..." # a2j_control stop echo "Stopping Jackd to remove all connections..." killall -9 -w jackdbus killall -9 -w jackdbus jack_control stop echo "Starting Jackd..." jack_control start sleep 2 # Running a2j -- needful to use ALSA MIDI devices with # zita-a2j, which uses the 'dummy' driver in Jack # echo "Starting a2jmidid..." # a2j_control ehw # a2j_control start # Start all relevant audio elements echo "Start all relevant audio elements..." nohup schedtool -R -p 90 -e mididings -f /home/jeb/Combine.py \ > /home/jeb/LOGS/Combine.log & nohup schedtool -R -p 90 -e calfjackhost --client CalfSRO \ eq12:SRO ! reverb:SRO ! Compressor:SRO \ > /home/jeb/LOGS/calfjackhost-SRO.log & nohup schedtool -R -p 90 -e yoshimi -N YoshSRO1 -j -l /home/jeb/YOSHIMI/SROpart1.xmz \ > /home/jeb/LOGS/Yoshimi-SRO1.log & nohup schedtool -R -p 90 -e yoshimi -N YoshSRO2 -j -l /home/jeb/YOSHIMI/SROpart2.xmz \ > /home/jeb/LOGS/Yoshimi-SRO2.log & nohup schedtool -R -p 90 -e yoshimi -N YoshSRO3 -j -l /home/jeb/YOSHIMI/SROpart3.xmz \ > /home/jeb/LOGS/Yoshimi-SRO3.log & sleep 2 # And lastly, create jackd connections using aj-snapshot echo "And lastly, create jackd connections using aj-snapshot..." cp /home/jeb/AJSRO.xml /home/jeb/AJRunning.xml nohup schedtool -R -p 90 -e aj-snapshot -d AJRunning.xml & -- Jonathan E. Brickman Ponderworthy Music | jeb(a)ponderworthy.com<mailto:jeb@ponderworthy.com> | (785)233-9977 | http://ponderworthy.com

11 years, 6 months

looking for commercial sfz sample libraries

by Nils

I am looking for commercial sfz libraries. This means intended and sold as sfz, not converted, not user- or script-generated sfz mappings. The bigger the better. More expensive: better. Needs proprietary sfz-extensions/engine? Also fine. This is not for personal use but for Linux Audio research. Do you know any? greetings, Nils http://www.nilsgey.de

11 years, 6 months

AVLinux on KVM? -- doh

by Ken Restivo

Just realized, I could just copy the AVLinux files onto a loop devices using a rw file system, rename isolinux to syslinux, and go from there. Sorry for the noise. -ken

11 years, 6 months

lac2014 photo gallery

by Rui Nuno Capela

howdy, still playing catch-up with the post-lac traumatic syndrome... all those unedited photos that were taken by me during the lac2014@zkm-karlsruhe, are now online: http://www.rncbc.org/lac2014 i suck at photography and it shows :) cheers -- rncbc aka. Rui Nuno Capela ps. please report any concerns you may find, if any, privately.

11 years, 6 months

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Linux-audio-user