4 Dec
2004
4 Dec
'04
11:47 a.m.
IMO there is a place for a simple recording utility
that works with jack.
Ardour isn't intuitive the way audacity is. This evening I managed to record
30 minutes of nothing with it. Today's job was to try and get vst
instruments working under linux. Learning Ardour was going to happen some
time next week.
Problem with ardour is there is no manual (except for a skeleton)
however the support community are VERY helpfull - I have been using the
IRC channel
I can't do everything at once, but if there are
no easy
tools to take away some of the pain you end up having to be an instant expert
in order to be able to do any creative work. There is also the instablity of
many of the linux audio packages to be considered, particularly if you made
an unfortunate decision somewhere along the line (SuSE 9.1 in my case - it's
fine for a business desktop, but not for audio).
A lot of the pro grade Linux software at the moment is in very late beta
- in the next few months I think stability should be vastly improved as
v1 of jack/jamin and ardour comes out. However I still think they are
generaly more stable than windows software.
The more complex and
minority-user-targeted the application the more problems you are likely to
have. For what I needed to do this evening I would have used kRecord if it
worked with Jack. Something simple that works (unlike me - I am both
intensely cerebral and unemployed).
Is there Jack support in the Audacity source code? If so that may push me
that bit closer to ditching SuSE and going back to Gentoo because Gentoo
builds usually do actually build (except on macs).
Apparently they are planning basic JACK support for audacity soon
"Audacity will have basic JACK support when the next version of
PortAudio is released. More advanced JACK features would also be nice,
but we need more developers to work on them." - from audacity user list.
As for which distro to use - Gentoo is great but not exaclt for the
faint hearted/people who don't want to wait hours for things to install.
I use Ubuntu and install from CVS. This seems to work when you get
dependencies sorted.
If the audio applications
I've got running now are as unstable as they seem and won't play ball with
each other I might as well do audio work with a casstte deck and an abacus.
This is why I install from CVS - the development on the software I am
using is going so as they approach V1 hopefully the are getting
progressively more stable.
I Think Jamin/Audacity will be a killer combination for simple
recording.
Ben
Robert
--
Ben Edwards - Poole, UK, England
If you have a problem sending me email use this link
http://www.gurtlush.org.uk/profiles.php?uid=4
(email address this email is sent from may be defunct)