[LAU] A made-in-linux audio project (was: Re instructional videos ?)

[ I try sending again as it seems my first message didn't get through maybe due to attached screenshots] Ok, sorry for the delay but yesterday I had a little time to write and recollect on this. The project consisted in the sonification of about 9 minutes from a Russian silent film made in 1924. My hardware set-up is pretty simple: HP laptop with ubuntu (9.04 currently), ZOOM H4 digital recorder, headphones, speakers. Software-wise: jack (qjack control), Ardour, Rosegarden, Pd-extended, various plugins (from the ready-made ubuntu packags), lots of other audio-related stuff not used in this project, video applications (see below). I built Ardour and Rosegarden myself due to the ubuntu packages notoriously being out of date for such applications. I made the mistake of compiling ardour with vst support which wasn't really necessary (I ended up not using any vst at all, having so many nice 'native' ones) and seemed to make it more crashy (all the crashes I got where Wine). Otherwise it was very stable. Anyway, fortunately I always had the 'ctrl+s tick' and Ardour has a very good undo/redo support amongst its many features, which keeps memory even through closing and reopening sessions. Audio + video (jack) - My first issue was to find a way to perfectly sync audio and video for use with jack-transport-aware applications (Ardour of course has no support for video - I think that's good). Research lead to basically two options for jack-transport and video: Openmovieeditor and Xjadeo, Because I wanted to use Ardour I was more attracted by xjadeo's minimal interface (basically a video window controlled by jack transport); I tried building xjadeo after discovering there was no package for ubuntu but couldn't successfully play video so used Movie Editor for quite a while; eventually someone created a launchpad repository for xjadeo and that did work (after transcoding the clip in the right format). I created a suitable qjack control profile and a simple script for launching the video in xjadeo, after which my fixed set-up was ardour and the small xjadeo window "always on top" - see screenshot-2.png - notice ardour was perfectly in sync with the video which was a must for me). Some of the material I had recorded with the H4 recorder and then trransfered as wav file directly to ardour or PD for editing/processing. Rosegarden and Pd were simply plugged into ardour via Jack, and usually recorded "live" (for Rosegarden I also used transport). Many sounds were created in Pd and recorded/edited in Ardour. I also used Pd as a stereo delay effect with a patch I made for some music composed in Rosegarden, I had some out of sync problems in this case, but easily solved them by manually realigning the clip. It may be I had something wrong in the configuration, but I wanted to get "the job done" so didn't investigate on the problem. In ardour I made massive use of volume and pan automation. Finally I exported the audio from ardour and imported both audio and video in Cinelerra where I added some titles and translations in English for the inter-titles in the silent film (the originals are in Russian, but the DVD edition I had was in Italian) and rendered the whole thing. I hope this might be helpful. I guess I wasn't very methodical in my description so if something isn't clear or you'de like more information don't hesitate to ask anything. Kind regards to the list, Lorenzo. PS: I plan to upload the video somewhere, but first I'de like to find out the best option (i.e. probably not youtube) Lorenzo wrote: