For a while now I've been polishing a couple of simple tools for generating loops, playing them, practicing / improvising against a background chord progression, and recording. Since they are lightweight and reasonably automate the workflow, you might find them useful. Suggestions, bug reports and patches are, of course, welcome. SHUT AUDIO TOOLS Home page: https://github.com/danmbox/shut-audio-tools/ Ubuntu PPA (apt-get install shut-audio-tools): https://launchpad.net/~danmbox/+archive/ppa Included: * ShutLP, a gapless loop player with a count-in metronome. It helps you practice along with a recorded loop. For session management, it's LASH-aware. * Shut Record, a recording front end with workflow management for naming / recording / redoing. It can use jack_capture, arecord and other back-ends. Start jackd, set up a background loop with shutlp, record with shutrecord, view with mhwaveedit, retry until done. * spliceaudio, an audio splicing / loop-creation utility using sox * Shut Audio Control (shut-actl), a GUI for managing Pulse Audio, Jack and their interactions 2. DEPENDENCIES: * mandatory: sox, mplayer; perl, python; Jack, Pulse Audio or ALSA; for building, also GNU make and help2man * recommended: TkInter and Python-Imaging -- unless you don't use X :) * recommended: jack_capture and a sound editor (mhwaveedit) -- Dan Muresan http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~muresan/