[linux-audio-user] Re: FreeWheeling live looper prerelease - Linux-audio-user

5 Jan 2005

Folks,

Thank you, Philippe, Wolfgang, Spencer, for your kind words.

...
  it works great for me with my TB303. I find this soft
amazing and 
 very intuitive, already adopted and will stand a big place in my 
 music toolset :)

 Philippe 
When you have a chance, send me some music. I like hearing what people make
with Linux.

...
  jp, the energy and thought you have put into this are
truly 
 glamorous. Much in the same way that Fons Adriaensen's unique work 
 (http://users.skynet.be/solaris/linuxaudio) inspires gleeful things 
 you've added a beautiful instrument to the band. Oh, what am I 
 telling you, you know this. 
Yes, I played pipe organ for my family on New Years with Fons' amazing Aeolus.
What an amazing instrument that is.

Another round of questions-

...
   Not sure what
you mean by trim loops. Do you mean how to sync up many
 loops together?  
 Yes. I wondered if you could get rid of parts of a loop or change 
 start/end of a loop -- in order to sync up. I read the "loops with 
 different lengths can be captured and triggered at once" on your 
 website so I fiddled with "pulses" but got nowhere. 
 fweelin_core_dsp.cc says there is a metronome. How do you get to 
 hear it? 
OK, here's the scoop. Record a loop. Press F1 and a new pulse is created based
on that loop. The timing and downbeat of the pulse, and all subsequently
recorded loops, will match the original loop. So you'll want to press F1 after
you record a loop that has an important beat. I often start with drifting
loops and then when the timing comes to me I create a pulse.

Now that you have a pulse, you should see a piegraph '1' on the upper right
part of the screen. If you record another loop, you'll see that the timing
fits into the pulse. Your record will start at the nearest downbeat and will
last for a whole number of pulses. Currently, you can't subdivide pulses, so
you'll have to record at multiple lengths of your original loop.

...
  fweelin_core_dsp.cc says there is a metronome. How do
you get to 
 hear it? 
It's currently undocumented and unconfigurable. Record a pulse and press F11.

...
   There is no
way to pan loops right now. Freewheeling currently runs
 all loops mono. I recognize the limitation- it's a good idea for a
 future release.  
 There's more to panning than balancing between 2 channels though. 
 There might be n jack channels to pan to. 
Yup. Multi channel loops and outputs are on the table for an upcoming
release-- the framework is there but I'd like to collect more user feedback first.

...
   > MEM:
HiPri Thread 0
 > fweelin: pthread_mutex_lock.c:78: __pthread_mutex_lock: Assertion
 > `mutex->__data.__owner == 0' failed. Aborted  
 owner "0" would be root so maybe Spencer runs jackd as root and 
 fweelin can't connect being run with Spencer's user rights. If so he 
 would have to run fweelin as root too -- which is bad -- or go 
 2.6/lsm or 
 2.4/capabilities/jackstart respectively.

 Wolfgang 
Spencer writes-
...
  I'm running 2.6 with the realtime LSM module, with
my user in the
 audio group. I'm running qjackconnect and fweelin both with my
 non-root user. If I remember my c++, an assertion intentionally
 causes an error in the program when a condition isn't met, right?
 So maybe the program thinks I should be root? Thanks for the response.

 -spencer 
That is baffling. It seems to be when initializing the memory allocation
thread mutex:

  pthread_mutex_init(&inst->mgr_thread_lock,0);
  pthread_cond_init(&inst->mgr_go,0);
  pthread_mutex_lock(&inst->mgr_thread_lock);

Though I confess that I usually run as root, I tested fweelin as non-root and
it worked on this machine.

Spencer, I know it's horrifying, but have you tried running as root?

One other thing you might try, go to fweelin_core.cc and find:

  // Memory manager
  mmg = new MemoryManager();

Add directly after:

  sleep(5);

It should pause noticeably when loading, but if this fixes the error, then my
guess is it's a threading issue- are you running an SMP machine?

Good luck!

--

Michal-
...
  ok, now I'm getting this:

 OKIE DOKIE, KIDDO!
 VIDEO: SetVideoMode: Using 16-bit color
 Xlib: unexpected async reply (sequence 0x36)!

 and nothing happens afterwards.  On a couple of tries am empty window
 actually poped up but that was it.

 ./MiS 
This seems to be a video threading issue, and I've already had some headaches
with threading in my startup and exit code. Here are some suggestions-- go to
src/fweelin_videoio.cc and find:

  videoflags = SDL_HWSURFACE;

replace with:

  videoflags = SDL_SWSURFACE;

Also in fweelin_videoio.cc, try replacing:

  inst->SetVideoMode(0);

with:

  sleep(1);
  inst->SetVideoMode(0);
  sleep(1);

Good luck!

Thanks for all your feedback,
-JP Mercury