[LAU] audacity alternative?

[Hartmut Noack]

Am 11.06.2010 15:16, schrieb Joep L. Blom:
> Hartmut Noack wrote:
>> Am 11.06.2010 08:23, schrieb Joep L. Blom:
>>> Joel Roth wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 07:59:15PM -0700, Greg wrote:
>>>>> Hi all, I was wondering if you knew of a good alternative to Audacity.
>>
>>> I discovered 2 days ago qtractor and I think that does the things you
>>> want.
>>
>> Qtractor is a powerful, very nice MII-Sequencer with good
>> Audio-capabilities but it is NOT the obvious choice, if you want to
>> replace Audacity.
>>
>> I also recommend MHWaveedit. For day-to-day audiocutting and even as
>> an advanced wave-fileplayer. (And I have not seen a crash with it in
>> the last 2 or-so years).
>> SND is very cool for experiments with sounds derived from recordings
>> but its learning-curve is steep if you want to use it for simple stuff.
>> Si I like SND for granular-synthesis, extreme time-strecheffects,
>> realtime-effects for small samples and so on but MHW is better for
>> simple editing.
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
> Hartmut,
> You suggested mwaveedit and, as I'm rather new, I loaded it using
> synaptic (ubuntu Karmic 9.10) it installed without problems and it
> loaded rather fast.
> However, my first impression is that for the task I want to perform
> mixing 4 tracks recorded from 2 piano's,(2 recorded with 2 microphones
> and 2 from the output of an E-piano)

Well -  I see. I'd never use Audacity for such work so I misunderstood 
the task as I recommended MWH.
For such work Ardour is absolutely the best choice:

http://ardour.org

  Ardour is made for such kind of recordings and can handle all you 
request and much more. It can be installed easily via synaptic.

> , the view of qtractor where all
> channels can be combined together is easier than 4 separate windows,
> although it seems much easier to change the presentation of each channel
> individually in mwaveedit.
> Primarily I'm musician (former computer-'expert', programming in various
> languages) and not at all familiar with the 'language' used in the
> digital audio world. So I have to get to know what the LADSPA
> filternames mean as the names has no meaning to me.

Ardour has a search-window for Plugins in wich you can enter words like 
"limiter" or "reverb" that will find most of the plugins that are 
available for the tasks you request. If you like to have nice GUIs too, 
try the LV2-versions of the plugins where available.

> But at the moment my
> most pressing problem is the fact that I get lots of XRUN errors which
> clip the sound so a notmal mix cannot be made.

Reading about you setup in the following mails in this thread I suggest:

/usr/bin/jackd -u -dalsa -dhw:0 -r48000 -p512 -n3 -Xseq

this works perfectly well for me with the very same audiochip and a 
lesser machine.

Is your system set up for realtime?
Ubuntu uses a file in /etc/security/limits.d/audio.conf that holds the 
following lines:

@audio   -  rtprio     99
@audio   -  memlock    unlimited

without this file, your jack wont work as it can. You also have to add 
your user to group audio.
	

> I cannot understand why
> this should happen as I have an AMD Phenom II (4-core) processor so I
> assume more than sufficient computing power: I have it as well in
> qtractor as in mwaveedit.
> If somebody can give some clues what to change I would be very grateful.
> I use the plain Karmic kernel with no extra sound modules. Stopping
> pulsaudio (pulseaudio -k) doesn't make any difference.

This should not be neccessary.
As of now, killing pulseaudio does not work. PA should be suspended 
automatically as jackd starts. This works, let us say: okayish for me.

> Thanks in advance,

your welcome :-)

> Joep
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