[wellylug] music

[Pete Black]

I have tinkered around with Linux apps such as ardour, seq24,  
ecasound, linuxSampler, SpiralSynth, amsynth, fluidsynth, bristol  
etc. etc. along with all the infrastructure stuff like JACK and  
LADSPA plugins etc.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a big fan of Linux, and am a  
huge geek who has spent a large percentage of my time, at home and at  
work, using, developing on and playing with many facets of Linux. I  
am also by no means a professional musician, but I know how to drive  
a sequencer, a multitracker, a rack full of MIDI gear and a guitar to  
get what i want.

I can't say anyone looking for a comfortable and powerful music  
production environment is going to find it in Linux right now. The  
landscape is definitely a hell of a lot better than it used to be,  
and most of these apps actually do work OK (though you probably can't  
rely on stock kernels for best recording performance) but even the  
low-end solutions on other platforms like Garageband on the Mac make  
pretty much all the audio stuff on Linux look half-assed in comparison.

Most of this reflects my experiences with on an 1.4Ghz Athlon w/512MB  
RAM and a SB Live with ALSA running Ubuntu Warty w/stock kernel (it  
was a while ago i last tried to use the synth/sampler stuff)

Ardour constantly crashed for me, dragging audio clips round the  
timeline. (maybe fixed in newer builds, i don't know)
seq24's MIDI timing was excruciatingly bad (can be fixed by  
recompiling kernel with hi-resolution timers)
ecasound seemed to work as advertised, but revolting gui and command  
line interface is not really what suits my workflow
linuxSampler - not bad, a basic sampler that seems functional.
SpiralSynth - choppy playback full of clicks and pops.
amsynth - tended to lock up and crash, as well as exhibit stuck notes  
and really bad clicks/pops in playback
bristol - seemed to work ok.
hydrogen - works pretty well, except for the MIDI timing issues that  
also affected seq24.

Possibly the clicks/pops were because i needed to recompile this  
kernel with low latency patches, and maybe my filesystem caused  
problems (journalling filesystems can cause periodic audio glitches  
due to kernel locks around writing the journal to disk even with low  
latency patches, which was the case on my old gentoo box with XFS)  
but frankly, its so much easier for me just to open my mac and start  
recording/sequencing than it is to sort all this stuff out (and i'm  
not one to back away from a challenge when it comes to computers)  
that the thought of trying to use my Linux box when musical  
inspiration strikes just makes me cringe.

I have been able to run my MIDI synths, get softsynths playing,  
create a tracks using external and soft instruments with seq24, and  
have successfully recorded and mixed pieces of multitrack audio with  
ardour, and other apps but when i look back, it was not easy, or much  
fun.

I don't want to be overly negative since given a proper setup, most  
of these apps will work 'as advertised', and i'm sure things have  
improved since i stopped seriously trying to get this stuff to work  
for me - i too would be interested to hear of successes.


-Pete









> I really like the potential of Ardour, having fooled around with
> FruityLoops, Reason and Cakewalk on a Windows box and Mac/Protools at
> Uni. Quite labyrinthine, but usable. If only someone (or even me, but
> I'm too busy) could make a nice gui front end to Lilypond, we could
> have a Sibelius-killer!
>
> J
>
>
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