[wellylug] linux audio

[Alex Thomson]

I'm hoping migrate my little home-studio off Windows sometime shortly 
(when I find some free time and some money for a decent soundcard).  
Thought I might give Musix a go- anyone tried this? 
(http://www.musix.org.ar/en/index.html) With a bit of luck everything's 
all nicely integrated and not too fiddly

Pete Black wrote:
> Well, be prepared for the fiddliness to continue.
>
> I've tried a lot of the linux audio apps, including ardour, seq24, 
> rosegarden, ecasound, bristol, amsynth, spiralsynth, hydrogen and many 
> others, and frankly, when i want to make music, i use my mac, or my 
> hardware stuff, simple as that.
>
> Personally, i just find the mess of APIs and the total lack of 
> integration between the different programs (I mean, really, why isn't 
> a JACK server and patchbay a GNOME/KDE-level component? ) a real 
> turn-off. I want to pick up my guitar and play it, not spend half an 
> hour trying to tweak things to work like they did last time i barely 
> got it to work.
>
> However, on the plus side, for audio recording, ardour works well if 
> you can get JACK to work stably without lots of xruns (generally this 
> means patching the kernel of any standard distro). When I last tried 
> it, it was a bit flaky, crashing in some circumstances due to UI bugs, 
> but I understand things have improved recently, and it did allow me to 
> do multitrack recording quite well - feature wise its pretty good.
>
> For MIDI, the only thing I found that i really liked using was seq24, 
> and as as standalone loop-based sequencer, its pretty cool, if spartan 
> w/regard to UI. If anything would keep me using Linux for music, its 
> seq24.
>
> Many of the others either didn't quite fit with the way i like to do 
> stuff, didn't have the right features, were simply toys, were 
> difficult to set up or drive through MIDI etc, hogged the CPU 
> uneccessarily or just plain didn't work.
>
> I've used these apps with a Sound Blaster Live, a crappy 6-channel PCI 
> card, onboard motherboard sound on an old Athlon box, an Event Gina (8 
> outs/2 ins+digital) and an M-Audio 1x1 external MIDI adapter - the 
> latter two took some messing round with to get to work (custom ALSA 
> drivers for the Gina, and hotplug firmware stuff for the MIDI interface).
>
> So, it wasn't for lack of trying that led me to my conclusions, and 
> maybe things are better now (the last time i really tried this stuff 
> must have been at least a year ago), but it wouldn't surprise me one 
> bit if the status quo re. music/audio on linux hadn't changed at all.
>
> -Pete
>
>
>> Hamish Low wrote:
>>  
>>> is anyone else producing music on a linux system?,
>>> after technical hassles and so many soundcard incompatibility issues
>>> too tedious to name, I'm almost at a working setup
>>> pending my 32bit install of 64studio <http://64studio.com/>  - which
>>> never seems to download properly - md5 sums always wrong
>>> and the arrival of my new soundcard
>>>
>>> sharing knowledge can ease the learning curve
>>> and when I'm up and running I'd be happy to help others do the same
>>>
>>> it's fully the future of music creation
>>> a trillion tools, & lower latency,  for free
>>>
>>> Hamish
>>>     
>>
>> Good one dude - this is something I've been meaning to get around to for
>> ages but other things always seem to get in the way. I always had
>> trouble getting realtime kernel patches to work, but if there's a live
>> CD debian based distro that's got all that covered, I should just give
>> that a go :)
>>
>> Ardour, Rosegarden good places to start, and Hydrogen for drum loops
>>
>> Cheers,
>> J
>>
>>
>>   
>
>



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