Making Music With Linux: We're Getting There ... 251
Comparing music-authoring software on Linux with that available for other platforms isn't exactly a fair match-up. Dave Phillips, maintainer of the Sound and MIDI Software for Linux website, says "Don't bother with the odious comparisons: 'Rosegarden is no Cakewalk,' 'Brahms is no Cubase,' and so forth. We know. We're working on it, but we're working on better things, too."
I asked Dave about his current music set-up, and how he uses it with Linux. "MIDI-wise, there's not much you couldn't use. I have a Yamaha DMP11 MIDI-controllable mixer, two Yamaha TX802 synthesizers, an Alesis MIDIverb, and various other pieces. MIDI is MIDI.
Digital audio is another can of worms. Professional cards have only begun to see Linux support. Notable advances have been made by ALSA, particularly in the work led by Paul Barton-Davis. Digital audio boards from RME and MIDIman are now supported by ALSA, and OSS/Linux will be adding some more proprietary cards to their list later this year, I hope."
Free solutions are attractive to many musicians, who consider their music a labor of love, but can't spend money on equipment as if their music were a money-making venture. So, without big cash as a catalyst for the development of professional tools, how will we make that happen? Alex Young, digital composer and occasional musician, answers the question:
"We need competition. If you think about when the Amiga demo scene was big, different demo groups really competed to get the slickest code and the best tunes. As a side effect, many useful tools were produced. If Linux had a greater drive in multimedia than is commonly interpreted by onlookers onto the open source community, music tools would benefit. Maybe the increasing interest in Linux games will drive this, or maybe individuals interested in programming and music will. There are many things that could be done, maybe projects could even be funded by sales of music produced with such tools!
I think people need to be attracted to Linux itself. Considering that I still like using an Atari ST with Cubase, and some electronic musicians wouldn't give up their Atari even now, people don't see it as a platform for writing music. For that Aphex Twin sound, we need very advanced midi software. And for the kind of MoWax-style sound we need very good sample editors. I believe open source music software can be as good or if not better than the commercial counterparts, for the same reason as any other applications."
To many Linux-friendly musicians, how they license their music can be just as important as the music itself. I spoke to Jeff Alami, Linux.com editor-in-chief and weekend composer about this issue. "I'm not trying to make any money with my music. I may have to add some sort of license in the future if only to maintain that the music was originally created by me." The Design Science License has been developed by Michael Stutz as a method by which copyleft can be applied to things other than software. Written with a little help from Wendy Seltzer, an attorney at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, the DSL is a way of copylefting any work that is recognized by copyright law, including music and art. This is one tool you won't have to wait for; it's been available for the past few years. "From what I see right now," Jeff says, "the DSL would serve my needs, mainly because it works to maintain the attribution integrity."
It's true that Linux has no professional audio suite at present, but after speaking to some of the people who work with Linux as a music tool, the message is clear. We're getting there. Small bits and pieces of quality software are already available, but heavy hitters like Cakewalk and Mark of the Unicorn haven't made the cross-platform leap to Linux the way several big names in the graphics field recently have. A high-quality, open source audio suite is definitely high on the 'wish list' of Linux enthusiasts, and the increasing quality and openness of Linux sound-related device drivers is paving the way for Linux-based music production as more than hobby.
If software development for Linux proceeds as fast as it has over the past year or so, it won't be long till the killer audio app appears. Until that time, we still have plenty to talk about. Next week, we dive once more into the creative process, and discuss high-end audio mastering, low-bandwidth sound transport and using Linux as a tool for good old-fashioned synthesis.See you then.
Making music. (Score:1)
Re:Microsoft (Score:1)
Music making and Linux go hand in hand (Score:1)
I can guess about the type of "music" that these expresso-swilling, tofu-gobbling flower children are going to churn out, song after sickening song. It will be the same type of anarcho-socialist tripe that the reefer addicts of the 1960s came up with, only this time instead of railing out against a noble war against Communism in Vietnam, the songs will attack the capitalist heroes of this decade
Yes, I can see it now; the socialistic Linux community releasing such cherished hits as Stallman and Cher's I've Got GNU, Babe and Peter, Paul, Mary, and Linus's If I Had A Hammer, I'd Smash Windows. Naturally, the "music" would be distributed for free, in MP3 format; socialists love MP3. Pardon me whilst I vomit. This type of horrible music must never be allowed to see the light of day. It must be stopped, and it must be stopped immediately. It is for this reason that good and decent people must see to it that music authoring software is never developed and made available for Linux.
That's just my opinion.
Sound Forge runs under Wine release 20000227 (Score:1)
FYI, For those who use sound forge under windows. Up until this release, there has been problems with loading and saving files. At this point, as far as I can tell, all basic editing functionality works. The only thing that I'm not sure about are if external plugins work or not.
Still, it sucks that I have to run a the windows version of sound forge at all. The state of open source digital audio editors in a *nix environment is nothing less than piss poor. Anybody who has ever been forced to use XWave knows exactly what I'm talking about. ... I hate to sound like I'm complaining. All I know is that if I had the knowledge needed to write such an app, you can bet that I'd be working on it right now.
----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
Re:Electronic Musician article (Score:1)
--
Software synthesis (Score:1)
I have been making music with Linux on and off for about five years using Csound. Csound is a venerable piece of synthesis software. Its origins date back to some of the earliest formalised computer music at MIT.
Writing music in csound is pretty difficult, but very rewarding. Instruments are written in a flexible and powerful language (think of a language for describing modular synths and you are halfway there). The score is written in a seperate tabular file and there exist tools to convert MIDI files to Csound scores and back.
Recently Csound has picked up realtime capabilities. It is now possible to play Csound using a MIDI keyboard and hear the results by a soundcard. It is also possible to use Csound as a realtime effects unit.
There is a Linux version here [tiscalinet.it]
Sorry to feed the troll... (Score:1)
Re:Aphex Twin?? (Score:1)
Re:MPU-401and Linux Audio (Score:1)
I once started writing a sequencer which was to have done a few thing Jazz didn't do (like having tracks comprised of phrases, rather than flat lengths of events). I got about as far as writing a Qt piano roll window class when I realised that it would be much quicker to save up and buy a Power Macintosh and Cubase VST than to write my own, and that every minute I spend hacking on a sequencer is time I don't spend actually using one.
As for the free/pay software cultures, there is indeed a big difference. Then again, compared with the price of music hardware (anything capable of generating halfway decent sounds will cost at least as much as a quite passable PC, and probably more), paying $300 for a virtual drum machine plug-in doesn't look so excessive.
Re:Data not viewed as physical (Score:1)
maybe people think that knowledge and culture enlighten them, and they want enlightenment without it being tainted.
Brian
Re:MPU-401and Linux Audio (Score:1)
I'm hoping that we can get the SoundKit and MusicKit working on GNUstep/Linux so that you could write one of these applications in a few weeks at the most. We will have to wait for the GNUstep development enviornment to evolve first, of course. The development environment that NeXT put together puts even VC++ to shame--partly because of the incredible NeXT API.
Uhm, Earth to Future Sound... (Score:1)
Microsoft is actually abysmal at multimedia for high and medium end editing - that's why the Avid isn't run on MS. It is resource wasting, slow, uses a pathetic file-system, is unstable and fairly chunky. My multimedia development platform of preference is the Mac (hell - everything on Microsoft is a poor copy of the Mac anyway - be better to use the original than the pathetic gimicy clone), but I'm very excited that my OS preference of Linux is getting some serious attention multimedia-wise.
Re:Uhm, Earth to Future Sound... (Score:1)
> port to NT is because users demanded it.
And Linux users wanting ports of applications to Linux don't count? Unix has always been a superior system for computing and multimedia development (graphics, 3D, Audio, etc...) - only with Linux has it become affordable...
Re:What we have today. (Score:1)
s'ok. Just don't let it happen again.
heh (Score:1)
Soundtracker? (Score:1)
If it doesn't fit your needs, what edge does Impulse Tracker have on it? I haven't used either, so I don't really know....
And check out my brief plug for Octal here [slashdot.org]. We'd love to have your 'flazicator'.
Re:Perspective (Score:1)
Re:Professionality (Score:1)
Ok, true.... But can you really extend this to music, where the functionality that you're shooting for can't be defined nearly as objectively? (Not that either could be defined totally objectively, but I'm not really competent to argue that.)
Depends on what you are doing. You can produce anything you want in whatever environment you want just depends on how you want to get recognized.
No disagreement here.... I'm pretty much trying to say "I don't need the approval of professional musicians if that's the attitude they have" in a slightly less childish/(something)-sounding way, but I haven't really succeeded.
Re:Professionality (Score:1)
all the little bedroom 'musicians' grab a free groovebox type application and think they are a real musician. It's the whole DJ philosophy, let someone else do my work for me. Grab a few musicians aside, and ask what is the most important thing to them. Get real people involved and go at it.
The only thing I hate more than sample-based dance music is condescending people. There is talent in all walks of life, and art in all forms of expression. Perhaps if you were a little more open-minded about other people's choice of artistic medium your forum would be a little more successful. As it stands, I personally would never code for or help any group represented by someone with such a narrow-minded attitude.
Just something to think about. All people are real people.
--
Blue, musician, hacker, and supporter of trolls.
Hi. (Score:1)
I just want to point out that application crashes, even in windows, are often a fault of the application. If you access the wrong chunk o' RAM, yer gonna blow up, linux or not.
Also, no one has mentioned the gimp-like sound editing tool for linux, Glame. [freshmeat.net] It looks perty cool.
Thanks,
--
blue
Re:sysex sux (Score:1)
I have yet to see any modern synth with considerable performance data use strictly CC messages to do the setup. There just aren't enough controller messages to cover all the features on a pro synth. We're talking hundreds, if not thousands of parameters here. And what about other system messages, like song posisition pointer? What about sample dump via MIDI? Gotta be sysex; it provides a standard.
The complete SysEx specification is shipped with each synthesizer that uses it. I have never seen a synth ship without the complete sysex map. This has never been "closed" information.
MIDI isn't MIDI (Score:1)
A lot of synthesizers have hundreds of parameters that can be tweaked to get the effects that you want, and programming these synthesizers is easily as important as playback. If the synth isn't set up properly, then the song sounds like crap. Another really anoying thing is when the software automatically sets GM mode. These are problems I've had to put up with on Linux.
It wasn't until last month that I finally got a MIDI file with an embedded 17k User Performance sysex bank to play back correctly, and that was after writing my own playback engine.
I've tried the ALSA drivers, but it would seem that there are timing issues (unless pmidi just has bugs), and there is no documentation yet on the MIDI API. It may be great for audio, though I notice a significant loss of quality even on the Audio portion over OSS drivers.
Re: Professionality (Score:1)
and here's the fixed link to sonikmatter [sonikmatter.com]
what i would REALLY like to see is a good open source sequencer, with a HARDWARE interface (with lotsa buttons and knobs) for live performance! (like interactive, so REALTIME live performance is possible ) and maybe even better would be the ability to dump your sequences to the interface and just leave the computer at home? Wouldn't it be great to replace all the aging Alesis MMT-8's with something that doesn't crash, but has more flexibility?
--freq
k2000 owner, dj, musician, loon
Re:Best existing software for Linux? (Score:1)
If you look at any of the audio projects that are out there, they all have basically gotten to the same point; the basic interface is there, the plugin APIs are there, they have some nice mixing capabilities---and then the whole project kinda just loses steam.
Why? Because people aren't writing plugins. Why? Because the people who would be writing them don't know what people want..!! Seriously, writing plugins for some of these editing systems looks like the nicest thing in the world; these guys really put a lot of work into their programs. (ex; Gmurf, Electric Ears, etc.) it's just that once they were done the basics.. they went back to the drawing board, and decided to improve upon the basic functionality and stability, instead of adding those extras.
We, as a community, have to be the ones to MAKE those extras; if we want a certain type of plugin, we have to ask for it! Being able to mix samples together, and apply fadein/fadeout is all well and good, but how about a decent resample effect? Speed/pitch plugin? Resample to max volume?
There are a lot of plugins that still need to be made; this is what's really holding back the audio programs.
Also, while I'm at it, I should point out that while the Gimp is good at editing still images, we need either an extension to the Gimp or another piece of software altogether to be able to handle animation. I think extending the gimp would be the best idea; thus far, all we've seen are hacks, as far as making animations, or applying effects across image sequences. I want to be able to apply a ripple across an animation; be able to gradually move one layer from one side of an image to the other using keyframing; have access to a DECENT timeline editor.
http://www.retas.com
Lipsyncing to an audio track would be neat too, but you get the general idea. We have the hardware support; has anyone looked into this kind of project..?
James
Re:In music, timing is EVERYTHING (Score:1)
Re:Perspective (Score:1)
linuxUsersWho_DO_ProfessionalAudio++
Linux Multimedia (Score:1)
I think that the statement "We're almost there" is a very accurate one. There are many groups, commertial and open, who see the lack of good multimedia applications in Linux. The desktop void is being filled, audio support is getting better, but AV tools for the OS just aren't there.
This is actually one of the long term goals of the LSDVD [rit.edu] group: to produce video authoring software for linux. It's a long term goal, one which would take a lot of time and money, and might have to be slightly closed source in order to get by licensing issues with The Man.
We all love music. Most of us probably play and write music as well. Just be patient, the tools are coming...
-davek
ps: big things are happening with LSDVD [rit.edu], stay tuned.
Re:"Professional" home musician I am not (Score:1)
In music, timing is EVERYTHING (Score:1)
Imagine that you are trying to score music to a video clip. You'll want to be able to play along in real-time and have what you recorded happen exactly when you played it (digital audio and/or midi). You'll want to play along with existing tracks and make sure everything syncs up during and after the recording. If you've got a lot of multi-tasking going on, your music program may not get the resources it needs to reproduce a portion of the music without skipping or dropping out. Your video track needs to play without dropping frames while you're playing back 24 or more tracks of audio. And no matter how much processing you may be trying to do to individual tracks, sub-mixes of tracks, or the whole mix, *everything* has to sync up with the video timecode (including the video) on playback!
Can Linux be configured to allocate system resources and not allow background tasks to interfere when you are composing or mixing? For instance, getting a large email attachment in the background could choke your system because of network and disk accesses just when you are in the middle of recording that "perfect take". Then that performance is gone forever because of unreliability of the recording system. In a professional music studio with clients paying hundreds of dollars an hour this is unacceptable. At a personal studio level, it's still a pain in the ass. Is there a resource allocation solution in Linux that is easy to implement?
Is the Linux architecture capable of such heavy, all-important real-time tasking?
-ibo
CSound (Score:1)
Just thought I'd like to mention CSound, a very flexible music creation tool available for just about any platform. It is really a programming language for sound. The input is an orchestra (which defines the instruments) and a score (which defines the notes to play). The output is a wave file. The really neat thing is that the instruments can use all kinds of advanced functions available as CSound commands (i.e. different filters, formant synthesis, etc.)
CSound is primarily used for experimental electronic music, but I have found it is also excellent for creating new and original samples that can be used anywhere. The learning curve can be somewhat steep (it is similar to assembly language) but if you are serious about creating original music you should check it out. A nice page to get started is: the MITPress Frontpage [mit.edu]
Nathan Whitehead
Re:Data not viewed as physical (Score:1)
You are mixing up patents and copyright.
If I were able to patent my thoughts, then nobody else would have been allowed to have the same thoughts. Copyright is a right to restrict copying, not use.
And yes, if I express my thoughts to others, they are allowed to think them, but I would not be all that pleased if they start to spread them around claiming they were their own.
I am saying that information is not in and of itself property in my eyes.
I would say that your ideas of "property" are too narrow. You think that only tangible things can be owned. To repeat myself, don't think "property", think "bundle of rights" instead. The composition of this bundle is flexible -- "property" can mean different things in different contexts.
Certainly you have the right to NOT express thoughts of your own, or not release information to others. However, I do not recognize any right beyond that.
How about reputational rights? I wrote a song, can anybody take it and claim *they* wrote it? What can I do in this case?
How about more reputational rights? I wrote an opinion piece, somebody took it, inserted "And, by the way, Adolf Hitler was the greatest man of the XX century" at the end, and started to distribute this article. What can I do now?
And remember that you don't own your name, even under the current intellectual property laws -- and of course, if there is no intellectual property at all, then anybody can take and use your name -- right?
Kaa
Re:Data not viewed as physical (Score:1)
Well, of course, there are always two possibly different value systems operating: one is your own personal morals, and one is the set of current laws. Your personal morals are (from my point of view, at least) your private business. You may believe it to be immoral to wear bathing suits, or to work for the government -- that's all fine. You can believe all you want.
However, in your interactions with the real world your personal morals do not matter much -- here the laws rule. I may believe that this 35 mph sign is unreasonable and stupid, but if I am caught I have to pay a fine anyway.
Intellectual property is no different. You can believe it must not exist, as long as you remember that:
(1) Your beliefs do not impose any obligations on me -- what I should or should not do;
(2) Your actions in real world are still subject to current laws, regardless of your beliefs.
One more thing that you might want to think about is the freedom of contract. Two adults can enter into any contract they want, right? So if I wrote a song, I can enter into contract with you, giving you a license to play the song but specifying that you shall not make any copies of the song. I clearly can do this, cannot I? And that gives me the opportunity to establish the whole copyright system, even if there is no explicit "copyright law". It would be very inefficient, but it could be done.
So unless you want to make a law forbidding any restrictions on information, contracts will still be able to limit its freedom. And I don't think such a law would be a good idea.
Kaa
Re:I have an idea. (Score:1)
--
"The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
Some cool programs, but not enough yet... (Score:1)
And let me just say that juno6 and terminatorX for Linux are two of the coolest things I've ever seend
Joe
Re:MPU-401and Linux Audio (Score:1)
Is there a mailing list or site for more information on SoftWerk? I'd be really interested in anything that would listen to the MIDI clock on my old Akai HD recorder.
Cubase timing (Score:1)
Failing that, I might borrow a friend's drum machine, dump the drum track to that, and set it to clock-sync to my sequencer.
Apologies if you've already tried all this. Just thought it might help.
Re:Electronic Musician article (Score:2)
ttyl
Farrell
p.s. egoboo, Science Fiction Fandom term for "Ego Boost"
Bingo, got it in one (Score:2)
Expertise, and specialising the machine, pays.If you spend about 2/3 of the effort you spend learning Linux, you can get a Mac to be rock stable for specific audio uses, provided you turn it off when not in use, and don't install MS or AOL software on it.
Legacy and current software: a hell of a lot of software and hardware support for Macs is out there and always has been. There's new commercial stuff like MetaSynth that's strictly Mac- graphical experimental audio synthesis, and I hope to hell they haven't gone and patented it. An old 68K mac still makes a dynamite sequencer for outboard MIDI gear. You'd be surprised at what you can get your hands on just free or from shareware. By the time you're into crippleware you're already seeing stuff like 8-channel digital mixers with both pan control and binaural stereo arrival delay built into each channel- and that's still just shareware stuff, technically.
OS support: the last thing you want is preemptive multitasking. Preemptive multitasking is what makes those squawks and dropouts on Windows CD rips- to the OS it was Very Important to move the mouse at that moment, so important that the audio process had to go pound sand. You never see that on a Mac because instead the mouse just stops responding for a halfsecond, or the keyboard stores up a few letters and catches up when it can (there's an event queue for this allowing you to move faster than the machine is responding). All the while, the _important_ task is still undisturbed. Sure, this sucks donkey ankles when you're talking about watching Netscape render a page- but when you're talking about recording a band's hottest take of a song in a 500$ an hour studio? That's when you don't give a rat's ass whether your window switching happens promptly or if you have to sit there for a sec waiting for it to catch up. It's similar for MIDI- in that case, your music sounds like crap if the note-on signals are not happening _exactly_ when they are supposed to. With rigidly sequenced stuff, it will make it sound less solid- a serious drawback for technoid stuff that's got to sound like a savage machine. For MIDI-recorded performances, it's worse- it will make a musician's performance sound, literally, like they are not as good as they are! Most musicians with a good sense of timing can pick up on this, and it's brutally demoralizing. With a Mac you can get away from that.
I'm not aware of any reason why Linux could not be just as strong for these purposes (except maybe the legacy software, but oh well). You have the source code, it can be changed, and music workstations are often dedicated machines making it very inviting to hack up a specialty Linux that does nothing whatever but the music tasks. Furthermore, I can tell you there's another aspect that might not have been obvious right away- seen VA Linux's new one rack space linux servers? Picture one of those tucked into a rack of audio gear, and you'll begin to see the appeal Linux could have. Picture a specialised digital audio workstation, a FREE one, developed by musician geeks to blow away anything currently available. One that uses a dedicated box, as if it was an embedded application, maybe running off RTLinux or something. Perhaps it doesn't use X, but something more direct that assumes the presence of a particular screen or LCD display. Perhaps it builds synth keyboards and control panels into the OS like they were keyboard and mouse. Perhaps it builds in control of an automated mixing board enabling digital-like control of an analog mix- knobs and servos aren't strictly necessary, there are things like cds cells and optoisolators provided you can control the devices, and they're a lot cheaper. Who knows?
My point is that the sky's the limit, and there's really no reason Linux couldn't end up the obvious choice for something like this. The trick is thinking of it like an embedded application- there's really no point in having the thing serve web pages, and if you're willing to compromise your master tape for the sake of serving some web pages on the same machine or having instant messaging windows pop up, you should stick with doze ;)
For those of us who need more dedicated performance, there is still Macintosh (indeed, multiplie macs- I find that I wouldn't trust my powermac to send MIDI sequences and simultaneously record the resulting digital audio from the mixer. But I have a little older mac that can do the sequences as a dedicated box).
For the future? Well, Windows is still going to be consumerland, MOTU is still going strong, Digidesign is still on top of the heap but Opcode is toast, bought and dismantled by Gibson USA. Current Macs suffer somewhat from consumerism- these heavy tasks tend to require lots of slots and terrible demands on a consumerised system, and for a while there Apple had _totally_ blown off pro users, and they could do it again anytime. Not that the old gear doesn't still work, but you can't blindly put your faith in corporations- they can let you down.
Linux might well have a serious future ahead of it in DAW-land, not so much because of any inherent suitability for profoundly pre-emptive multitasking servers to the task (shudder) but simply because it is out there, it's available, it can be turned into whatever you like and it's GPLed and the information is always forthcoming. It's not about linux power, it's about linux empowerment. Ask Opcode users about empowerment sometime now that their vendor has been corporately bought and _thrown_ _away_ stupidly: there will be no bugfixes or access to the source code of Studio Vision. This is what lies in wait for anyone who doesn't control their tools. You have to be able to control your tools or they can be taken from you, held for ransom, or even broken and made useless for no good reason. With Linux, you can own your tools.
No MIDI for me, thanks. (Score:2)
Right now, I compose music using a few linux software tools. The mediocre (but increasing!) quality of the software available right now is offset by the good quality hardware I use. The SB Live has open source drivers that are very bleeding edge (there is no MIDI support for the front panel yet, so I don't use MIDI :) My roland JP-8000 can synthesize any sound there is, and the recording from the emu10k1 in the SB Live is top notch.
As for software, I use VoodooTracker [syncomm.org] for mixing loops, DAP [hw.ac.uk] for editing individual samples, Zerius Vocoder [zerius.com] for being like Kraftwerk, and Broadcast 2000 [linuxbox.com] for editing the final thing and mixing in performance stuff. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of little hacks and kludges, but I like itRe:Microsoft (Score:2)
Bingo! I know many musicians who have gone from $1000 computers to $20,000 dedicated machines with less functionality. You see when you are recording with a group you get 70 tries. ON the 70th try the magic is suddenly there and the song moves right. This is not an explainable thing since the other 69 tries are note perfect, but the 70th somehow has a level of energy that didn't exists. The last thing you want is to get the magic (whatever it is) and then find out the recording device didn't capture it.
Of course musicans have also discovered that for all the promise of digital, the orginal masters (running at 15 ips on 1/2 inch tape) can be recorded and edited in analog without anymore (noticable) hiss then then digital and analog editing has advantages. (mind you digital has advantages too, unless your are an engineer with expirence I wouldn't trust your judgement on which is better)
Making it in the Linux world is different than in (Score:2)
"Professional" home musician I am not (Score:2)
My setup sounds far nicer than MIDI at the very bottom of the musician-hardware pile. It is a travesty that this setup is not covered in pedantic magazines more often, as it's the setup of a lot of 'underground' trackers. I've had a chance to talk to profesional digital musicians and they state that they didn't do it my way, because they didn't need as much hardware.
I have a full duplex soundblaster, some Windows software and a few nice guitars. Guess which piece of that lineup I'd like to eliminate from the equation?
AudioMulch (Score:2)
CSound! (Score:2)
Here are a couple of good links on the subject:
http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/lin ux_csound.html [bright.net]
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-boo ks/csound/frontpage.html [mit.edu]
I haven't the time to explain it further, but it is far and away the most powerful sound package I've ever used. Even without a pretty GUI for composing, it's worth checking out.
-Isaac
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Professionality (Score:2)
Anything aside from Buzz running on WINE on the computer I have at work after hours is out of my price range. Does this make me less of a musician? Does this diminish or enhance my talent or lack thereof in any way, shape, or form? And there's no medium that's totally brain-dead. If you can't make it sound intelligent, that's not a reflection upon the medium itself, it's only a reflection of your capabilities within that medium.
And, quite frankly, if there's anyone who thinks less of me for not having a real studio setup, their opinion means just about nothing to me anyway.
Re:Buzz (Score:2)
And you don't have to keep Windows around to run Buzz, as long as you've got another machine to render to
Re:CSound, Linux, and Musical Composition (Score:2)
I would define experimental music as music that explores new ways of creating sound. Electronic music is now mainstream, you are correct. Things like Moog lowpass filters, ambient pads, are common-place. So experimental electronic music is where you use computers or other technology to experiment with creating new ways to synthesize sound. CSound is ideal for this.
I guess what I'm saying is that using existing instruments to make music is simply making music. Building your own original instrument for a song is experimental music, and is what CSound does best.
Nathan Whitehead
What we have today. (Score:2)
OK - I know this is flamebait, but I had to respond. It seems that this person has missed the point of a site such as
It would be easy to sit down and identify a whole bunch of apps that any O/S is lacking - precisely because nobody has written thenm yet.
True, Linux is somewhere behind Windows in certain areas of applications. However there are other areas where the application coverage kicks Windows' butt as a platform. Networking apps for instance!
Sorry to reply the the flame, but I felt it was an attitude worth exploring.
Re:Data not viewed as physical (Score:2)
Well, that's the basic idea of FSF and like-minded people: that there is no such thing as "intellectual property", that information cannot be owned in the sense of putting restrictions on its spread.
However it's all good and well to make sweeping declarations like this, but in order to convince people you have to come with reasonable arguments why this should be so.
Is there a "natural right" to copy information? Hm.. doubtful. Is it "you can't stop me so that's got to be legal" thing? Not a very good argument, that. Can you offer an "economic efficiency" arguement? Perhaps you can, but it's very much non-trivial to show that lack of intellectual propery will promote socioeconomic growth.
Or is it really "I want stuff and I don't want to pay for it"?
Kaa
Re:Data not viewed as physical (Score:2)
Think about it in this way. What is property? Property is, basically, what is called "a bundle of rights" with respect to the owned thingie, the most important of which is the right to exclude others. Exactly which rights make up this bundle is subject to debate (especially is the owned thingie is not physical).
My thoughts, dreams, ideas, etc. exist only in my mind. Yet I am quite convinced I "own" them -- that is, I have a set of rights with regard to my thoughts and one of them is, clearly, the right not to divulge them to anybody else. Nothing absurd here at all.
Besided, consider this. You go to a fine restaurant and pay a sum of money -- for what? For the food (as in some protein, some carbs, a lot of fat, some minerals, etc)? Nope -- you can get your carbs in a more cheap and convenient way. You come to a good restaurant for the *taste* of food and for the atmosphere. Both of these are intangibles -- they exist only in the human mind. Yet would you deny the restaurant the right to charge you for them? for something that exists only in your mind?
Kaa
Re:Microsoft (Score:2)
I wouldn't want any general-purpose OS (RT-Linux, QNX, WinCE, whatever) on my pacemaker. I want something built from the ground up to keep my heart beating. Which doesn't take a whole lot of processor power, really.
Re:You fed the troll! (Score:2)
Re:What's really going on (Score:2)
Someone please moderate it up ASAP.
Insightful, Informative, Underrated...
Somewhat relevant... (Score:2)
"OpenAL, the Open Audio Library, seeks to become the audio counterpart to OpenGL for audio. With OpenAL it is possible to create three-dimensional sound across many platforms, such as Linux,Apple Macintosh, Windows and more, with quality suitable for professional projects like games and multimedia applications.
OpenAL is supported by a growing number of hardware vendors and developers (such as Creative Labs and Loki Games) with the goal of creating a powerful, elegant C-based API for creating rich, high-quality 3D sound content, with cross-platform compatability as a design goal.
problems.. (Score:2)
Re:Professionality (Score:2)
What!?
You're kidding right? Two words: Sonic Foundry.
Let me put it this way. Sound Forge is the Photoshop of digital audio. What Linux needs is the Gimp of Sound Forge, and then Acid.
If Linux wants _many_ new fans, an Acid-alike will do it. Acid is _the_ sh*t. So called "serious" musicians will try to tell you it's a toy, etc. But it most certainly is not... it's (part of) the future of music!
(BTW I am a "serious" musician. I play many real instruments at way beyond the "4 chord braindead" level. I just don't have my head up my ass).
gribbly
P.S. If there are any coders who have been harbouring an impulse to write a Linux Acid-alike... contact me. I am a designer by trade, and hereby offer my services in a design and co-ordination role. So if you would like a neat document that describes exactly how everything should work from an end-user perspective, let me know.
USB Midi & Audio Support (Score:2)
today, i've got a mac with Vision DSP, which handles audio & midi tracks seamlessly, and is very tight for producing professional studio quality work.
how many years will we have to wait before we can get a linux version to be doing what i've already been doing for years already anyways?
john.
Broadcast 2000 (Score:2)
This will be better than Windows (Score:2)
-motardo
Re:Broadcast 2000 (screenshots) (Score:2)
http://heroine.linuxbox.com/bcast 2000screens.html [linuxbox.com]
numb
Re:You don't need any OS for that. (Score:2)
A DAT would save me a lot of trouble, however I already have a computer that is sufficient (for now at least.) Last night one band offered to let me borrow a digital 4-track for recording future events so I might do that. Keep in mind that I am NOT a musician (nor do I play one on MTV.) I love music but don't have any talent in that area. That's a huge part of the reason I'm doing this.
Another possibility that is showing some promise is getting sponsored with IDSL or ADSL access at one of the local bars so I can broadcast live events. If that happens the computer will become an absolute requirement. The software I use for that will be icecast [icecast.org] which allows MP3 streaming.
numb
Re:Microsoft (Score:2)
This is fine if you're just playing around sampling some stuff. But for recording a live performance you need an operating system that has a high level of reliability. That's something that is not currently available for Windows.
numb
Re:You don't need any OS for that. (Score:2)
The reasons I got it... at the time (2+ years ago), hard drives were still kinda small.
The analog inputs into the DAT are much better than the analog inputs on any soundcard that's affordable. Considering I go through an external Mackie mixer, it was/is the best choice for me still.
It also makes a handy external DAC for my sound card's digital out.
This is the same model that we used in college-- actually they were the original DA-20. We had 2 of these units, one in the performance hall and the other in the sound/midi studio. Both were used nearly every day, for over 2 years, without one single problem. No tape jams, no dropouts, just routine cleaning. It wouldn't surprise me if you were having problems with portable units though.
Besides, when I master something to DAT, it doesn't stay on the tape-- I dump it digitally over to my hard drive for final processing and burning to CD.
Re:yuck! (Score:2)
Not liking something doesn't make it crap.
I try to be objective. I wouldn't compare Trent Reznor to, say, John Cage or somebody, but he's very effective at defining an atmosphere with sound.
Some of his stuff (especially Quake soundtrack) is bordering on minimalist. On the other hand, the first couple NIN albums just seemed sort of.... sequenced. On example, in his latest, he's using detuned instruments, which is pretty bold for "popular" music. So, he's a bit more experimental on The Fragile.
He still can't sing worth a damn... but there are several NIN songs I like to blast for the pure angst factor. Or something.
You don't need any OS for that. (Score:2)
Try a DAT.
If the response is "I can't afford a DAT," then you also probably wouldn't be able to afford good enough computer hardware capable of making a quality recording of a live performance, either.
All the microphones, mixing equipment, etc. will make the DAT (or computer) look like one of the cheaper components anyway.
Re:"new compositional techniques"(Re:Troll accepte (Score:2)
Fortunately, MIDI only defines notes as numbers. Those numbers are usually interpreted (by software or hardware) as a 12-tone system (C1, Eb6, etc) but as far as MIDI goes, I think it's just notes #0-127. It's up to the synth for the implementation. It just so happens that most use a piano keyboard. MIDI is already capable of the types of expression you mentioned, via the real-time controllers, and the fact that you can have other tuning systems associated with a particular MIDI patch.
On my Proteus synth, I have MIDI patches using both Gamelan tuning systems (5 note, and 8 note) as well as 20-tone, "C-only" (uses true harmonic tuning on C for the pure intervals you mentioned) and a couple others. It makes for some rather authentic sounding bagpipes! You can also make user tuning maps adjusting each note in 1-cent intervals.
Now, that can only go so far... if you want control over the actual sound, and apply techniques that MIDI doesn't give you, well that sounds like something the Kyma system has been doing for years. Kyma is basically an OO programming language, which talks to a Capybara sound module-- essentially just 1 or more dedicated DSP's in a black box. This was very popular for movie sound designers. I saw a demonstration of this way back in 1994 or so-- the system could be programmed to say, harmonize a note you sing with some brass instruments, as well as some truly amazing real-time sound processing and sound morphing.
Other forms of synthesis get close, using standard MIDI data. The complexity of the sound is abstracted away from the data stream-- a synth still sees the same old note-on, note-off, channel aftertouch, velocity, etc., but new synths make use of those in very creative ways. Look at the Kurzweil K-series and their function generators (over 10 years old now). And, newer synthesis methods- physical modeling synthesis and modal synthesis. Seer Systems' Reality is one that does those and some other types in software on a PC.
MIDI (the protocol) has served us well for almost 20 years now-- that sure says something about an open standard! Still, I think it's time for something much faster. MIDI is limited to 38.4kbps, which means I have to wait a couple minutes while I dump a bunch of new patches over to my Wavestation.
Troll accepted! (Score:2)
There's a whole new world of experimentation and new compositional techniques that electronic music brings. And it's constantly evolving. The manipulation of sounds, etc... A lot of NIN's new tracks and the Quake soundtrack are pretty ingenious if you analyze them, and his techniques have matured considerably over the past few years.
And "real" musicians will never go away. We're just using more toys now.
I double-majored in music if that means anything.
Re:You don't need any OS for that. (Score:2)
As for random access... well, that's sort of irrelevant while recording a live performance! You can record to ADAT, or whatever, then transfer it via coax digital into your favorite cheap soundcard for editing on the PC. That's exactly what I do.
Granted, DAT is the way to go for a 2-channel recording of a performance, but that's not studio work, that's live work.
I thought we were talking about live work all along. At home in my studio, I record multitrack audio on my PC, then downmix to 2 channel on DAT. I could use my PC to master everything+downmix, but that would involve routing my external synths into my PC, where the audio path isn't as clean (unbalanced 1/8" stereo plug, vs. 1/4" balanced shielded through the mixer to DAT). A CD burner won't work for that either, unless I go and get an external burner with high quality I/O. That wasn't an option 2 years ago when I got my DAT. Keep in mind that redbook audio also doesn't have error correction, while DAT does. Only my mic audio goes into my PC, but since I don't have a sound-sealed recording room, it's about the best I can do anyway.
Re:You don't need any OS for that. (Score:2)
I was thinking strictly in the sense of recording a live performance to be edited and mastered later. You don't NEED a computer to record, although you will for editing.
I'd love to see DJ's start using MP3's now that there's that dual "turntable" plugin for winamp. Heh... but according to the RIAA, that would be bad!
Re:Best existing software for Linux? (Score:2)
You also may want to look at Mix [xdv.org]. Some of the software here [bgsu.edu] is also great.
Re:Data not viewed as physical (Score:2)
> different value systems operating:
> one is your own personal morals, and one is the
> set of current laws.
Certainly....one of my personal beliefs is that
the entire system of law and government is about
as valuable as a steaming heap of dung.
> (1) Your beliefs do not impose any obligations
> on me -- what I should or should not do;
Of course. Yet by the same token I just ask for
the same respect (unfortunaly the big uniformed
men with guns who call themselves the government
feel they have the right to impose their belifs
on me...particularly their belief that they have
the authority to tell me what to do...and
furthermore that authority exists)
> (2) Your actions in real world are still subject
> to current laws, regardless of your beliefs.
Only if you are caught. Which, truthfully doesn't
happen much. I exceede posted speed limits
at least 2 times a day every day. I have never
been ticketed. I have smoked pot probably a
hundred times in my life...purchased it probably
10 times. I have never been caught doing any of
these things...therefore I have to say that my
actions are not subject to law unless I am
caught.
(especially when you factor in that at least the
purchase of certain substances implies technically
illegal action by at least 3-4 others (producer,
distributor etc) who also did not get caught
at that time either...)
> One more thing that you might want to think
> about is the freedom of contract.
This scenario you describe is flawed. This
"Freedom" to restric another via contract only
exists if there is someone who can enforce this
restriction. As such...the restriction of a
contract is actually a threat of force.
(ie If you break this I will have have men with
guns force you to do things (ie pay restitution
etc))
As such I would not classify this as a freedom.
I do however recognize a freedom of people to
freely associate themselves with eachother and
enter into any agreements that they wish, between
themselves...so I supose yes.
> So unless you want to make a law forbidding any
> restrictions on information,
Why is it that law is always considered the most
important source of rules? I much prefer to
follow my own sense of morality than some old
rich authoritarian mans rules.
Given the plethora of laws that a person can break
in a single day, and continue to break every day,
without ever being prosecuted, I think that
talking about law as if its important "because its
the law" is fairly silly.
The laws that you really can't get away with
breaking too easily (stealing, murder etc) are
generally fairly deplorable and not morally
justifiable anyway.
Re:Data not viewed as physical (Score:2)
> my mind. Yet I am quite convinced I "own" them
Do you claim the right to not allow others to
have the same or similar thoughts?
If you express your thoughts to someone else...
are they allowed to think them too?
> Besided, consider this. You go to a fine
> restaurant and pay a sum of money -- for what?
Usually so I don't have to cook.
or to put off grocery shopping for another
day.
> You come to a good restaurant for the *taste*
> of food and for the atmosphere. Both of these
> are intangibles -- they exist only in the human
> mind.
No restraunt claims the right to stop you from
copying their ideas and cooking the same food
at home for your friends, or even from opening
your own restraunt and cooking dishes that are
similar or the same as their own.
I am not saying it is wrong to charge for goods
and labor...I am saying that information is not
in and of itself property in my eyes.
Certainly you have the right to NOT express
thoughts of your own, or not release information
to others. However, I do not recognize any right
beyond that.
Its like this;
If I lend my friend my car, with the intent that
HE drive it soemehwer...then he lets other people
drive my car...that is a problem. It is real
property of mine that he and noone else have
been given permission to drive.
On the other hand...if I hand him a CD of music
that I created...and he makes a copy for a friend
then I still have my copy. Nothing has happend
to my property. My property is the CD itself not
the sound on it.
Re:Microsoft (Score:2)
nice but...thats a fairly simple task.
Since idle cycles are wasted cycles...it would
be really nice to run a distributed.net client
on a pacemaker.....
Re:Microsoft (Score:2)
> Linux will crash just as bad as Windows or
> Powerbooks will
I agree...it does happen. I have had Linux systems
lock up and crash etc. However....they are still
a hundred times more stable than just about
anything else I have used (including many
comercial unicies - there are a couple that have
been on par though).
So yea...my system crashes on the order of
once every other month or so...my workstation
at work does somewhat better.
When you consider the average windows machine
crashes on the order of several times a week or
on some...several times a day...
> Digital Audio is still damn tricky.
the mantra is "User Aps can't crash the system"
(not always true sadly...)
Re:Data not viewed as physical (Score:2)
> Well as far as copyrights are concerned, the
> second you record any song or WRITE DOWN any
> lyrics, they are copyrighted. This applies to
> all forms of recording including digital.
Very true from a stricly legalist viewpoint.
However this isn't the question of "From the
court of law point of view, who owns words and
notes?"
Personally....my answer would be that nobody owns
them, and everyone is free to use them. However,
thats not as popular of an opion as it could be,
and it disagrees strongly with the current
establishment.
I find the idea absurd that a person can own
something which doesn't exist outside of the
human mind.
Music is nothing more than vibration of air. Music
does not exist on a tape, or on my hard drive.
Music exists in my mind. It is an
interpretation of data. Outside of the human
mind, writting, words, music are all meaningless.
To claim ownership of any of these things is
to claim to own nothing more than a human
percieved and interpreted pattern of
information.
of course...those are just my offtopic views in
an offtopic conversation.
Re:Data not viewed as physical (Score:2)
> can anybody take it and claim *they* wrote it?
Claiming that they wrote it would be fraud. Not
because I wrote it but because they didn't. Thus
they are telling a lie.
> How about more reputational rights? I wrote an
> opinion piece, somebody took it, inserted "And,
> by the way, Adolf Hitler was the greatest man of
> the XX century"
Again...they are commiting fraud in my eyes. A
lie, claiming that you wrote something that you
didn't.
I don't see how one needs the concept of "IP" to
see the wrongdoing in either of these cases.
And also...I am NOT mixing up patents and
copyright...I think they are both equally
absurd.
I just can't delude myself into believeing that
when a person makes a copy of a musical piece
and shares it with a friend, that they have commited some horrid offence. Its just not
"stealing", its "Shareing". (thats not to
say that I activly go around copying CDs...I
have more important things to do with my time...
like write code)
I dunno about anyone else, but when I write
something, or come up with an idea, it is for
use. I don't see how I could possibly gain
anything by stoping people from using, coping,
or distributing anything I make. If what I do
can benefit someone, either practically (like
a piece of software) or emotionally (music, art)
then I should be glad that it benefits them and
that they use it.
Music licenses (Score:2)
Talking about free music licenses, check out:
The Free Music Philosophy
I'm a musician myself, and I'd hate to have my music controlled by some record label. Perhaps some musically-inclined slashdotters should get together and write up a GPL-equivalent of music... I'd be happy to know about that.
Data not viewed as physical (Score:2)
Re:my ball and chain to MS.... (Score:2)
Sample Editors & Trackers (Score:2)
Does a sample processing library exist already? I haven't seen one. I think this would speed things up, since this kind of code would be common to all of these audio projects... pure MIDI not withstanding.
Something I personally need is a mod tracker. There aren't any decent trackers, as far as I have found, for Linux. Impulse Tracker is the sole reason I keep a DOS partition, it's simply the best tracker, IMHO. These days, it seems trackers are falling out of popularity, and those still being developed are crossing the line, into bigger and better editing suites.
---
script-fu: hash bang slash bin bash
bad multitrack sound card support (Score:2)
one of them is sonorus (www.sonorus.com). after speaking with the ceo for quite a while (a few yrs back), it seems that he put all his trust in OSS. OSS dropped the ball by not supporting this card very well. yes, they do have some support, but when I corresponded with the OSS guys, they clearly felt that their time was better spent in the mainstream rather than fringe digital audio market.
another is the frontier wavecenter (www.frontierdesign.com). talking with these folks yielded no interest at all in unix ;-(
just yesterday I bought a midiman (www.midiman.net) pro audio digital card. cost was $100 (!) and it does seem to work well under win*. but I bet the free unix support will not be there for a long long time, if ever ;-(
its great to have sequencing and .wav editing under linux. but the most critical part of digital audio work is the initial capture from digital audio sources. this is sometimes a once-in-a-lifetime event and you cannot trust M$ products on a once-only gig session. but I would be willing to trust linux (or *bsd) for this audio capture. but alas, only the zefiro za2 (www.zefiro.com) card is really really supported by linux. and this is quite an expensive and very old ISA card - due to die out pretty soon, I bet.
before free unix can tout that its 'pro audio ready', it needs to have solid and proper support for the digital-audio cards. and I don't mean the kind of card that you find on the shelves of Fry's ...
--
Re:You don't need any OS for that. (Score:2)
for one, dats suck. I've had over 7 dat decks (at one time) and I've spent many years on the dat-heads mailing list (since the time dat first came out). I've taped at live shows with my portables and dubbed my share of tapes. let me just say this: the dat format is not robust. tapes jam, diginoise abounds, dropouts happen and tension (slack in takeup reels) are very common. NO ONE records mission-critical audio to dat. no one but a fool, that is.
a computer with a hard drive is MUCH MUCH more robust than a dat. and it has no set length limit - you could record a 6 or 16 hour event if you have disk space enough (ignoring the common 2gig file limit for now).
and if I record (on location, say) direct to disk, I can then, in very short order (before I even breakdown my pc for the return trip) make some safety copies to cdr. so even if my hard drive crashes, the cdrs are still safe. other than a fully redundant $1M pro setup (like what a sony mobile sound truck would have), show me a better setup that us 'normal folks' can afford and still get pro quality reliability?
direct to pc, using linux, is still my dream. I hope it happens someday.
--
Re:Microsoft (Score:2)
my point (post is further down) exactly.
I don't know HOW MANY TIMES I lost work due to win* locking up. using supposedly high quality apps (sound forge and cooledit/pro) and the latest win* o/s. importing a 2hr tape from dat can take an entire weekend! win* will crash somewhere in the middle. or record to a temp buffer but not be able to save. or crash during saving. or when I save and reopen for editing, it corrupts the file.
I don't see HOW pro's can justify this time investment in fooling with M$ crap.
come to think of it, maybe THAT's why the Mac is so popular with the music crowd. its not as functional as a linux box but it supposedly IS stable for audio work.
--
Music and Linux (Score:3)
The software side will be harder. The greatest strength of systems such as Cubase VST is the number of interlocking programs. You have your effects plug-ins (ranging from homebrewed compressors and flangers to expensive proprietary DSP wizardry), soft synths (including ReBirth and the new VST 2.0 plug-ins such as Neon and LM-4), sample loop/phrase editors (i.e. ReCycle) and the like. FX plug-ins, for one, are incredibly useful. A Linux-based digital recording/sequencing application that only has a few basic reverb and echo plug-ins will look pretty poorly compared to Cubase or Logic.
On one hand, there are a lot of free (though not quite open-source) DSP plug-ins for Cubase VST, and the SDK is available. The interface has a small C++ class library to wrap it; if a compatible API could be written, a lot of plug-ins could be ported. On the other hand, maybe (just maybe) it would be possible to run some Windows VST plug-ins (i.e., DLLs with functions for doing stuff to buffers) using part of WINE.
MPU-401and Linux Audio (Score:3)
When I downloaded Jazz++, I found that it came with a code patch to allow my MPU-401 to operate in Intelligent mode (external sync). Unfortunately, the patch did not compile on my system. A quick check of the code led me to believe that it was written for older libraries. I don't think anyone is maintaining it.
Sorry, but the vast majority of Linux "audio" software seems targeted at guys with semi-pro soundcards who want to goof around with sequencers and maybe a loop or two. FWIW, BeOS, with all it's "media OS" claims, is in the same boat. (Yes, I know Logic is "coming". Where is it now?)
The market for professional audio software is small enough without targeting an operating system that is still very much in the minority. This kind of software is very time-consuming and difficult to write (I *have* considered it). That's why even the Windows versions cost so much. There's also a culture barrier -- Linux users are accustomed to Free Software while Steinberg, Logic Audio, etc. are most definitely trying to get every dime they can from their products.
wanted: simple, high-quality 2-track recording (Score:3)
MIDI is cool, but I don't know much about nor use it. My musical gene is stunted;) What I
There are some audio-recording utilities for Linux (audiograb), but none that offer the functionality of a simple personal audio workstion like the Akai DPS12 [akaipro.com].
In fact, this could be a money maker for anyone who wants to sell it: I would really like to find a professional-quality card featuring two XLR inputs (perhaps on a breakout box) and GPLd software to access them, saving into a non-proprietary format. Better, make the interface to the computer a USB connection, and a decent laptop can become a much better tool than my DPS12.
timothy
Free Music Philosophy (Score:3)
Music notation based on a programming language (Score:3)
Haskore is a collection of Haskell modules designed for expressing musical structures in the high-level, declarative style of functional programming. In Haskore, musical objects consist of primitive notions such as notes and rests, operations to transform musical objects such as transpose and tempo-scaling, and operations to combine musical objects to form more complex ones, such as concurrent and sequential composition. From these simple roots, much richer musical ideas can easily be developed.
Haskore is a means for describing music---in particular Western Music---rather than sound. It is not a vehicle for synthesizing sound produced by musical instruments, for example, although it does capture the way certain (real or imagined) instruments permit control of dynamics and articulation.
Haskore also defines a notion of literal performance through which observationally equivalent musical objects can be determined. From this basis many useful properties can be proved, such as commutative, associative, and distributive properties of various operators. An algebra of music thus surfaces.
You would probable find that Haskore offers more ability to extend your musical ntation then AMPLE because flexable notation is one of the things functional langauges like Haskell are good at.
Best existing software for Linux? (Score:3)
I've been using Goldwave for recording. It's a great shareware program despite only being available for Windows. The problem, other than my aversion to Windows, is that when Windows crashes the entire segment I was recording is lost. This is a definately a problem when it's live performances that you are recording.
Gmurf [epita.fr] (open source) has a lot of potential but needs more development. The primary thing I'm looking for right now is software that allows me to record and does realtime visual analysis of the input. This is critical for adjusting the recording level to prevent clipping. The second thing I need is a nice open source mixer--one that allows me to adjust recording and playback levels at the same time. As far as the actual recording goes, SoX [sprynet.com] does an excellent job of recording and uses very little overhead.
My question is: What are the best open source packages for realtime visualization, the mixer, and wave editing?
numb
Check freshmeat (Score:3)
as encore, fix the bugs and open the source...
Check on freshmeat [freshmeat.net] in the last few days/weeks. I was almost positive I found a package that did musical notation that you are describing there.
I just found Mup at:
http://www.freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/07/01/89
MuX2d is in the works:
http://www.freshmeat.net/appindex/2000/01/04/94
As well as the very interesting Rosegarden:
http://www.freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/05/06/89
Brahms:
http://www.freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/09/30/93
Those should get you started.
One area where linux is -not- competing with MS (Score:3)
(Mainly because my friends & I had such a hassle recording a few songs [metaphase.org] using windows)
It's what you want to do with it...... (Score:3)
The author mentions the Tracker music as used in the Amiga demo scene. The trackers were wonderful, in that they allowed people with talent and vision, but little musical expertise to produce tunes that sounded nigh-on professional at times, nad best of all, the software was generally free, or at the very worst, shareware. However, in the late '80s and early '90s, 8-bit 22Khz sampling was perfectly acceptable for release, as cassette was the primary means of distribution outside of the computer. What sounded professional 10 years ago would be laughed out of the studio now. There already exist several trackers in the public domain for most OS's, but they serve more as a doodling pad than anything else. So there are more complex options (Cubase, Cakewalk etc......)
It doesn't say a lot for Windows and MacOS that an awful lot of musicians would rather die than let go of their ST's, simply for stability reasons. TOS was admittedly crap, but it rarely needed patching, and there were no service pack. The TOS that came with your machine would be the one it stayed with until it died, for the most part. BSOD/GPF's are bad enough for coders, but imagine what it'd be like to have to reassemble the music if one crops up! You may never get that sound again, unless you made copious notes on the settings, and let's face it, one of the points of doing it on computer was to alleviate writing every little detail down. MacOS these days is almost as bad....and that's before we come to the astronomical prices charged for the latest versions of the software. I'm aware that the software is WAY more advanced than the ST/Amiga days, but the price shouldn't be hiked as high as it has been.
So we come to Linux. Stable? yes. Capable of performance? yes. Lots of developers around the world? YES! It is an acknowledged fact that many coders also have an affinity for music, so... Musicians, what do YOU want from a Linux-based music program? Musician/Coders, what do YOU want from a Linux based music program? Coders, what can we GIVE them in a Linux based music program?
Answers on a Post Form!
Electronic Musician article (Score:4)
Unfortunately, the 06/99 issue seems to be the only one that's not archived on EM's very kludgy website. I've pestered the parent company, Intertec [intertec.com], a couple of times about this, and they keep alleging they're going to fix it.
The article's aimed at musicians looking at Linux, not at Linux geeks looking to music, so the focus might seem a bit strange to some of the Slashdot crowd, but I'm really rather proud of it.
Unfortunately, if you'd like to see the final version of this article, you'll either have to buy the back issue or pester EM's parent company to get the 06/99 issue into the archives. Or maybe I'll post the draft version if Intertec's too clueless to post the final one.
--
Buzz (Score:4)
There is currently an effort to produce a Buzz-alike for *nix called Octal. It's in its extreme infancy (first code release last weekend), but we desperately need coders. Check the project out at http://www.gnu.org/software/octal/octa l.html [gnu.org] and contact the project maintainer or myself if you're interested in helping out.
What do I want from a Linux-based program? (Score:4)
I don't want to run a Linux-based program solely for the sake of running a Linux-based program.
I want to concentrate on the MUSIC.
I don't want to be sitting there thinking "I wish this program would do such-and-such, but that's OK because I'm running on a better OS."
Right now, believe it or not, Windows98 handles all my music needs flawlessly. The software I use (Cakewalk Pro Audio) isn't the highest-end software there is, but it's matured over 9 versions and I've used it since version 2.0 for DOS.
Can new software be designed from the ground up with the same functionality for Linux? Sure, if it's designed by people who know what musicians/composers actually need to do.
But the hardware support has to be there first. So there are some obstacles to overcome here, and eventually, I'll bet that there will be linux ports of the most popular professional packages. I'm in no hurry though... there was a time when Windows sucked at anything multimedia.
Does anyone remember AMPLE? Anyone? (Score:4)
Every now and then you stumble across something which is an interesting fusion of several interests. One such find was around the late 80's, I bought a Music 500 system (like a Hybrid Music 5000) for my BBC B microcomputer. Basically this was an RM, FM synth linked into the system via a 1MHz port with 16 voices. What was interesting about this system was the method of driving it - it came with it's own Forth-like language - AMPLE (Advanced Music Programming Language Environment) for writing music, building sound sets (by combining voices together, using ring-modulation), controling volume and stereo position, and of course it also came with programming control structures such as loops, conditional execution and other such wonders.
While today's technology far outstrips the equipment that I used then, the AMPLE language provided a interesting (to a programmer who plays keyboard and oboe, anyway) method of creating and playing music, and not necessarly just playing music using conventional tools. The letters A-G represented notes, with capital letters implying go up and lowercase mean go down the scale, note lengths were easily specified (48, implies a crotchet, 24, implies a quaver and so forth), ties and slurs could be implemented and chords could be played on. As an example, a bar of music for one voice including chords might look like
24,C(48,ge)b~48,a(fc)96,C(ac)
which equates to quavers playing notes C down to B while G and E below are played and held, with the B quaver tied to a crotchet chord AFC and semibreve CAC to end the bar.
Several times I saw suggestions that the language should be revived and tied in to some modern MIDI or sample-based system, but to my knowledge nobody has ever taken up the challenge. If anyone knows differently, I like to hear from them!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Comment removed (Score:5)
my ball and chain to MS.... (Score:5)
Quake3 is out for linux, Pine's great for e-mail, Communicator is acceptable as a browser, but there is an emtpy void where the multi-media apps come in. I haven't been able to find anything for wav file editting like Sound Forge [sonicfoundry.com], or a sequencing program as good as VST [com.com], or a multitracker as good as SAW [iqsoft.com].
(all of these are personal preference I'm sure).
Plus, from my understanding, there's no plug-in architecture like MS's DirectX that allows for effects plugins to be compatible with virtually all of these programs (well, except for SAW)...
When these apps are carried over to Linux like Photoshop was (Gimp), MS will be a distant memory...the likeliness of this however is a sign that I'll be using MS stuff for a while to come
-lev
What's really going on (Score:5)