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Music Media

Interviews with Linux Sound Folks 46

Posted by Hemos from the making-your-world-sound-better dept.
Hexdancer writes "Linux MusicStation currently has an interview with Jaroslav Kysela from the ALSA sound drivers project as well as some words from the author of SLab (one of the two free HDD recording systems for Linux)"
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Interviews with Linux Sound Folks More

Interviews with Linux Sound Folks

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  • Re:What's the OTHER HDD Recorder? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There are more than two...

    http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linux_soundapps.h tml
  • The point? The point is that ALSA WORKS. I tried getting OSS/lite to work with my GUS PnP and it failed miserably. I downloaded the commercial OSS preview in hopes that it would work better. Well, no such luck. One of the channels had HORRIBLE static no matter what I did. Then I remembered the UltraSound project that I had used for my old ACE. I grabbed it and it worked like a charm. Then I noticed that Jaroslav had started ALSA so I grabbed that and it worked great as well. So the point of ALSA is that I can actually use my sound card in Linux now!
  • Problem is, the alsa-util packages insist that the drivers are not loaded, even when they are
    Are your sure they're loaded? Make sure you follow the modules configuration instructions carefully, I had some problems with this myself. Especially confusing is the different instructions for 2.0.x and 2.[12].x kernels.

    Also, if the modules get unloaded then reloaded, the mixer will be muted again. Solution: modprobe them in by hand.

  • Recording, yes; I'm not sure about full duplex recording (haven't used it myself), but I assume so.
  • I got a plugin message window which I closed, but otherwise no problems in Linux.

    However, I have to agree that Dr. Watson under NT has caused me unspeakable pain and agony under Netscape (and ICQ).


    Who am I?
    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • Try Rosegarden [bath.ac.uk]. The new version (3.0) will be a complete rewrite, but development seems a bit slow (I think the main developer is away for a while). There's also kooBase [lienhard.desy.de], which I haven't been able to compile yet, and Jazz [jazzware.com] (shareware)

    This page [bright.net] is a good place for music/sound software for Linux.

  • God you're sounding like GNOME folks - everything is "will be". The solution is simple. Don't use ALSA if you don't need to. It doesn't help anyone if you whine about it. And with some soundcards costing around $15 these days, $20 for the driver is NOT a bargain :)
  • There is a small and powerfull sequencer package for Linux called Rosegarden. It's GPL'ed unlike all the other MIDI sequencers for Unix that I've seen. It may look outdated (it uses nothing but Xlib for the GUI), but it is intuitive and *very* fast.

    Check it out at:

    http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/rose.html

    A new version using the GTK+ and Gnome libs for the interface is at the conceptual stage.


    Chris Wareham
  • I really like the idea of having the ALSA code added to the kernel. This will increase the multimedia viability of the system as a whole...which is a plus...and a needed step towards world domination ;)
  • I've used it from everything from:

    1) Playing MP3's, .wav's, .au, and .ram files...
    2) Microphone recording.
    3) Playing Quake/Quake2/Civ:CTP
    4) Creating CD's from audio tape (FD definately worked for that)

    MIDI is coming but not here yet for general use. Anything else you would need it for?

    jf
  • Also, ALSA does a lot of things that OSS/Lite doesn't and won't:

    1) Full Duplex on ALL cards that support it.
    2) Hardware mixing (multiple sound streams) for hardware that supports it.
    3) Very sophisticated midi infrastructure
    4) Patch management for soundcard synths
    5) Documented API
    6) Multiple card support (up to 8 per system)
    7) Modular system
    8) Extensive mixer control system
    9) Card autodetection
    10) PnP autoconfiguration (for PnP cards)


    And that's just the stuff off the top of my head.

    OSS is a very basic sound interface. ALSA is very
    structured, professional interface (or will be).

    jf
  • I was talking about the sequencer/MIDI portion of ALSA and some of the more advanced dsp features (hardware mixing) in current development, or in the next phase in the 'will be's'. Everything else is already there.

    And it takes about 5 minutes to set up a PCI or PnP (if you have the resources) sound card with ALSA...

    And KDE has it's share of "will be's" too... :)

  • Nice to see Jaroslav getting some attention... (Score:3)

    by John Fulmer ( 5840 ) on Thursday June 10, 1999 @03:36AM (#1857575)
    Having been involved with him for the last 3 years as a driver tester, it is nice to see Jaroslav (or Perex, his old handle) getting some attention and credit for his hard work. He is truly a quality human being and is one of the unsung hero's in the Linux world.

    About three years ago, I had a Gravis Ultrasound. The DOS/Windows drivers were buggy, and the OSS drivers weren't much better. I suffered along awhile, having to load Windows to to anything sound related, until I found the UltraSound Project, Jaroslav's first driver project.

    The UltraSound Project was an attempt to provide an OSS compatible driver, written from scratch, that 1) worked, and 2) supported all the features of the Ultrasound cards.

    The project was wildly sucessful in both goals. At the end, the /dev/dsp emulation was almost perfect, and it had a very, VERY nice /dev/sequencer emulator that did patch management, MPU-401 emulation to the Ultrasound's onboard synth (which allowed the use of ANY MIDI program written for linux). I was quite happy.

    On the sucess of the Ultrasound Project, Jaroslav started ALSA. The nice thing about ALSA, though, was that it was no longer a project to create an OSS compatible driver , but to create a better sound system (with backwards compatibility) with features like full duplex for every card that supports it, hardware mixing of multiple sound streams, RT (or close to it) recording, and an professional quality MIDI subsystem; along with an API (alsalib) for programmers to easily write software for it.

    At this moment, ALSA is at version .3.1 However, the PCM interface is pretty much completed and working great. The mixer interface is pretty much completed (after a recent major overhaul). The sequencer interface is currently under major development, and the onboard synth support for soundcards, with patch management, etc. is just starting to get going.

    I have found it very usable over the last year or so for day to day work, and I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to try it out. Here is a short list of supported soundcards (note this is PCM, no MIDI. MIDI support (as stated) is just starting for soundcards):

    Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, Max, ACE)
    AMD Interwave (Gravis Ultrasound PnP)
    CS4232,CS4236,CS461x
    OPL3-SA
    SoundBlaster 8,16,AWE
    es1688
    es18xx
    ess solo1
    Ensoniq AudioPCI, SB PCI {32,64,128}
    Trident 4DWave {DX,NX} (I have one of these! Works great)
    S3 SonicVibes
    MSS

    And more coming all the time. And in case no one mentioned the web site, it's http://www.alsa-project.org. There are also developer and user mailing lists available..

    Anyway nice article, and if you want to help, please do. Users and testers welcome.

    jf

  • ;-) (Score:1)

    by pqbon ( 7033 )
    Sounds like we finally have a kick ass sound system. This should help make linux a viable multimedia platform. I personally feal that multimedia is this biggest whole in the linux stratagie/philiosophy. For me it's not a huge issue but it keeps me from moving my mom and fiancee to linux. They like there MM stuff.
    "There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
    "SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
  • now there's a good idea. it would be great to have a distro that automatically installs a lot of the great music programs out there. i think there are many musicians who would like to try linux, but are not technical enough to build up there own toolkit of software. but i could be wrong.

  • Sure, we need all kinds of things though.
    Decent Midi software for one thing; something
    that can take midi -in and output staff music,
    and then typeset it.

    So much of the "music" layer is "mp3 this, mp3 that" but that's not really all musicians want.
    To me, midi is far more important. A GUI/wysiwyg
    composition tool would absolutely rock, as would
    a port of something like guitar pro.

    Studio folks need SMTPE encoding too, for A/V.
    Keyboard players need midi sequencers. A linux
    port of cakewalk, for instance.

    And where is the decent speech synthesis?
  • Netscape 4.06 on Windows 98, page makes it go boom after a few seconds. /me goes to run Lynx...
  • Hey!

    Neither ALSA nor OSS supports that chip you've got on your shoulder, so why don't you just get rid of it? :)
  • There is no soundcard.h in ALSA. The main header file that applications include is sys/asoundlib.h which is LGPL. It does include some other files that are GPL'ed but maybe it would have been better to ask if that was just an oversight.

    The free drivers that are included in the kernel are almost all GPL as well, so they are not free to be used in closed source products, unless they are also available under a different licence as well. So I don't really see what the point is here.

    The reason why I started using ALSA was simply because OSS just didn't work for me. Whenever you try to find out more, the advice was always to get the commercial version. Eventually I realised that it just isn't very suitable for music applications and that ALSA had a better plan and a more promising future even though it was less complete.
  • great news that the kernel is going to get the addition of such a fully-featured sound driver, the future just keeps looking rosier...

    it got me thinking about MIDI -- does anyone know of any MIDI sequencers for Linux? And what MIDI interface hardware is supported, if any. A quick search of Freshmeat simply shows MIDI players [presumably using soundcard wave tables and the like].

    it'd be cool to think about using linux for my keyboard -- Cubase4PPC is damn unstable!

  • I assume the other recorder they are referring to is Multitrack. (I don't have a link for it handy.) However, as far as I can tell, Multitrack is distributed binary only, and only for x86.
  • I have found it very usable over the last year or so for day to day work

    I'm just wondering, what is it that ALSA are very usable for? Just playing sounds, or for recording as well? And if for recording as well, for full duplex recording?

    I'm asking because one of the two applications that keeps me attatched to the MacOS is ProTools, a very nice HDD recorder. I would defninitely like to be able to switch over to Linux entirely at some point. But it's really hard to record duets by oneself if you don't have full duplex recording! :)

  • I have earlier used the OSS/Lite drivers for my 3 Linux PC:s at home. The sound quality improved very much when switching to ALSA drivers.

    The script for aoutoconfiguration of ALSA is a very impressive piece of art. It looks pretty small but does all the magic for you.

    This project really deserves attention and support.

    //Pingo

  • MIDI and buttloads of other Linux music software is available at:

    http://sound.condorow.net/

    this is by far the most thorough collection of Linux (and UNIX in general) music programs, so it's highly recommended.
  • Multitrack is available at:

    http://rulhmpc38.leidenuniv.nl/private/multitrac k/multitrack.html
  • when did music inclined ppl become machine destroying political members?

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