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Music Software Media Linux

Linux Audio Developers Conference 267

Posted by michael from the ear-candy dept.
paulbd writes "This weekend sees the first Linux audio developers conference at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Gathering together many members of the Linux Audio Developers mailing list and others, the conference will feature 2 days of in-depth technical presentations and demonstrations of many cutting edge Linux audio and MIDI applications." Desktoplinux.com has a related story about using Linux in a professional recording studio.
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Linux Audio Developers Conference More

Linux Audio Developers Conference

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  • Where is the stream ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:08PM (#5494816) Homepage

    This all appears to be text, are they streaming the presentations, which would make sense at a conference like this ?

    • Re:Where is the stream ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by theno23 ( 27900 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @02:26PM (#5495520) Homepage
      - The live audio stream to be broadcast on Friday and Thursday (probably
      between ~ 2 P.M. and 9 P.M. on both days) is available at these LiveIce
      servers:

      x http://plugin.org.uk:2300/liveice (currently set to max. 50 clients)
      x http://politik.uni-duisburg.de:2300/liveice (max. 20 clients)

      As posted to the linux-audio-developers mailing list.

  • LADC? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:11PM (#5494848)
    I think they should be renamed "Linux Audio Realtime Developers And Sound Symposium".

  • could be big (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:12PM (#5494853)
    Sound support is one area where Linux has consistly trailed more important Operatin Systems such as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh OS. Where those systems have had Professional quality support for Professional quality hardware that works well, Linux has been stuck in the background.

    Perhaps this Conference can identify and deal with such issues as:

    1. High Latency when performing other tasks such as opening windows or moving windows around. This leads to stutters in Audio and MP3 Playback.

    2. Poor compatibility with Professional and New hardware. Realistically, although most people use SB AWE64 and SB Live! sound cards, most Professionals use newer cards and many new computers have other cards. Linux is not compatible with hardware that is newer, cheaper or more expensive.

    3. Poor feature support for Linux, because it is good support for features such as 3D Sound and MIDI Music playback.

    4. Best Stability on Linux audio drivers. Other Operating Systems have drivers that crash less for Audio Hardware. Linux is a very much more stable Operating System in most respects, but the lack of stability in audio drivers is Irritating.

    If these issues can be addressed then Linux could be a top quality audio platform!

    • Re:could be big (Score:4, Informative)

      by cxreg ( 44671 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:19PM (#5494914) Homepage Journal
      1. High Latency when performing other tasks such as opening windows or moving windows around. This leads to stutters in Audio and MP3 Playback.

      This is definitely being fixed in Linux 2.6. Between the new O(1) scheduler and the recent patches for interactivity, this SHOULD go away completely.

    • Re:could be big (Score:5, Informative)

      by oliverthered ( 187439 ) <oliverthered@nOSPAm.hotmail.com> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:21PM (#5494930) Journal
      High Latency.....
      pop along to kernel.org and get a 2.5 kernel. Oh, and make sure your graphics card is accelerated.

      'Poor compatibility with Professional and New hardware', wait till Mac becomes #3, also I think it's easier to write drivers for 2.5/6.

      'Poor feature support for Linux', go get alsa (or 2.5 since it has alsa in the kernel tree).

      'Best Stability on Linux audio drivers', now this is where you can help, since you want 1 2 and 3 why not goto kernel.org, get a 2.5 kernel, do some testing and report the bugs in the kernel bugzilla.

      • Re: Wait Until Mac is #3?? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Black-Man ( 198831 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:29PM (#5495002)
        If that's what you are waiting on for more drivers... good luck. Apple's purchase of EMagic shows they are serious about pro-audio dominance to continue on the Mac.

        • Re: (Score:3, Redundant)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:49PM (#5495182)
            Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Vocalized and then output through ALSA.
      -----

      Sound whirrrrrrrrrrrsupport is one (crakcle)area where Linux akkkkpwhas consistly trailed more ptoo ptoo ptooimportant Operatin Systemshack hack such as Microsoft Windows pukpupupkkupuand Macintosh OS. Where thosewhirrrrrrrr systems have had Professional quality supportckckckckckckc for Professional quality hardware that whirrrrrrrrrrrrworks well, Linuxkkkkkkk has been stuck (snappoofbang)in the backgroundpokopokop.

      I've had much better luck with OSS (although latency sucks) than ALSA. Also, what's the deal with ALSA not being able to handle 4 or 5 channel cards? That's like a 3d graphics card with the prereq of 2.5 d only.
    • Get some decent apps and good drivers will appear, get some good drivers and decent apps will appear.

      I wish Linux supported my Yamaha sound cards, Yamaha aren't interested in Linux drivers as I have asked them before. Something about giving away secrets of their chips etc.. bah.

      I'm voting with my wallet...
      • That excuse is such a load of horse sh-t. If we can reverse engineer drivers one Windows then what's stopping a company with resources to dedicate to the task from reverse engineering their secrets? Besides, what's stopping them from releasing a closed source driver? Yamaha won't be seeing any of my money anytime soon.
        • The two cards in question are (or were, they're getting on a bit) professional cards. They can't see a professional Linux market exists, hence not worth the risk.

          The codecs on both my cards are not Yamaha designs, so could have some driver written, it's the control ASICs that they wish to keep secret.
      • OSS supports many Yamaha sound cards. Look here [opensound.com].
      • Come to think of it, so does ALSA [alsa-project.org].

        mumbles somethign about stupid 20 second limit...

    • Re:could be big (Score:4, Informative)

      by Surak ( 18578 ) <surakNO@SPAMmailblocks.com> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:35PM (#5495060) Homepage Journal
      1. High Latency when performing other tasks such as opening windows or moving windows around. This leads to stutters in Audio and MP3 Playback.

      I don't have any problem with this on my Athlon XP 1800+ running Gentoo Linux. Although I did have some problems with these on my old Mandrake 8.1-based AMD K6/2 400, the problems were *more* pronounced in Windows 98 and Windows 2000 on the same hardware than they were in Mandrake.

      Now I'm not sure whether the lack of these problems is due to Gentoo's high-level of optimization or my faster processor, but I suspect it's some combination of the two.

      I paid less than $600 for the components to build the Athlon box last year.

      Poor compatibility with Professional and New hardware. Realistically, although most people use SB AWE64 and SB Live! sound cards, most Professionals use newer cards and many new computers have other cards. Linux is not compatible with hardware that is newer, cheaper or more expensive.

      I don't know about higher-end hardware than the SB AWE64 and SB Live! cards, but you say that Linux doesn't work with hardware that's cheaper. I say sure it is. The aforementioned Athlon has integrated SiS 7018-based sound hardware that works absolutely fine and has 100% functionality with ALSA.

      Best Stability on Linux audio drivers. Other Operating Systems have drivers that crash less for Audio Hardware. Linux is a very much more stable Operating System in most respects, but the lack of stability in audio drivers is Irritating

      I've never had any audio driver crash on Linux, but then again I've only used 3 different drivers so what do I know? ;)

      • I've never had any audio driver crash on Linux, but then again I've only used 3 different drivers so what do I know? ;)
        The only time I've ever had Linux hang (rather than X Windows hanging) were due to hardware problems.

        However, one of these was a bad port on an SBLive! card. The kernel would hang when the ALSA driver was insmod'ed for this card. The same card on a Windows 2000 machine would NOT hang the machine -- the bad port just didn't work.

        Now, I can see both sides of an argument here regarding whether drivers should accommodate hardware which is actually broken (rather than just poorly designed). If I didn't use that port, I'd have never know w/ Windows that the card was bad.

        • Ehhh...IMHO, you shouldn't hold an audio driver to the standard that it should work with broken hardware. The only bad design I could see there is that the driver should report the bad port and then at very least disable itself if the design is such that it can't continue with the broken port. It shouldn't just hang. That's how *I* think the driver should handle it. But on the other hand, sound hardware isn't *generally* a mission-critical component, unless of course we are talking a professional audio studio, then it's another story. So it comes down to a design decision, really, and what side you err on depends on what your goal is.

          Now, a RAID driver should definitely work with a broken a hard drive -- but it should report that error immediately, of course, giving the administrator ample opportunity to replace the bad drive.

    • Re:could be big (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:38PM (#5495082) Journal
      The biggest problem for desktop users, IMHO:

      Conflicts between sound servers. Under Windows and MacOS, I have no idea what the counterparts to Arts, OSS and ESD are, no idea whether there's a single one or if different servers can easily be run concurrently. And there's no reason why I should have to have any idea.

      It's absurd that there should be work involved if I want to play MP3's or streams with xmms AND CD's with the KDE player.

      No doubt someone is going to tell me that if I don't know the fine points of sound servers, I don't deserve to have sound on my computer. Let me save you same time and preemptively reject that notion.
      • Well, as this thread is for the most part geared towards more professional applications, I would say that a professional probably wouldn't want to be running his sound through Arts if he's worried about latency.

      • Re:could be big (Score:4, Informative)

        by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @02:36PM (#5495619)
        On Windows, I believe DirectSound does software mixing in the kernel.... the Linux guys don't want all that kind of crud in the kernel and for good reason. So we need to mix in userland.

        Last time I checked up on this (a few weeks ago) there was a big discussion going on kde-multimedia about this very issue. KDE is really the key point here, as now GNOME is moving to GStreamer they are basically isolated from what sound server is used.

        The main sticking points seemed to be: JACK is cool for pro audio, but doesn't have network transparency and is Linux only. aRts just blows goats, and needs to be phased out. MAS == Unknown?? GStreamer is being blocked by a few developers who aren't happy with GObject. Then there's this thing called CSL which is supposed to wrap the whole mess up into YAAA (yet another audio api).

        Basically, the situation is highly confused, and I don't know if we'll get anything good out of it :(

        Oh, and just to make things even more fun, it seems that at some point ALSA may get the ability to route its audio via JACK, so apps that are unaware of the sound server in use could end up being mixed by JACK.

        Personally I'd favour JACK (or Jack) here, because firstly it's been designed by the linux audio community for low latency etc, so clearly real audio apps will be using it. Having to switch sound servers because you want to fire up a sample editor is stupid. Secondly, it's light and small enough to be accepted by most people, ie it's not a CORBA driven multimedia framework.

        The main problem seems to be lack of network transparency, which isn't really of great concern to most users at this time and could be added to Jack anyway.....

        • On Windows, I believe DirectSound does software mixing in the kernel....

          So does FreeBSD. They have virtual devices in /dev called /dev/dsp.{1..n} (for all the channels), and /dev/dsp just takes which ever one's free. In-kernel sound multiplexing. Is that cool or what. No matter what your desktop uses (arts, esd, whatever) it will always work.

          Of course your audio card must support it. One card at least that I know off that can do it are the ESS/Maestro type cards.

          • Er, I think perhaps you don't understand the difference between software mixing and hardware mixing. Software mixing is what is used when the hardware doesn't support it, Linux w/ OSS has been able to utilise this nearly right from the start.

            In kernel mixing is where the kernel actually does the mixing calculations itself. That functionality doesn't actually need to be in the kernel, so they don't want it there.

            Anyway, this is all moot, it seems that the ALSA guys have come up with a way to use direct writes to the soundcards DSP buffer to do software mixing. Maybe sound servers will just fade into obscurity?

        • Hmmm. Apple's CoreAudio classes are supposed to be the bee's knees, and before that, NeXTStep had a highly regarded set of classes in the computer music community. Could the GnuStep Project's implementation be a good place to look?
        • JACK performs well but is not (yet) a "do the right thing" kind of program. It requires a high amount of user intervention to do anything useful. At the moment it forces you to configure the period size and the number of periods manually. Too low and you will get dropouts, too high and you will get sub-par latency. You can't just tell it to optimize for reliability at the expense of latency, because it can only operate with period-size/number-of-period combinations that the underlying ALSA driver directly supports.

          Additionally it will not resample for you, so if applications have sound data at a sample rate other than the rate JACK is running at, the application must be able to resample internally.

          I want to see a standard sound server as much as anyone else, but I don't think JACK (in its current form) is ready to fill that role. The question is whether someone will step up to accomplish the difficult task of retaining JACK's high performance while also making it simpler to use for less demanding users.
      • I personally never saw the point in sound servers, I have a ymfpci sound card and running the alsa drivers, I don't run a sound server, and mutliple applications can be accessing /dev/dsp at once, playing an mp3, still hear icq sounds, record. I've never runn esd, arts, or whatever....

        It's weird though, I can do all that, but if I load a page that uses flash, and I'm recording at the time, I get a kernel oops and my sound driver dies (until I reboot) damn annoying.

    • Re:could be big (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:43PM (#5495136)
      This is a conference for professional audio on Linux, and most of your points are from a amateur/consumer viewpoint.

      You have to invest both in skills (ability to set up the computer and apply patches) and in hardware (RME/Hammerfall or M-audio are well supported) to use Linux for pro audio.

      1 High latency.

      Use a kernel with Low-latency patches, and a low latency sound server like jackd. Do not use a journalling file system on your audio drives.

      2 Poor compatability.

      See the ALSA page for supported hardware.

      3 Feature support.

      3D sound and simple soundcard MIDI music playback are not much use in a studio.

      4 Best Stability.

      Audio drivers rarely if ever crash, you may be thinking of sound servers such as ARTS, or indeed a program like xmms.

      I think that if Linux makes an impression in the pro-audio recording world, it will initially be as a replacement for dedicated systems like the Mackie HDR 24/94, Fostex MX-2424. These are the workhorses of studios, required to do a straightforward job, but with very high reliability.

    • Realistically, although most people use SB AWE64 and SB Live! sound cards, most Professionals use newer cards and many new computers have other cards. Linux is not compatible with hardware that is newer, cheaper or more expensive.

      Not to mention that it has a fair share of limitations even with the Live! board you mentioned above. I recently tried to load a 145MB soundfont and found the driver dropping notes like mad. I couldn't find anything that would help solve this in the docs for alsa (which are VERY sparse - it took me a LOT of searching until I stubled on a Wiki page which mentioned that you need to download a 3rd party driver designed for the AWE series of boards to get soundfonts to load at all).

      Finally I started grepping through the source to find if there was a hard-coded limit to the soundfont buffer size. I found some tantalizing contstants in there, but no smoking guns.

      Granted, the Creative windows drivers have their own limitations (such as only letting you allocate 50% of RAM towards a soundfont), but this has been overcome with 3rd party software (such as Megafont - which loads and unloads individual patches as needed). I don't expect bells and whistles, but a kernel module parameter to set the soundfont buffer size would be nice. I'd even settle for an obvious #define in an include file in the source...

  • Alsa 0.9.1 released (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In related news, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture [alsa-project.org] has just released its newest stable version, 0.9.1.

    The linux sound community has been waiting for this for a long time. Congrats guys!

  • You forgot one (Score:5, Informative)

    by i0wnzj005uck4 ( 603384 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:14PM (#5494872) Homepage
    Audacity [sourceforge.net] is pretty good, and for linux too. Can't believe it missed the cut.

  • Hardware support (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But how many hardware manufacturers are actually putting out low-latency ASIO drivers for Linux?

    (On the plus side, Linux does have CSound and PD, which are excellent progs for electronic musicians.)

    • Re:Hardware support (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward


      RME and M-AUDIO are sufficient for me.

      good quality + good performance == bliss

    • Re:Hardware support (Score:5, Informative)

      by lightcycle ( 649999 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:30PM (#5495006)
      Linux doesn't use ASIO, it uses ALSA, which in addition to being much faster (lower latency) than ASIO also supports quite a few soundcards, both consumer and professional grade.

      Here is a pdf with latency tests [jhu.edu]

      I think the sound managment in linux has improved quite dramatically in the past few years, and there are right now _a lot_ of projects which will make linux a reasonable choice for professional audio authouring, such as ardour, jack, alsa, etc. (look at links in the story)

      I don't know what the current status on VST plugins in linux is, but there's still ladspa, which seems to be a very competent architecture. Steinberg's hesitation in this area might very well prove to be a mistake, costing them influence in a growing market.

      I'm right now in the process of trying linux out for a synthpop project I'm working on, using ardour, and various softsynths and sequencers. If some interesting experience comes out of it, I'll make it known.

  • Andromeda (Score:3, Informative)

    by turnstyle ( 588788 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:15PM (#5494879) Homepage
    Linux audio folks might be interested in my software, Andromeda [turnstyle.com]. It runs on Linux/Mac OS/Windows with PHP or ASP, and turns a collection of MP3s, OGGs, and so on into a streaming web site.

    Sorry if that was too much of a self-serving plug.

    • If you want to mix Mp3's in realtime (Score:5, Informative)

      by oliverthered ( 187439 ) <oliverthered@nOSPAm.hotmail.com> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:23PM (#5494953) Journal
      Try gdam [ffem.org], I havn't seen it in any distros yet.

      GDAM is a digital dj mixing software package. It aims to be a powerful, professional-quality music mixing and remixing system, suitable for live performance. It was conceived on some beautiful summer morning (in 1998), and developed with drive and enthusiasm that seemed completely unnatural. Over four years later, we have achieved many of our goals; yet, development continues. Here is a list of features:

      client-server architecture based around glib
      streaming and mixing of any number of mp3 files
      dynamic filter insertion and removal
      multiple sound device support (see the faq)
      plugin support
      cacheing / playing loops
      contiguous queueing - plays albums without gaps between songs, regardless of output buffer size
      dj turntable-style interface
      assisted beat matching
      waveform viewer / beat calculator
      sequencer
      record from any point in the stream, to disk or another process
      gtk gui's, with simple skin support
      flexible command-line interface
      gdam123 - an mpg123 clone that talks to a gdam server
      Users Guide
      hardware input support (midi and other)
      support to use LADSPA plugins
      support to create LADSPA plugins graphically
      online help

    • Re:Andromeda (Score:2, Interesting)

      by rute20740 ( 567763 )
      Another alternative, is NetJuke [sourceforge.net]. Did I mention it's free software, unlike Andromedia?

  • Sonic Foundary niche (Score:5, Informative)

    by molarmass192 ( 608071 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:17PM (#5494894) Homepage Journal
    I know for a few migrations I've been asked about, the show stopper has been lack of tools like those provided by Sonic Foundary and other music maker tools. Vegas and Fruity Loops are the two that have lost me converts in the past and neither work in WINE. I'm not a music man so I didn't have anything to counterpoint with but this is one area where Linux apps (not the OS) need to play catch up since Win and Mac apparently have many good music composition apps available for them.

  • Linux audio is still shakey to me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GMFTatsujin ( 239569 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:19PM (#5494915) Homepage
    I recently installed Gentoo Linux with modest optimizations for my processor (athlon-tbird 1GHz at -O2), expecting some pretty snappy response. Every app and driver was compiled from source with compatabilities built in for ALSA and OSS. I though it would be better than pre-compiled binaries.

    I've been quite disappointed. Maybe I layered in too much.

    Noatun plays MP3s with only modest smoothness. mpg123 suffers similar problems. Skips are common when switching or redrawing windows. Real users stick to command lines, I guess. :)

    I haven't tried recording from a live source, but I'd be wary -- is that weird pause in the music because of the recording skipping, or the playback skipping? Which system do I trust?

    Anyway. Perhaps I tried stuffing in too much compatability, and instead should have picked one system over the other. But then who knows which apps would work and which wouldn't?

    Please please please -- can we have a standard layer that's easy to install?
    GMFTatsujin

    • IMPORTANT:Little known Latency / Scheduler info !! (Score:5, Informative)

      by MarkWPiper ( 604760 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:55PM (#5495236) Homepage
      I am also a gentoo user.

      Here are some things to consider:

      1) Did you compile low latency support with sysctl support? In that case you have to turn on lowlatency mode on your own , a little known and not widely documented feature!

      2) I actually had worse performance, w/ the 2.4 tree, when both low latency, and the O(1) scheduler were enabled, and am now using just low latency. In 2.5, AFAIK, they play much better, and it's sensible to enable both.

      4) Are you using OSS, or alsa?

      3) Gentoo now includes a safe hdparm script (I think it's installed by default, at least on ~x86), which works great. Check for it in /etc/init.d

      4) Be wary of the difference between march and mcpu optimizations! The choice makes a big difference!

      • All five of the issues (#1, #2, #4, #3, and #4) mentioned in the parent post are things that a typical OS user should NEVER have to know about. Linux distributions still have a long way to go before they're as friendly as MacOS or Windows.

        I don't want to spend hours tweaking my OS to get MP3s to play smoothly. I just want them to play smoothly.

  • Finally (Score:3, Troll)

    by FullCircle ( 643323 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:21PM (#5494929)
    I hope they do something about the audio issues in Linux. When playing an mp3 is a frustrating, skipping nightmare on even high-end systems, something is wrong.

    Even a PentiumII 300Mhz running Windows has better audio capabilities than my P4 2.4Ghz running Linux.

    Maybe the new patches [slashdot.org] the kernel developers are comming up with will help?

    • Linux does have a tendency not to preempt. I have 1Gb or ram on my work machine and when I copy very large files everything gets cached and then after a few seconds the whole system freezes when the cache is dumped to disk.
      The new patches should solve that and improve reaction times
    • holy crap you have something horribly mis-configured.

      running Gnome, X, and tons of other apps running AND a XMMS vis running I get ZERO skips on a linux box on a simple P-II-350

      if you cant play mp3's perfectly in linux on anything bigger than a Pentium 200 thne you did something horribly wrong.

      and yes, I play mp3's all day long on a websurfer pro which is a Pentium 200 set top box with a jukebox program, mysql, and apache running on it.

  • Linux in a Pro Studio (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Obiwan Kenobi ( 32807 ) <(evan) (at) (misterorange.com)> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:22PM (#5494933) Homepage
    Wow. I've never read such a vague article [desktoplinux.com] in my life.

    Here's the synop:

    We used Windows. It crashed and got viruses. We didn't want to upgrade to XP.

    We played around with Linux. We decided on Mandrake. We went Ogg Vorbis. Life is grand.

    Nothing on the implentation, nothing on what programs/hardware they used in Windows or Linux, nothing in regards to performace of said hardware and/or ported software.

    Linux is great for them, but being too vague doesn't help small time studios understand how to use it in their shop, or how best to go about it.

    Why not get a little more in-depth, such as what utilities they used, what hardware settings needed to be tweaked (if any), and how difficult it was to train for.

    For example:

    What was the hardest part to train/learn?
    What features are you hoping Linux audio programs will add in the future?
    What advice would you give to a small, struggling studio in regards to using Linux in a studio?
    Do you know of any other studios who have utilized Linux?
    The list goes on.
    • My impression of this article is that they're using their Linux systems for general-purpose functions ( like converting things to/from Ogg, book keeping, stuff like that ) rather than any real heavy-duty recording, multitracking, or editing. All the benefits of Linux mentioned in this article would be the same if you switched your desktop to Linux, or your server, or mom's home computer, or whatever.

      Unfortunately, multi-track recording and mixing, pro-level audio I/O hardware support ... those are exactly the features I _need_ in a studio computer, which are still not quite there yet in the Linux world.
    • If you looked closely you would see that this "article" was actually taken from a Windows-to-Linux Migration topic on a Desktop Linux's message board. He wasn't writing a HOW-TO, or addressing any propeller heads. If you do want the answers to your questions (instead of bitching for karma), head over to the source [desktoplinux.com] and ask them.
    • I'd also question if this is what's meant by a "Pro" studio. I understand that it was used in a production capacity for a radio station, so in that sense it's professional I suppose, but it's not at all clear that it had the multitrack and audio manipulation abilities you'd expect from a facility built for recording a band.

      Getting away from the other vague technical points, I'd be happy just know what capabilities the studio actually had.

  • oggenc is great (Score:2, Interesting)

    by timothy ( 36799 )
    a) it's great to see the various specialized summits and meetings that have happened in the last few years especially (distro-based, or "Desktop Linux" or kernel summit, or ...) -- it's impressive that the various subsystems are independently good enough (and independent enough, if that makes sense) that improving one system does not (usually) kill the others.

    b) Speaking of Linux sound, a nice thing: the other day, I compressed some music (passengermusic.com is the band's site, though no music is on the site) for a musician I know, because I'd like to convince him to post some music in ogg vorbis format on the band's website.

    Usually, I have used grip to do such compression (nice interface, easy), but this time I wanted to try a wider range of qualities without going in an changing grip's preferences several times, so I started up oggenc instead.

    Compressed at q6, the sound was predictably good, and my tin ears on my low-end equipment could not tell from the original. Sadly, same is true at 3. Probably most of the other available integers, too.

    For kicks (and since this is for web use, and since most people are still on dialup, and since long downloads are a pain in the tuchus ...), I tried q -1, and am shocked at how good it is! I ended up with a compression ratio of about 35-to-1 (350-some MB total WAV files; approx. 10MB squashed to -1) and sound that in non-critical listening environments would be jes' fine, thanks. I should try compressing to q -1 and making it *mono* first, too.

    timothy
  • Linux audio is still hellish.

    It reminds me of the DOS days when you had to pick your soundcard from a list of 6 for each and every app/game you'd install.

    I dont want to configure each seperate app for my hardware. This is the 21st century for crying out loud! So make some rules about how linux makes noise. Just writing to /dev/dsp is no good, lets have a standard api that can do proper positional mixing, fading, and whatnot.

    I know such libraries/sound servers exist. Just pick one that works and run with it.
    • You got to be kidding. Selecing one working solution that doesn't suck isn't the way of Open Source. Instead, you get to choose between several solutions with various suckiness depending on what defect(s) you can live with. Just look at the X mess, where all applications look and behave different.

      On a more serious note - yes, a standard library for sound handling would be superb. Such a simple thing as a global sound mixer is impossible right now, since you have to figure out a way to support *all* sound generation ways. I also agree that using /dev/dsp doesn't cut it for multichannel cards and such things. How do you read 13 tracks of audio at the same time from /dev/dsp? Or send your 32-channel ProTools project to the sound card?

  • Radio Studio != Professional Recording Studio (Score:3, Informative)

    by RadioheadKid ( 461411 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:31PM (#5495021)
    Anyone who has ever worked in radio knows that radio production is not the same as a professional recording studio. In addition to that, the article is very vague, it appears like they are encoding files to Ogg Vorbis and burning CDs, nothing groundbreaking there.

    • ...radio production is not the same as a professional recording studio.

      Yeah, I noticed that too about the article. They only mention doing real studio tasks on linux by saying "we could have done them if we wanted to." Well, why didn't they?

      A major reason why people I've tried to convert in the audio field won't is because of the lack of professional grade HD recording, sequencing, audio effects apps for linux.

  • Professional sound? What about desktop sound? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jagripino ( 314506 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:35PM (#5495058)
    Most comments here are discussing the lack of quality professional sound apps for Linux.

    Well fuck that. I just want to be able to listen to my MP3s and still be able to know when I get an e-mail or IM like I did when I was in Win2k.

    OK, I CAN do that right now, using ESD, but it's a kludge that I'd like to see going away.

    I'm looking forward to see the kind of sound quality we'll have at kernel level on 2.6.

    Yes, I'm a happy user of a desktop Linux, after years using it on servers. But boy did I have lots of trouble trying to get the same desktop experience I had with Win2k...
    • OK, I CAN do that right now, using ESD, but it's a kludge that I'd like to see going away.

      Or you can buy a soundcard that does hardware mixing and free up some CPU cycles at the same time. Both OSS and ALSA have dealt with cards that can do hardware mixing/resampling for some time now, for instance I can run many sound apps at once on my machine at work, all using OSS, because my card isn't a dirt cheap one.

      Unfortunately, because Windows has provided "backup" software mix/resample functionality for so long, many manufacturers are simply doing without to get cheaper than their competitors. It's like the winmodem situation :(

  • LADC is the Latin American Symposium on Dependable Computing [pcs.usp.br], the most important event on Dependable Systems in Latin America, in cooperation with IFIP wg 10.4
    • an AC up near the top suggested an alternative acronym:

      "Linux Audio Realtime Developers And Sound Symposium"

      It has a nice ring to it, I think.

      "Hey, you - I'm here for LARDASS, where's the pizza?"

  • Professional linux audio workstation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hafree ( 307412 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:44PM (#5495138) Homepage
    This is actually something I've been looking at for my own needs for a while now. As the author put it quite accurately in the last article, Windows just lacks the stability needed for professional broadcasting applications. 20% of your efforts shouldn't need to go towards restoring data from crashes and rebuilding systems that need constant maintenance. I was considering OSX on Mac hardware simply because Macs have always been ideally suited for multimedia work. However, most applications I'd want to use come with the caveat that they have not yet been ported to OSX and must be run in classic mode. Might as well build a custom setup in Linux that will do everything you need. No IRQ conflicts coming about for no reason, no CPU bottlenecks when Gator or some other spy/adware running on your machine decides to use some cycles... I'll definitely be keeping my eye on any developments in this arena. :)

  • Spiralsynthmodular (Score:5, Informative)

    by dabadab ( 126782 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:44PM (#5495139)
    Check out spiralsynthmodular [sourceforge.net].
    It is a softsynth (a program that generates sound mostly based on algorithms).
    It basically provides a framework to connect modules (that are called plugins for confusion's sake :) and the actual work is carried out by them. SSM has its own plugins but it supports LADSPA [ladspa.org] (the de-facto standard for Linux softsynth plugins) too.
    SSM can connect to other applications via JACK [sourceforge.net], a low-latency audio server.

  • Advanced sound applications? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:47PM (#5495172)
    I'd be happy with ANY sound! You gotta walk before you can run, and in my experience, Linux is still in the pre-walk stage when it comes to sound. How about something that, when I install a Linux distro, makes whatever sound card I have actually work without having to play around with wierd downloads, configuring text files, etc.? I know that's a bit advanced for 2003, and maybe I'm asking for too much, but it's something that I'd really like to see.
    • How about something that, when I install a Linux distro, makes whatever sound card I have actually work without having to play around with wierd downloads, configuring text files, etc.?

      I can honestly say that (with execption to an anceint AWE-64 ISA card about 4 years ago) I've never had to dick around with anything like that. And the AWE was still fairly easy; sndconfig setup the AWE card working 100% fine in about 20 seconds. These days I just make sure the module for my card is in my kernel, and that's it. Reboot (to init the kernel). I use Gentoo, so I compile my own kernels, but with a more mainstream distro, all that stuff is already there in the binary package they hand out.

      Granted I've used fairly generic cards (meaning I don't have an Audigy or something), but I've been using linux (and several flavors of it) since RH 5.2 (or something like that, I forget... it was 5 something) and I've never had to really dick with the system for sound to work.
      • My experince was different. Last one I tried was Redhat 7.0, and with generic, old PC's that were put together with generic parts, I couldn't get 'em to work. I should've been able to choose "Sound Blaster compatible" to make 'em work. I don't see ISA cards as "ancient" because A. They still work just fine and B. they work fine in W2K and C. I shouldn't *have* to buy new hardware just to make the software work properly.

  • Sorry Boys (Score:2, Informative)

    by Dokushoka ( 570664 )
    But Linux has a lot to catch up to before professionals will take it seriously (see below links) http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/audio.htm l http://212.86.33.7/home/news/index.php?lang=EN http://www.digidesign.com/
  • I think having a conference dedicated to audio issues on Linux is great for the platform. Linux is going gang-bisters on the server - it's on the desktop that the next surge will take place. If compelling video and audio applications are produced that push the envelope in terms of performance and features can that take advantage of the cost savings of Intel hardware, then Linux may be able to carve out a niche from some of SGI and Apple's customers. This will certainly be of benefit to the end user and will help increase Linux mindshare.

  • This is wonderful but.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DCowern ( 182668 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:52PM (#5495211) Homepage

    I love to hear linux success stories -- especially ones about Mandrake, don't get me wrong. The article, however, mentions that this person paid $69 for a Mandrake powerpack and installed it on three machines. He claims that this made the cost $23 per machine. Don't the commecial pay-for-media distributions usually have a caveat that the license is for one machine only and that additional machines require separate licenses?

    His claim is kind of like me going to BestBuy and buying one copy of XP, installing it on 165 machines and claiming I reduced our licensing fees to $1 per machine.

    Trust me, I'm not a licensing nazi or anything like that but, being a software developer myself, I strongly believe that if you like a certain piece of software, you should pay for it. Even more so in this case because this is in a corporate environment and because Mandrake is having financial difficulties.

    If everyone in the corporate world adopts this attitude that "just because it's linux, we don't need to pay our licensing fees", theres not going to be much commercial linux left after awhile.

    If I were this guy, I'd run over to MandrakeStore.com and buy another two powerpack licenses just to help out the company that cut his costs so much.

  • This point has been made. When I can see some professional quality MULTITRACK recording software and the hardware support to go with it, I can get rid of Windows completely.

    However, supporting pro hardware, and syncing MIDI with real audio, at 24 bit resolution, including a reasonable GUI to do it all with, is the domain of Mac/Windows only as far as I can tell. Cakewalk Sonar leads by a long way on this. You can add digital effects in real time, chuck in a canned drumbeat while you lay down the first couple tracks, export to a single compressed file (lossless) and all sorts of wonderful stuff. That's what a pro studio needs.

    Editing single stereo files is NOT what professional recording studios do. Radio stations have very low requirements in this regard, they just pre-record shows and interviews, compress them in a lossy format, and send them out. Since FM and digital radios have analog or digital compression anyway, then OGG at high bitrates is fine. However, artefacts from SEVERAL mp3/ogg streams all in a multitrack environment is not acceptable.

    • Replying to myself, there is this FANTASTIC looking project called Ardour [sourceforge.net] which I will be checking out very soon. However, it won't sync with MIDI, but that's no so bad.

      No I just have to find out if it has some standard effects or not. I need at least compression and reverb to save having to buy an expensive outside effects box.

  • Mandrake audio workstation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Götz ( 18854 ) <`ten.xmg' `ta' `khcsaw'> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @01:53PM (#5495227) Homepage
    There's a recent project that tries to integrate all the best audio software into Mandrake Linux 9.1, including a patched multimedia kernel for the low latency, the ardour sequencer and other stuff.
    It's all explained in this howto. [groundstate.ca]

  • Grr (Score:3, Interesting)

    by al3x ( 74745 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @02:05PM (#5495319) Homepage
    Having spent the better part of a weekend trying to get RedHat 8 and ALSA to jive with a fairly standard pro-consumer soundcard to no avail, I'd say the first thing Linux sound developers need to do is get shit working. I mean ALSA is absurd: every time you upgrade your kernel, you recompile. Explain that to any pro studio user who's used to the Mac/Windows "install driver, reboot, get working" way of computing. Then explain to them about all the command line stuff they'll have to learn, about two differing and conflicting user interfaces, about all the different distributions and package formats. I'm not sure pro users are willing to sacrifice hours of thier time for a 5ms drop in latency or whatever Linux audio developers can promise, and they certainly won't give up tools like Logic, Reason, and Pro Tools. Get stuff working for average users, Linux audio devs. Then we'll talk.
    • I mean ALSA is absurd: every time you upgrade your kernel, you recompile. [...] Get stuff working for average users, Linux audio devs.

      Average users do apt-get upgrade kernel or something to that effect, at which point ALSA is upgraded automatically. That is, if their distribution is worth its storage space.

      The initial bits of configuration are tougher, but the ALSA website [alsa-project.org] provides sample configurations for all supported cards.

  • Gimme a break.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by AusG4 ( 651867 )

    OK, this may in fact be a "professional recording studio", but in the author's own words, he uses the machines for archiving audio, burning discs and making CD's for distribution.

    When I can slap a pair of DigiDesign TDM cards into a linux box, run ProTools, and then use them to mix a 32 or 48 track mix for a band I'm recording... well, THEN it'll be ready for profesional audio use.

    Frankly, the only UNIX doing that kind of audio right now is MacOS X. Native multi-channel 32 bit audio is pretty sweet, yes... but it's not something linux sports in a usable fashion right now.

    • why the hell would you want to use overpriced proprietary hardware that isn't even particularly good at what it does?

      RME and others make decent multichannel hardware without the ridiculous price gouging Digidesign is involved in.

      Others of us are working on the software side.

      and i'd like to point out that Mac OS X still does not support the configuration you describe (though Digidesign have announced PT for OS X, its not shipping yet).

    • Re:Gimme a break.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by entrigant ( 233266 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:49PM (#5497977)
      Perhaps you missed the point. See these people are attending this thing to discuss the future of linux audio, and how they want to procede getting linux audio to the point you so nicely put that it is NOT at. Give US a break and quite pretending like every sentence with "linux" in the word is secretly meant to say "linux is perfect for X app, USE IT!"
  • Simply put, the base system installed and configured itself, including a rather complex ethernet router link to the internet.

    That's the easiest possible way to connect a Linux box to the net. Or am I missing something?

  • Mostly usable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eGabriel ( 5707 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @02:38PM (#5495632)
    I used to just use linux for sequencing and mixing down to digital, but now I have been playing with Ardour, JACK, LADSPA, and it's a whole new ball game. I can't wait to try the latest RoseGarden; it looks like it has come a long way. With JACK I can use my Delta 1010 sound card, and it sounds like a million bucks, and has fair support, including a mixer control panel very like the one it has under windows. I haven't tried recording under Windows since 3.1, but the software is all very expensive. I love software like Vision, but it's just not worth it to me anymore.

    I tried Be, which was supposed to be low-latency this and multimedia that, but nothing I recorded with it ever turned out very well. At the time, one couldn't even purchase a decent sequencing or multitrack recording app, even if you had the money.

    Lots of work has been done in the Linux kernel to address latency. It still is jerky sometimes, but a multi-processor system might help address that.

  • What a puff piece (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BluedemonX ( 198949 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @02:51PM (#5495759)
    He never mentioned what hardware, what software he was running.

    I would GLADLY build a home studio around Linux if I could figure out which distro, which sound card, and which EASY TO USE APPs to use to do the same kind of Cubase VST stuff I've previously done.

    Some package from some obscure German FTP site with a command line interface that doesn't even compile doesn't rate as "easy to use".

    If you're going to say how great your system is, please let some of us in on what it was you eventually used?

    Maybe the reason for the complete absence of detail is he didn't want to go into the endless kernel recompiles, header file and package searches (no no no you need ALSA_dev_package_weirdo_tool_support.h, that's available from ftp.godknowswhere.com) the frustrating incompatibilities with the top-end hardware, the latencies, etc.

    Much more rah-rah to say he installed Mandrake and suddenly he had no support costs.
  • I would like to see EAX support in Linux. I know Creative Labs has an opensource project [creative.com], but I don't think their emu10k1 driver has EAX support. I don't think any of the Linux native games support it, even Unreal Tournament 2003. :(

  • Annoying adjacent links (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zerosignal ( 222614 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @04:01PM (#5496436) Homepage Journal
    The type of fomatting used in this submission is very annoying, and I wish Slashdot editors would stop letting these through:
    in-depth technical presentations and demonstrations of many [alsa-project.org] cutting [sf.net] edge [all-day-breakfast.com] Linux [sf.net] audio [iua.upf.es] and MIDI [muse.seh.de] applications. [sourceforge.net]

    (The domains are only shown in-line when they're part of the comments, not stories).

    • With a high resolution display, you can barely see the pixel or two gap between the underscores. It just looks like one big long link.
    • To find out what each link is for I need to mouse-over each one individually. But Slashdot doesn't even make of the TITLE attribute of A tags, so I need to look at some cryptic URL in the status bar to figure out where it will take me!
    • The Related Links section is automatically generated from the links within a submission. But it's now rendered useless since it contains link titles such as 'many' and 'cutting'.
    A longer more-descriptive sentence would allow easier embedding of links, even though it may sound awkward when read aloud.

  • Oh, well. (Score:4, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:23PM (#5497588)
    Ah... I remember the good ol' days when there was this operating system called BeOS. They were going to be in all kinds of high-end audio equipment. I remember getting excited that after being somewhat involved in the tightly-knit community of BeOS users and developers for a number of years, the software started to gain recognition in one area of its technical superiority over competing systems of the time. Then, when a number of high quality audio and graphics applications were being produced by some of the biggest names in the aforementioned subjects, they made an announcement that they were shifting focus to refrigerators with email access. And everything went into the trash. Developers couldn't distance themselves from this crap fast enough.

    With several more years of improvement, Linux and other free operating systems are starting to gain on the technical advantages present in that several year old operating system. I feel confident that given a few more years and the efforts of individuals and companies worldwide, Linux will soon be the operating system of choice for everything from coffee makers to the next generation space shuttle. So I'm happy to hear about this conference and all this exciting stuff.

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