Kara-Moon Forum

There are a number of interesting topics in this section that all seem to have gone quiet.

Do we all know everything we need to ;D

Has it gone pear-shaped and we are quietly burying the embarrassing memories ???

Are we so engrossed that we don't have time to talk anymore ::)

Is it now so normal we don't bother to mention it 8)

... enquiring minds need to know :P

Homework, Will.

It's all come down to homework ;D. Lots of it. Examining the features of the various software tools, determining which are right for my style of composing/recording/mixing, and then deciding which ones work together most advantageously.

The array of software is staggering. Did you know that Linux has an equivalent to Buzz Machines called Buzztard (combination of bastard and buzz - really :D!) Plus Audacity still refuses to work as a JACK client, so I'm forced to learn Ardour. And the plugins - reams and reams of them. It's big, very big; and I'm just one tiny guitar player trying to sort it all out.

No lack of interest here, friend, just no time to chat about it lately.... :P

Oren.

As Oren said , homework  ;D

My configuration on 64studio is completly operational  8)
- Jack talks to my new M-audio interface with no problems and a latency of 5,8 msecs
- Audacity talks with Jack (strange Oren that this doens't work on your config ?)
- I've managed to sync all other softwares trough Jack, this was a big one !
- Now I can :
* Create a drumtrack with hydrogene with all drums on different output, sync ardour with hydrogene as a slave (MMC&SMTP) and record all hydrogene tracks in one go.
* Create midi tracks in Rosegarden, sync it with hydrogene and ardour and record the synths in rosegarden with ardour.

I have found out a couple of no-do's in ardour. My previous problem of not loading a saved ardour project is identified and comes from a bug in ardour. You should NEVER rename a track wich has allready audio on it  ::) But with some help on the ardour forum, I've managed to change the ardour project file, which is actually an XML file, and recovered it.
I found out how groups work in ardour, which is unconventional compared to other windws hosts, but quit clear one you know how it works.
I don't fully understand the concept of busses yet....

Allso managed to get milkytracker working and I'm in contact with the developper (on irc) , there is a version in the making with jack support.

Which finally means that I allmost have a complete equivalent of my old windows daw !

Next topic : Exploring Zyn...
Getting there quit soon now  8)

Btw. This one : http://www.kara-moon.com/forum/index.php?topic=1480.0 is completly Linux

k
 

Kara,

What synth are you using in the new collaboration song?

Why did you choose Rosegarden rather than Seq24?

Why have you switched from Audacity to Ardour?

Is there anything Audacity does that Ardour cannot do? (I'm trying to select software packages that work together, and not have two tools doing the same thing - avoiding redundancy, you know ;))

Do fish sleep?

Oren.

@Oren

Work, work work. It just never stops eh  ;)

Glad to see you're still moving forward.

I must admit I'm very puzzled by your Audacity problems. Have you thought of taking a very deep breath and trying to compile the latest version from source? It's a bit scary at first, but usually not too painful, and it does mean the code is optimised for the environment it's sitting in.

@Kara

Wow! You really have got this well organised in a very short time. Great stuff :-
I'll be very interested to see (and hear) what you make of Zyn :)

@Oren 2

According to a fish-keeping friend of mine, fish do the fishy equivalent of micro-napping ;D

Will,

Ardour will do the trick. The flow is taking me there anyway, so why swim upstream? ZynAddSubFX with Seq24 is also providing excellent service. Sort, choose, discard, assemble. And try not to buck the tide. Simple, but not easy... :D

Oren.

@Oren

The synths used in the collab song are (as usual with me) my hardware synths, Clavia Nord Modular and Clavia Micro Modular. Drums are hydrogene with my own created drumkit.

At the moment I'm still using audacity as my work horse only because I know it so well. It is faster for me to play the loops and record directly in audacity then to setup a project in ardour. Once the tracks are finished I'll export them and reimport in ardour to do the final mixing.
As I've prooven with the cyber blues song, i could do everything in audacity. The ONLY advantage I see in ardour (at the moment) is the non destructive fx chain (pre-fader, post-fader inserts and send busses) and the possibility to automate fx with the automatisation lanes. This opens some new possibilities.
In the end I'll propably switch completly to ardour. But at the moment I stick with audacity  for the workflow that I know, when I'm creating I don't want to be distracted by the lack of knowledge of the host. When I do that and I have to search for half an hour for a feature, once I found the solution I've forgotten what I wanted to do in the first place  ::)

To answer your question 'are the things audacity can do that ardour doesn't do', the question is yes...
Audacity is mainly an audio editor which happens to be multi-track, ardour is a multi-track mixing desk (it is actually a pro-tools clone). This means that audacity is way stronger in manipulating raw audio, ardour doesn't have time-strech, repitching,.... and it is way faster to split audio and move regions in audacity then in ardour (alltough ardour can do this to). On the other hand, ardour has multiple takes (recordings) on the same track and you mix multiple takes in one track...
Another big advantage of ardour is that it has MMC (midi machine code) and MTC (midi time code) both as master and as slave. This you realy need, if for example, you want to syncronise hydrogene with other tracks.
This is mainly the reason that I do the raw recording and audio editing in audacity and will then export the tracks in ardour to do the final mixing. 
At the moment, I don't have the perfect workflow yet, since I'm still switching between both.

I've used Rosegarden for some pieces, simply because I knew rosegarden a bit from a previous experience, to be honnest I didn't look at Seq24, actually i have to check to see if i have it in my distribution.

k

Seq24 is not on the default install of 64studio, but it is on the Synaptic list for download.

Just had a quick look at it, and I don't like it at all. It only seems simple to me from the point of view of not being capable of much :P

I've worked with a number of sequencers over the years and the only one I found less intuitive was one built into a hardware synth :(

Each to his own of course, but it you are working with that Oren I think you are doing yourself no favours >:D

Kara,
Thanks for the clarification!
I'll use Audacity as my "back-up" program for those times when Ardour/JAMin won't do the job. The plan is to keep the number of programs to a minimum and learn to make maximum use of the ones I choose.

Will,
The way you see Seq24 is the way all the Linux programs look to me. Alien, nonsensical, daunting. If it wasn't for the relative comfort of Audacity, I think I'd run away screaming... :D.
Seq24 resembles two Windows-dependant non-MIDI sequencers I've used quite recently: Hammerhead and HotStepper. There is sufficient similarity to provide a starting point, and like Hammerhead and HotStepper, Seq24 is far more capable than it first appears.
Let me work with it for a while, then see if I can't blow your gourd with a little synth wizardry of my own. (dream on, hoser  ;D)

Oren.

I had a look at Seq24, didn't install it.
It looks a lot like some well know hardware boxes. From what I saw it has allmost the same organisation as the Yamaha RM1X.
Patterns that are chained into a song.
I sometimes make song segments like that, but allways use a tracker for such operations. My favourite is milky tracker which is the succeser of fast tracker, the first tracker I worked with.
There'll be a new version of Milkytracker out soon, testing is in final phase. Nothing world shocking in the new version, beside the fact that it'll have a jack connection !
Milytracker isn't the most feature tracker out there, I think that would be Renoise and there is allso a Linux version of it now.
I use Milkytracker mainly because I have a compatible version for my PDA, makes it fun to fiddle around when I'm on the road and I can finish the song on my DAW.

k

The good news: I'm getting some lovely sounds out of ZynAddSubFX  :-
                             ________________________________________________________________________

Another brain-twister has arrived on the scene: Seq24 is not being recognized as a JACK client. No way, no how.

After deciding not to: a) fly into a rage and strangle JACK and his whole family...
                                    b) immediately replace my O/S with 64studio
.....I once again came to notice how this Ubuntu Studio distribution tends to gently guide the neophyte user toward the more full-featured tools; Ardour, Rosegarden, JAMin, ZynAddSubFX , rather than Audacity/Seq24/Ecawave/Beast/Freebirth.
Could this be intentional? Or are the buggers just toying with my emotions?

So now it's "learn Rosegarden" time.

Hope you're happy, there, Will  ;D

=> Zyn
See, I told you Zyn was female ... and a very beautiful lady she is too  ;)

=> Jack
This is very puzzling. Although I don't like seq24, I had no problem with it talking Jack-ise :-\

=> Ubuntu
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they are not plotting against you :D

=> Rosegarden
I really don't think you'll regret it. As you come from more of a tracker background than notatation (I think), I suggest you set 'matrix' as the default editor.

I shall forbear to comment further :-X

@Oren
Hmm I 'think' you missunderstand something about Seq24 and Jack.
It is true that Seq24 doesn't show up in the Jack control panel, but....
Seq 24 is supposed to be (and can only be) the Jack master, meaning that it will handle sync of Jack.
If you put it as Jack master in the options, you see in the Jack controll panel how it start and stops the jack transport.
The actual midi output is done in the pattern editor, ex. once you start ZYn it will appear as a possible midi output in the pattern editor of Seq, only thing you have to do is choose the output and the midi channel.

Now you can push this a litle further. When you start Ardour and put it in Jack slave mode, it will slave itself on jack control. Meaning that Seq24 will master Jack transport and ardour will slave on it  ;D Be sure that you put the input of the ardour audio track to the output of Zyn in the patchbay of Jack.

I know, it's not obvious I needed some time to find it out myself.
But it works  8)

Nice going, Kara..... >:(

Now you got me thinking again - this is not always good ;)

Yup, worked for me here, too!

(thanks, you're a genius)

Yep I've done it, my first complete (mini) song in a Linux DAW only.
http://www.kara-moon.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=1443.0;attach=1285

To be honnest, it took me longer then expected, or perhaps not, I knew I would spend some time to choose the tools and learn them.
The used sequencer was Rosegarden, a great sequencer but it took some time to learn it, especially his channel rooting.
Instruments come from the Qsampler rack, what a beast and it loads Giga sound  files !!
And the final mix was done in Ardour :)

I'm not 100 % satisfied of the sound of Azell's voice, I need to learn more about the LADSPA plugins and there are a lot of them !

But I guess that makes me a full Linux DAW user  ;D and i don't regret it  8) There is actually nothing from my windows tools that i'm missing.
For the next song I'll integrate Hydrogen !

k

....update on the "sample sequencer band-in-a-box" project :P

Ardour( http://ardour.org/ ) has recorded my guitar input, and the best bits are now individual .wav files that I'll import back into a fresh Ardour project to effect them and trim up the files so they're suitable to use as samples in Jackbeat( http://www.samalyse.com/jackbeat/ ). So far it has proved itself a very capable audio editor - at least the equal of Audacity.
The plan is to end up with 12 staccato bass notes, 12 sustained bass notes, a kick(bass) drum sound, and a "snare"drum sound.
Later I'll try some "pads" in major and minor chords, and some more creative percussion sounds.

Some sort of example will be ready for posting within a week - unless I fry too many brain cells in the process... :D

Great Oren, sounds interesting
Looking forward to the result  8)

k

As I work with Ardour and learn to accomplish the tasks that I would normally do with PowerTracks Pro and Audacity, the versatility of the program becomes evident. Preparing samples for audio sequencing is a good exercise....and now it becomes apparent that Ardour will do a good job of sequencing those samples! Jackbeat is a slightly more convenient way to compose and play the sequence (and interfaces well with Ardour through JACK), so I'll continue with it, but Ardour is really impressive :o

So far I only have one (ya, one :D) sample I'm happy with, but now that the process is clear, more will come along relatively quickly.... ::)

I'm in the process of upgrading my operating system from "Gutsy Gibbon" to Ubuntu version 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron". :;

Over 800 megabytes of new content. My 3 gigahertz dual core processor will take more than half an hour to install the upgrades, and that's after downloading the files!

Update: It's here, and it's beautiful, but.....now it's time to reconfigure the audio applications :o - more work than I had anticipated, but an opportunity to start fresh and streamline things 8)

Further update: JACK is re-configured; all else seems intact, with no adjustments necessary.
                         Ardour is greatly improved, with a new screen that is very legible and easy on the eyes.
                         Firefox is loaded as version 3 Beta 5 - very fast.
                         Audacity is updated to version 1.3.4, and will now load without interfering with JACK (although still does not show up as a
                                                                         JACK client)
                         Rosegarden opened, and immediately asked for "Sox", which I downloaded and installed from the repository.

The updated operating system seems completely functional, and a significant improvement  :)

If this is a significant improvement, then we certainly have something to look forward to from
you..especially considering the incredible quality of your last couple of offerings.

Like the guy said: "perseverance furthers"..oh yeah..that was you.   :)

Wyatt

Good morning, Wyatt!

(easy now, I don't work well under pressure :'( :D)

Today I'll take the Ogg Vorbis files of the spoken-word vocals Daran sent me, import them into Ardour at 96,000Hz, make the necessary edits and tonal adjustments, and mix them into "Hell Has No Dominion" as the final addition to Marc JX8P's synthesizer masterpiece.
This will be the new Ardour's shakedown cruise.... 8)

Glad to hear the upgrade went so smoothly. Looks like you're rapidly becoming the ubuntu expert 8)

Incidentally audacity has a strange way of behaving with jack. It only appears as a client when it is actually in play or record mode. This can make it a bit of a pain to route (but it is possible with a bit of lateral thinking).

Will,

It might be more accurate to say I'm becoming "less befuddled" :D

I'll toy with Audacity from a lateral point of view (very natural for me), and eventually get it to shake hands with JACK.

As always, your interest is appreciated.

Oren.