Archive for the 'Sound' Category

Sixth sense gets to you

Since several years we [Audacity team] have a feedback email. People write to it to tell us that Audacity rocks or, equally common, that it sucks. Several mails a week tell us Audacity was rebranded and sold under a different name at eBay (we stopped worrying about that ever since the Luxuriosity thing all them years ago). Some people ask if Audacity could be redone as a web app (it can’t). Well, since today we also have our little share of pranksters. As pranks go, however, this one is a little disturbing:

have you considered developing a ghost phone with your software to alow the dead to call the living with voice dialing, i’ve done a little bit of research into it and its acheiveable, thomas dolby discovered that there are certian places on the earth where the dead can be heard with a tape recorder and with modern psionics it is posible to recreate these energy feilds to alow cross dimensional communication dead to living, are you down for a little occult scientist network administration, like honestly i live in the same house as my dead grandpa and it would be great if he could call his living relatives up, maybe you could throw the ideal around the office or something maybe even come up with a skype plugin or something

Now, the only thing I really hope is that it’s nothing but a prank. Otherwise someone is bound to have his/her head examined.

Listening to users and drawing conclusions

This posting somehow complements the previous one where I quoted a couple of Audacity’s users both having diametrically opposed opninions on the tool’s usability.

Several days ago Harrison Consoles released new version of Mixbus — their Ardour-based digital audio workstation. The thread at Create Digital Music progressed quite a bit since I looked at it first, and I’ve just discovered that Paul Davis, Ardour’s lead developer, joined in and, probably not realizing it, provided the best explanation why software projects need design architects who listen to all opinions, but think about big picture first:

“Background: in the 10 years I’ve worked on Ardour, it has been my experience that listening too carefully to any one person’s experience with a given piece of technology always tends to be misleading. We have heard from people who tried Ardour and found it mostly unusable. We have others who have had years of experience with Logic or PT who find Ardour much more functional for them. Both these points of view are right, and its taken me a long time to realize that once a tool becomes even remotely complex (possibly at the point where there is any user choice at all), there’s no way to make that tool be the choice of all possible users. So these days, while I try to listen very carefully to the reports I get from people who have issues when using the software, I’ve learnt to not take anyone’s verdict (e.g. “its much harder to use than Logic”, “its ugly”, “its not mature yet”) as a comment about their specific working style and the way that Ardour fits into it rather than anything more general.”

If you take any big free software project, especially one that you bend your production workflow around, you’ll immediately stumble into X vs. Y battles. This is inevitable, but one needs to understand that any software developer who tries to please everyone usually ends up pleasing nobody, because complex software is always about vision, and visions are never shared by all of the human race, HIG or no HIG.

On VST, WINE and all

The epic battle against Focusrite Plugin Suite is over and I’m defeated. The problem turns out to be in the license registration prompt that simply refuses to load under WINE, whether you load it in Ableton Live or in Ardour: any signal simply gets bypassed until the plugins are registered. There probably is some WINE conspiracy in support for native effects/instruments SDK over VST :)
Continue reading ‘On VST, WINE and all’

REX2 is on radar

A while ago we, re-lab project, started clean-room reverse-engineering of REX2 — a rather popular file format of audio loops supported by most DAWs on the market except free/libre ones. Before we started we actually contacted Propellerhead to ask if they are willing to share the spec and got no reply whatsoever. Since Propellerhead has a history of being not quite friendly towards open source projects, and we still want our files supported, thank you very much, we proceeded with reverse-engineereing.

Right now we have several Python scripts to parse .rx2 files and dump contents to stdout. There is also a stub of the spec that we intend to fill ASAP with what we already know. If you have a licensed copy of Propellerhead ReCycle (that is the primary authoring application for REX2) and you want REX2 supported by free audio tools, don’t hesitate to join.

The request for REX2 spec originally came from Paul Davis of Ardour fame, so we expect Ardour to be the first application to support REX2. All the work happens in Gitorious: http://gitorious.org/re-lab/audio.

Reversed World

Sometimes I wonder if we live in a reversed world. It’s quite common to hear ramblings of old guys how youth gets it all wrong and spits on traditions and best practices. Wanna have your thinking pattern broken?

You probably already heard about loudness war and definitely have experienced that yourself unless you are hearing impaired. If you haven’t, go check Wikipedia.

Lately someone noticed that Steinberg, developers of a very popular audio editor called Wavelab, say exactly this of loudness:

“One of the most important steps in the mastering process is to enhance the loudness of a track. Loudness is the listeners’ individual perception of sound levels caused by an audio signal. In commercial productions, high volume levels are an important factor. Unprocessed songs are likely to be too quiet, which is disappointing if songs are published on radio or TV, where louder songs might attract more attention.”

Okay, that’s marketing team talking really. Surely youth thinks along the same lines, eh? Young and clueless, eh? What do they know, right? Well, wrong. This is what Tutsplus wrote in their own take at loudness war just a couple of weeks ago:

“The only real solution is for everyone to turn the volume down. For everyone to co-operate. And that’s a big job. There are no worldwide Volume Police to enforce this. There are no fines for over-compression. There is just the love of music. We all need to agree that dynamics are worth fighting for.”

You nailed it, guys.

Interacting with external audio/MIDI devices on Linux

This May I spent a weekend hunting for the list of apps the allow controlling external audio/MIDI devices on Linux in some way. The list was updated since then several times. Some of the apps are, of course, just SysEx editors with fancy UIs, but there’s more than that.

While answering a related question at ubuntuforums.org yesterday, I thought it would be unfair to make this list available to linuxsound.ru users only. So here is the English version, pure and unadorned, with few pictures.
Continue reading ‘Interacting with external audio/MIDI devices on Linux’

Calf is awesome

I’ve been using Calf pack of DSSI/LV2 audio plug-ins and instruments for a while now (vintage delay is my fav), so since I’m used to bleeding edge software I decided to clone its git repo and see what they’ve been cooking for the next release.

Calf Organ DSSI

After so many years of geeky interfaces native effects on Linux don’t look like complete crap anymore :)

The upcoming version will also feature several equalizers (already in git), and the very next thing I’m going to do is build it with –enable-experimental to enable “50 small LV2 plug-ins made specifically with modular hosts in mind”. Jeez, you free software developers just don’t seem to be able to stop making us excited recently :)

NtEd

For some reason I missed The Great Return of Jörg Anders. If you missed that story, here is a quick reference.

In late 90s Dr. Jörg Anders created a free/libre musical score editor called NoteEdit. For some reason it didn’t get much acknowledgement which (but not only this reason) subsequently led to departure of Mr. Anders from the project which actually left the project headless for several months. Then it was picked by several guys who maintained it until ca. 2006 when they started a new project called Canorus.

Now Jörg Anders is back with a GTK+/Cairo application called NtEd which has two most anticipated features implemented: brackets and page layout. Here is an obligatory screenshot :)

NtEd

Free!Music

One of the projects I’be been involved into from the very beginning is Free!Music. It started in early 2002 from two ideas:

  1. There is something deeply wrong with the way record labels do their business and the way music is promoted.
  2. Why not have a CD of freely redistributable music as an addition to a Linux distribution?

The first idea came from EXIT project — a music band that doesn’t restrict itself to any particular music genre, playing a fusion of them, often doing jam sessions with musicians who play from jazz to folk to rock music. They were the first to release their tracks under terms of OpenMusic license that was further reevaluated and turned into Free!Music declaration.

The second idea came from ALT Linux — a russian Linux vendor who started as Mandrake and SuSE distributor, then soon quit that business and started it’s own apt-rpm based distribution, doing solutions based on it, being involved into russian e-government project etc.

We had some participants from ex-USSR countries before, but recently the project has become truly international. Yann Bennoist, guitar wizard of famous Space band, who did session work with Mireille Mathieu, Michel Legrand, Patricia Kaas and others has joined us and published four tracks under terms of Free!Music declaration:

Feel free to checkout them, read the interview with Yann and listen to other songs. Oh well, and we have Internet radio playing all published songs 24 hours/day :)

Nah, and for those socialized — we have a last.fm group :D

FAVE 2006

If you haven’t considered going to FAVE this year, please do so if possible ;-)

This is an event for people who are interested in free and open source creative software on Linux and other computer platforms. It features workshops, talks and performances from free software developers and artists. The 2006 event is taking place at Limehouse Town Hall in London, England on Saturday the 25th of November. Highlights this year include:

  • Andy Farnell presents a workshop on synthetic audio in Pure Data
  • Steve Harris gives a talk on LV2, the new plugin standard
  • Mutant electronic punk from Jamka, over from Slovakia
  • Conor O’Tuama, recording acoustic music in Ireland
  • Biomusic from Simon Egan, featuring plants and animal organs
  • Live coding from Dave Griffiths and Alex
  • A demo of the 64 Studio distro from Daniel James
  • Olivier Laruelle and Chun Lee play with Desiredata
  • Rob Munro remixes TV with Pd, Gem and OSC
  • Karsten Gebbert and Evan Raskob

http://www.fave.org.uk/