Krater - an album-a-day

So, that supposedly useful post I promised you will just have to wait. I will post it some time during the next decade or so...

Irony aside, I have recently recorded an album-a-day. It's called Krater and can be downloaded here. Most of it was done within 12 hours, with a minimal amount of mixing done the next day. I don't really know what to tell you about the music itself, there's some pop music with shaky vocals in Swedish and some instrumental tracks of different genres. I still love the sounds of the Roland TR-808 drum machine.

Stuff used:

Hardware
* Edirol FA-66
* Boss ME-50
* ADK A-51
* Fender Telecaster (thanks Caspar!)
* Peavey Cirrus 4

Software
* Ubuntu Studio (Hardy)
* Ardour
* Hydrogen
* seq24
* ZynAddSubFX
* Qsynth (with Fluid R3 sound font)

Jack crashed a couple of times during recording, but otherwise there were no issues from what I can remember.

What's next then? I still haven't installed Jaunty, but I will do it soon. Apparently there are still problems with the realtime kernel, but there is help!

New distro, old kernel - Hardy's 2.6.24-22-rt kernel on Intrepid

First off, let me get this straight: I am currently reporting about my experiments with two different versions of the Ubuntu Studio distribution: 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). I'm dual booting between these two and trying to figure out which one will work better with my hardware and for my purposes. I realize this can be a bit confusing. When I will finally get this somewhat done, I'll write a summary of the pros and cons of each.

I have updated my first post, Introduction / My goals - I've re-structured the sections and added some basic information about my hardware which I guess is quite relevant to this whole experiment.

Thanks to Andreas Nilsson for putting a link to me in his blog!

What I did today
I did what LDiablo][ suggests in his comment to the Intrepid real time kernel bug.

I downloaded the following four packages to downgrade to the old kernel:
linux-image-2.6.24-22-rt (2.6.24-22.45)
linux-rt (2.6.24.22.24)
linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24-22-rt (2.6.24.14-22.53)
linux-restricted-modules-rt (2.6.24.22.24)

...and istalled them with dpkg --force-depends. I'm not exactly sure why I would need the restricted drivers, though.

The system boots up fine, but without ALSA. No sound at all, in other words.

qjackctl says the following:

13:45:02.348 Could not open ALSA sequencer as a client. ALSA MIDI patchbay will be not available.
ALSA lib seq_hw.c:457:(snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed: No such file or directory


Also, when trying to use real time mode:

cannot use real-time scheduling (FIFO at priority 10) [for thread -1210079568, from thread -1210079568] (1: Operation not permitted)
cannot create engine


I have a vague memory of fixing the latter issue before in Hardy - it obviously has something to do with permissions. Googling will probably do the trick. I'm more concerned about ALSA.

lsmod |grep snd gives me nothing, and when trying modprobe snd_seq I get the following message:

FATAL: Module snd_seq not found.
FATAL: Error running install command for snd_seq


I'll take a break now for a day or two. Any and all suggestions are welcome!

I'm quite surprised about acutally having readers/commenters already - thanks for contributing, and have a happy new year!

Preparing the system

Today I've done the following:

System tweaks and stuff
I've set the noatime mount option for my drives to increase performance.

With Boot-Up Manager (BUM) I disabled some services that I don't think I need running all the time.

My accents (as in é and á) didn't work - I fixed this with "setxkbmap se" (as I'm using a Swedish keymap).

Software updates
Thanks to khashayar, I now have Ardour 2.7.1 and Audacity 1.3.6 as well as recent versions of LMMS and Rosegarden - from www.getdeb.net. I haven't had much time to try them out yet, but Ardour does seem a bit faster than I'm used to.

Dual screen, big desktop
I have literally spent HOURS trying to figure out how to use both of my screens (the laptop's 1280x800 screen and my LCD with 1280x1024) for one, continuous desktop. After screwing around endlessly with aticonfig, I realized that the proprietary fglrx driver does not support such a virtual desktop - both screens would need to have the same resolution. I can, however, switch screens (this is called "clone mode") which is more than nothing, I guess. Apparently I can't install the more recent (and open source) radeon driver, as it depends on the drm module which throws a "Can't allocate memory" error when I try to modprobe it.

I checked in Ubuntu 8.10, and sure enough, the radeon driver is on and configuring the dual monitor desktop is easy as pie. No screwing around in the console (aticonfig) or with some proprietary controller software (amdcccle) - just click, drag and apply. Things do get better, it seems. Too bad the realtime kernel in Intrepid doesn't work with dual core processors. I know, I'm repeating this in each blog post, but it really is annoying. (On a side note: there seems to be a war between two drivers: radeon and radonhd. It is amusing and tragic at the same time).

Further steps
1. One comment to the bug report suggests that it's possible to install an older kernel in Intrepid and be able to use real time capabilities. I might try this. I'm pretty sure I have already but I can't remember what happened.

2. Do I really need real time capabilities? Maybe I can do without it for now?

3. Maybe I should check out the 64 bit version of Ubuntu Studio.

4. I must go to bed much earlier than 5am.