Follow-up - Midi controllers!

Of course, I didn't quite do what I planned to do. This is what I have done, though:

• I've recorded song ideas using Hydrogen, Ardour and Qsynth. Nothing new or exciting here, except maybe for some LV2 plugins that I've tried. I might get back to them in another blog post.
  
• I've tried Rakarrack a bit. There are some horrid presets on there, but there are also some nice ones and I think this app might come in handy later on.
  
• I have bought an AKAI MPK mini!
• I've learned how to map MIDI control signals to seq24, to toggle loops (with the help of this thread and this chart of MIDI status codes). I've also learned how to map midi signals in Sooperlooper, which is considerably easier.
  
• I've learned how to route my "vintage" Nobels MF-2 midi foot controller to seq24 and Sooperlooper using a2jmidid and Patchage (see this page). One step closer to using my PC as a loop station!
• I have finally donated some money to the Ardour project. I'll donate to Hydrogen as well.
  

I might write in more detail later about my midi controllers and how to map them to seq24, Sooperlooper and so on.

I am also trying out Ableton Live again (in Windows, although it reportedly works with Wine). At this point, I need to figure out a workflow that works for me, no matter what platform - and although I think Live is fantastic, perhaps Linux will still be my primary choice. After all effort I've put into it, I feel quite at home with it and I know my preferred applications quite well. Setting things up is happily no longer such an issue. We'll see where it goes...

P.S. One thing I'd like to investigate is how Zynaddsubfx actually works (ie. how to customize instruments in detail) and why it makes noise that sounds like xruns when there are none (it was discussed in this old thread, also here with what looks like a possible solution - OK, so maybe there are still things that need to be tinkered with).

What's next

You have your ups and downs I guess. Right now I'm on the up side, planning my next steps. I've started using this repository for fresh versions of music apps: https://launchpad.net/~philip5/+archive/extra - which among other things means that Qtractor and Traverso works.

Here is some of the things I'm planning to do as soon as I get more time:

• Check out Traverso and Qtractor and see if they would make a good replacement for Ardour, or if I should stick with Ardour when sequencing audio
  
• Compare Sweep, ReZound and Audacity and see which audio editor I prefer
  
• Try to get my MIDI foot controller to work with SooperLooper or Kluppe for live audio looping
  
• Try out the Rakarrack guitar rack
  
• See if the organ/synth emulator Bristol can be made any more stable than last time I tried it
  

Also, I've ran into an "audio loop slicer" called Smasher. It looks promising!

I'm still very impressed by the number and diversity of music applications for Linux and I would like to contribute more to this community. However, am still frustrated that it's not easier to set it all up than it is...

Success with new Jack settings

No wonder there are problems when you are stupid! I was using the obsolete "freebob" driver instead of the newer FFADO "firewire" driver in Jack. Once this was corrected, even Bristol seemed relatively stable. (I'm on Ubuntu Studio (Karmic) using an Edirol FA-66, FYI)

Now I can achieve lower latency, too. With a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and a buffer size of 64 frames/period (latency according to Qjackctl: 4.35 msec) things seem to work well. With a buffer size of 32 (latency: 2.18 msec) Adour disconnects from Jack, and with an even lower setting, my whole system gets very slow. But I've worked with higher latencies than 4.35 msec without being dissatisfied, so this is a win.

At maximum sample rate (192 kHz) I can get down to 4 msec (with 256 frames/period). I can go even lower but then my system gradually gets a bit slow. Somehow Hydrogen doesn't recognize the higher sample rate, or maybe all the samples in the drum kits are recorded with a lower sample rate, because everything gets more high-pitched when Jack is set to a higher rate.

I guess I could tweak the settings more to achieve optimal performance. I don't know what "No memory lock" or "Unlock memory is", and I know even less what the difference between these two is, so I will need to read up on it. Maybe "Periods/buffer" is something to get acquanted with as well. Checking the memory lock boxes has had no apparent effect, though.

Ardour still throws a segmentation fault once in a while, particularly when normalizing a region or when trying to reconnect to Jack once connection was lost (Ardour always dies when I try that at 192 kHz). This is quite annoying, and I hope I can fix it. Hydrogen has also died once for no apparent reason.

In short: I'm back on track. My goal is to have a stable environment for composing, recording and mixing. There are still some things to work out but I'm getting closer!

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!

First steps - I've got sound!

I have now installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) on my laptop. Sadly, Hardy's ATI drivers for Xorg don't seem to support my ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400, so I have to run proprietary drivers for now.

One possibly good piece of advice for anyone looking into Linux audio (or Linux in general) is "don't buy a laptop model that's too new!" or you will need a load of patience to hack around with it - sure, Ubuntu 8.10 recognizes most of my hardware, but in this case, I need to run 8.04 to get real time capabilities.

After some googling and hacking (among other things, I followed this thread about making Jack work in real time mode) I can now get sound through the Edirol FA-66. FINALLY!

Everything's not fine, though. Jack has crashed a couple of times during the last 20 minutes, Qjackctl seems to be inclined to freeze, and there is some annoying crackling and popping going on during playback in Ardour - although neither Qjackctl nor Ardour registers xruns (Ardour does, however, detect "spikes" in master output).

On one hand, I'm glad that I've gotten this far. There's definitely a sense of accomplishment, and I'm hopeful about this whole project. On the other hand, there are obviously some issues to be dealt with before I've got a stable, working setup.