response 1 of 20:

Jul 18 11:30 UTC 2003

I went to Guitar Center over in Canton to try out some inexpensive studio
monitors.  GC, like most big-box stores, rather weird and most of the
employees aren't very useful.  However, there's a guy there in the audio
department who looks & sounds like Al Bundy but knows his shit and takes his
job seriously - a pleasant surprise.  Anyway, I ended up comparing three
nearly-identical self-amplified speakers from Event, the TR8 I'd been reading
about, the slightly older PS8, and the product-line flagship 20/20bas.  About
$100 total price difference, but it was pretty interesting what little
differences I could hear.  The 20/20bas didn't reach as high, which makes a
little bit of sense being the oldest design.  The TR8 is getting a lot
positive reviews, especially given its price ($250-300/ea street price).  But
the TR8 had some kind of nastiness in the lower highs, and also didn't seem
to have the headroom.  The PS8 turned out to be the winner, and I got the pair
for $600 since they were being discontinued.  

Pretty cool listening to them last night, checking out some different stuff.
I'd auditioned at the store with a couple of CDs, Aimee Mann's "Whatever" and
Thomas Dolby's "The Flat Earth" (most of my CDs are in storage at the moment,
or "Aja" would certainly have been in there).  It's definitely an improvement
to have good speakers; I was hearing the kind of stuff I'd be able to hear
in the headphones.  MiniDiscs from vinyl definitely sounded squashed, narrow,
and missing highs & lows.  May have to spring for a CD version of "Born to
Run" pretty soon.

response 3 of 20:

Jul 19 02:46 UTC 2003

Explain a little bit more about the Linux aps.  All I know is PC and 
Mac applications (mostly Master Tracks for the latter).  I didn't 
remember hearing about any big differences, so I assumed it was just 
individual preferences.  I thought Linux was primarily a tool for 
servers, so I'd be interested how it works in the studio.

p.s. that reminds me, goose, you had questions about PowerScript... 
somewhat unrelated to this...

response 5 of 20:

Jul 23 19:30 UTC 2003

New PC for audio, planning on using Linux-based recording apps.  What I got
was a small-size "ShuttleX" PC, a DVD+RW drive for backups, a gig of RAM, 80Mb
disk.  Pro sound card later - I'm going to get things working with the cheapy
builtin sound before dropping $500+.

Currently have installed RedHat 9.0 (also played a bit with Mandrake 9.1,
first choice for elegance but not for compatibility with drivers and special
apps).  After getting the NVidia driver (binary only) installed to support
the ethernet port, I'm about to try installing "Linux Audio Workstation"
which patches RedHat for audio use.  Then I'll try to get Ardour, a multitrack
recording app installed.

response 7 of 20:

Jul 26 20:29 UTC 2003

Decided LAW was just to clunky, and that I should just try installing the
support stuff for Ardour myself and see what happens.  I'm going to hold off
installing the low-latency kernel patch, although after today I think that
shouldn't be a big deal to do.

Anyway, I reinstalled Red Hat and went for the first package - ALSA (advanced
Linux Sound Architecture).  The basic motherboard sound in my computer is
supported, and I found a nice set of installation notes from the sound card
support page for ALSA (big list of supported cards)
(http://www.alsa-project.org/)
Had to follow the notes on a couple of tricky sections, like adding stuff to
/etc/modules.conf and adding a call to a startup script (loads the kernel
modules for the sound card and alsa) to /etc/rc.d/rc.local so that everything
would reappear when rebooting the computer.

It works!  Basically a few command-line and text screens, but I can get into
a mixer for the ins & outs, do bare-bones recording & playback.  The sound
has surround outputs, which I couldn't manage to access.  Regular stereo
output and the optical spdif outputs worked, and I could record from the line
input.

Enough for today.

response 9 of 20:

Jul 27 21:52 UTC 2003

A few hours break on a Sunday afternoon, and I got my brain working again.
Turned out I only needed a couple more things:  ladspa and libsamplerate. 
Getting those made & installed freed everything else up, although I did have
to remake jack before ardour's configure script would recognize it.  I also
had to add an environment variable for something else to be correctly
found.

response 11 of 20:

Jul 28 13:08 UTC 2003

Hot damn, it works!  I was able to record something through the line-in, play
it back, and a apply a couple of very basic plugin effects.

response 13 of 20:

Jul 29 01:43 UTC 2003

After getting frustrated with the recording software (I'd managed to record
some stuff and even get a couple tracks down), I already had a couple mics
and the mixer set up so I decided to grab my MiniDisc recorders instead. 
Bouncing back and forth, just like with two cassette decks back in high
school.  I've been working on "If" by Bread recently, so I put down 4 acoustic
guitar tracks and then a couple vocal tracks.  The guitar stuff was a bit
clumsy but overall pretty good, needing a bit different arrangement since the
arpeggiated parts get rather ominous when stacked up a bit.  Vocals, different
story.  I definitely need to get back to regular voice practice!  This tune
is also a hair below my best range, so maybe I'll try to push it up a couple
frets with a guitar capo or something.  That or try doing Van Morrison's
"Moondance" which I've got more practice on.

response 15 of 20:

Aug 31 00:33 UTC 2003

        (nice to see an Aja fan)

response 17 of 20:

Dec 1 22:57 UTC 2003

Finally, I bought a real sound card, an M-Audio Delta 44.  4 inputs, 4
outputs.  This one seems fairly popular among Ardour users.  After I've
finished a small project on my old PC I'm going to brain-wipe it, install the
new card and Windows, and play around with Windows stuff for a bit.  Then I'll
start back on Ardour again.  

I've heard that Soundblaster-type cards tend to cause a lot of clicks/dropouts
in Alsa/Ardour, probably due to the amount of support they need from the CPU.

response 19 of 20:

Apr 30 23:55 UTC 2004

Wow, it's been a while.

The live recording had a few glitches, but turned out OK.  More problems with
microphones and with something broken inside the piano than with the computer,
anyway.  

More recently I used the apt-get stuf at Planet CCRMA (part of Stanford) to
get Ardour running better.  Still some CPU and memory usage issues, but I've
managed to get some stuff done.  Learned a lot about using Ardour, which is
pretty nice.  Of late my focus has been more about getting decent sounds from
my own playing than anything else.  You can check out a recent attempt at
http://www.scotthelmke.com/Moondance-3.mp3
I should add that most of it was recorded in very few takes, so the
performances could be a lot better.  By the end I was really trying to get
great vocals, which is why the groove is a flaky.