This is an item to talk about studio stuff, since that's part of the business I'm getting back into, and in particular an area where I'm currently working to educate myself better. To that end I'm building a Linux-based PC for multitrack recording, and playing around with microphones and such.20 responses total.
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.
("Headroom"?)
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...
"headroom" is how much power you've got which you don't usually use. Makes a difference on occasional loud bits. The main Linux app I want to try out is called "Ardour"; it does multitrack recording, effects, mixdown, etc. There are other packages, not as current. "Ecasound" has been gradually growing for years, and I should check that out as well. Linux is great for servers, but these days it's quite nice on the desktop as well. I've been using it at home for 3-4 years and it keeps getting better and better. By contrast Windows gets more and more loaded down with junk, especially whenever you install something - then somehow you get more junk you don't need and most likely don't want.
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.
Got LAW installed - ugly. It installs easily enough, and does useful things like apply the low-latency kernel patch. However, it also installs an older (24.20) kernel with some useful things disabled (not sure if that's an issue with the kernel version or how it gets configured). Plus it wants to use a rather ugly version of the Windowmaker UI. I think I'm going to go ahead and install Ardour on top to see what happens, then I'm going to start from scratching installing things by hand this time.
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.
Got JACK installed OK, but Ardour got me into a "package dependency spiral of doom", at least enough to make me take a long break. Maybe I'll start over with the rpms instead of the source tarballs and see if those are in better shape. For Red Hat it shouldn't matter.
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.
Ah, this Internet stuff is wonderful. I got ardour to make, but was getting an error message whenI tried to start it. First search on Google turned up the answer, although I haven't fired the box up yet this morning to test it.
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.
A few annoying problems and a plot twist or two. I'd been having some occasional problems, a few crashes, and other things like recording mysteriously stopping after a variable amount of time with no error message. I decided to go ahead and try to get the "low latency" kernel stuff installed, but couldn't get the patch to work. Turns out at least some of the latency patch is already in the Red Hat 9.0 kernel, and apparently enabled although I don't know how to test that. Tomorrow I'm going to start over from scratch, using rpms instead of source tarballs for the audio stuff.
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.
OK, I'm finally back at it again. Another fresh install of Red Hat, and I'm going to try installing from source tarballs again (using rpms got me into another annoying dependency situation), this time with more little tips I've picked up from the Ardour mailing list.
(nice to see an Aja fan)
Too long of a break... I installed SuSE 8.something on my old computer, and got Audacity running after a bit of fiddling. It works, but has some clicks recorded on each track (probably from latency problems). I've learned from the Ardor mailing list that my soundcard (cheap Soundblaster clone) tends to have more issues than a pro audio card. So, time to spend some money on a decent soundcard.
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.
Grrr. Still getting low-level problems. However, with a promised live recording coming up Sunday, I realized that the lowest level, ALSA, has a couple little record and play utilities probably meant for testing. However, in the grand tradition of little Linux apps, all sorts of formats and inputs are supported. So I can easily do 4 channel recording in DAT format, so far with no problems. No fancy editing available, but that's OK.
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.
Finally somebody did it - a live CD Linux distribution for audio & video. http://www.agnula.org or http://www.demudi.org A "live CD distribution" is a bootable CD which runs a complete Linux system, including applications, cleverly compressed to fit on one CD. I've just played around with this one a little bit so far, but it does a lot of the nasty work of getting the low-latency kernel and the sound card drivers for you. So aside from learning some simple application stuff it's a running audio system, including Ardour (complete with DSP plugins!). Very cool.
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