Weblog entry #2 for orchid
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#2
audio apps
Posted by orchid on Thu 13 Oct 2005 at 23:06
A while ago my then roomate asked me about some audio apps for linux, he was a big
fan of the windows apps Reason, Acid Pro and Cubase VST, but if you have ever bought any semi-pro to pro audio packages you know how much they cost and then the yearly updates yada yada yada.. On the up side, most times it does work out of the
box and phone support usually comes included in the price.
He saw Audacity once on my computer and asked about setting up his computer to dual boot linux so he could play with some of the Open Source stuff.
I tried Debian but this was a year ago when the whole 2.6 kernel, Alsa instead of OSS transition was going on so it was a struggle for me to get it all working, not
to mention a ton of reading on things like Jack and Alsa and kernel modules. Not fun.
I ended up installing Agnula DeMudi, a Debian based audiocentric distro
http://www.agnula.org/
Well it worked, the Jack sound server ran out of the box and everything was hunky-dory. Sadly though as a new linux user he quickly realized some effort was required on his part to learn a few basics like where to save his files and so on, which proved too much for him and he went back to windows. He did like Ardour though and was impressed enough to look for a Windows version, not sure how that went.
So anyway, a year later and I decided to install some stuff the other day. I am using Alsa and kernel 2.6.8 on Debian unstable.
apt-get install rhapsody qsynth freewheeling qjackctl sooperlooper amsynth ardour-gtk-i686
After it all downloaded and installed, I first ran qjackctl which makes things SO easy to set up, as soon as you start another app, like amsynth for example it pops up in qjackctl and you can drag the output into the input of any other app or just leave it outputting to the sound card. (I dont have MIDI but theres lots you can do there also)
Its really amazing the quality of some of these programs, Ardour is really advanced and with a little documentation reading you can get some wild sounds out of it! :-)
LinuxJournal has some great articles also on some of the new music tools, just do a search on audio tools
http://www.linuxjournal.com
fan of the windows apps Reason, Acid Pro and Cubase VST, but if you have ever bought any semi-pro to pro audio packages you know how much they cost and then the yearly updates yada yada yada.. On the up side, most times it does work out of the
box and phone support usually comes included in the price.
He saw Audacity once on my computer and asked about setting up his computer to dual boot linux so he could play with some of the Open Source stuff.
I tried Debian but this was a year ago when the whole 2.6 kernel, Alsa instead of OSS transition was going on so it was a struggle for me to get it all working, not
to mention a ton of reading on things like Jack and Alsa and kernel modules. Not fun.
I ended up installing Agnula DeMudi, a Debian based audiocentric distro
http://www.agnula.org/
Well it worked, the Jack sound server ran out of the box and everything was hunky-dory. Sadly though as a new linux user he quickly realized some effort was required on his part to learn a few basics like where to save his files and so on, which proved too much for him and he went back to windows. He did like Ardour though and was impressed enough to look for a Windows version, not sure how that went.
So anyway, a year later and I decided to install some stuff the other day. I am using Alsa and kernel 2.6.8 on Debian unstable.
apt-get install rhapsody qsynth freewheeling qjackctl sooperlooper amsynth ardour-gtk-i686
After it all downloaded and installed, I first ran qjackctl which makes things SO easy to set up, as soon as you start another app, like amsynth for example it pops up in qjackctl and you can drag the output into the input of any other app or just leave it outputting to the sound card. (I dont have MIDI but theres lots you can do there also)
Its really amazing the quality of some of these programs, Ardour is really advanced and with a little documentation reading you can get some wild sounds out of it! :-)
LinuxJournal has some great articles also on some of the new music tools, just do a search on audio tools
http://www.linuxjournal.com