sound

Short Notices: News In Linux Audio

Dave Phillips — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:24:05 +0000

I hope all my readers enjoyed the best of the holiday season. I've been busy with the predictable confusions and minor crises that attend this time of year, but I managed to find time to jot down some recommendations for my readers. Go on, you've been good, give yourself a few extra belated gifts and don't worry if your budget's busted - it's all free software, you can't beat these deals.

harmonySEQ

"live loop-based MIDI software sequencer intended to aid music composers and performers"

Figure 1. harmonySEQ (Full size)

I built and installed the latest development version 0.16 of harmonySEQ (Figure 1) on a 64-bit Arch system. This "little" sequencer is a straightforward MIDI loop composition environment with some unique features, e.g. a Control Sequence editor for writing MIDI Controller curves and OSC support for remote transport control. HarmonySEQ has also borrowed a page from Dr. Emile Tobenfeld's great Keyboard Controlled Sequencer, i.e. the user can assign sequences to keypresses, a very flexible method for patching together fixed-form compositions or for formal improvisation in realtime performance. However you choose to use it, harmonySEQ is likely to find a permanent place in your Linux MIDI system. For more information see the harmonySEQ home and Louigi Verona's article on his use of harmonySEQ. While you're out there, you should also check out his music improvised with harmonySEQ, it's an impressive display of the program's potential (and the composer's talent).

SunVox
"modular synthesizer with pattern based sequencer (tracker)"

Developer Alex Zolotov calls his SunVox (Figure 2) a "modular music creation studio". It's a light-weight but complete music composition environment that includes a handy set of built-in synthesizers and effects processors. The "modular" in Alex's description refers to the program's module tracker, a music sequencing interface designed originally for music composition programs in the late 1980s. The tracker UI is easy to use and lends itself to complex pattern-based composition, but I should emphasize that any kind of music can be composed with a tracker.

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An Arch Tale

Dave Phillips — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:14:04 +0000

by Dave Phillips

Dave needs a new 64-bit Linux for his primary audio production machine. What shall he do ? Read on to learn how and why he decided upon the Arch Linux distribution.

Why Switch ?

For about four years I've been running the excellent 64 Studio Linux distribution on my main machine here at Studio Dave. That machine - affectionately known as Big Black, thanks to the color of its Antec Sonata II case - houses an AMD64 3200 CPU, a single-core 64-bit processor that runs at 2 Ghz. It also contains 4GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive. Video is handled by an nVidia GeForce 7600 GS chipset with 512 MB video RAM, and the box's sound hardware includes an M-Audio Delta 66 digital audio interface system along with the motherboard's integrated HDA_Intel chipset. The Delta 66 is used for all serious recording on the machine, while the mobo's chipset handles audio playback for my CDs and DVDs. Altogether, a decent box, not especially up-to-date but quite sufficient for my purposes. Those purposes include various functions for my teaching business (printing lyrics, tablatures, chord charts, et cetera), most of my music composition, and the forementioned recording activities. I also use the machine for almost all my professional writing (with vi/vim, of course).

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Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World Of SuperCollider3, Part 3

Dave Phillips — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:00:00 +0000

by Dave Phillips

Advanced Use

The examples in the previous parts of this series should be fairly intelligible to someone with a background in Csound or a similar MusicN-derived language. They demonstrate a few basic principles of SuperCollider's linguistic elements, but they miss most of what's most interesting about the environment. In fact, SuperCollider's debt to the MusicN heritage is relatively small, and its design considerations have been differently ordered. From its inception SuperCollider has favored realtime operations in an interactive environment. On the server side the design has nurtured a high-performance audio synthesis/processing engine. On the client side the control language has developed many elements either not clearly defined or not present in other computer music systems. An in-depth presentation is not possible in this article, but we can catch a glimpse of some of SuperCollider's more advanced features.

Of Tasks, Routines, Patterns, And Streams

We've already met a Task in our prettified example of a synth-plus-GUI. Tasks and Routines are closely related mechanisms often found working together in SuperCollider code. A Routine is a function with stop/resume capability, while a Task is a process with similar charactistics, i.e. it is a pausable process. Our synth GUI example in Part 2 showed off a typical combination of Routine and Task, the SuperCollider documentation includes many others.

Routines are also closely related to Patterns. Musicians are accustomed to the term "pattern", but it means something unique in SuperCollider, where a Pattern is

"... an object that responds to asStream and embedInStream. A Pattern defines the behavior of a Stream and creates such streams in response to the messages asStream. The difference between a Pattern and a Stream is similar to the difference between a score and a performance of that score or a class and an instance of that class. All objects respond to this interface, most by returning themselves. So most objects are patterns that define streams that are an infinite sequence of the object and embed as singleton streams of that object returned once."

To the typical musician that explanation is probably about as clear as mud. Have no fear, illustrative examples abound in the SuperCollider documentation and elsewhere, but before we display one let's find out what's a Stream in SuperCollider-speak. The docs say this about it :

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The SuperCollider Book: A Review

Dave Phillips — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:08:26 +0000

by Dave Phillips

The Book

As a final flourish to my series on the SuperCollider audio programmng environment I present this review of The SuperCollider Book, a collective work edited by SuperCollider gurus Scott Wilson, David Cottle, and Nick Collins, and published by the MIT Press. This marvelous tome contains twenty-six chapters written by some of the leading lights of the SuperCollider community. As expected, they cover a wide range of topics, neatly organized into the following major divisions :

Tutorials
Advanced Tutorials
Platforms and GUI
Practical Applications
Projects and Perspectives
Developer Topics

Each section includes up to six chapters detailing the division topic. The chapters are loaded with practical information, the writing is clear and well-edited, and the writers all convey their great enthusiasm for SuperCollider and its possibilities.

I've been absorbed by the book since I got it. I haven't read everything in it yet - it's a big book, and I'm bouncing between it and various Web-based materials - but I've read enough of it to offer an opinion or two. With regards to my summary judgement, I'll just skip to the spoiler and tell my readers that this book is a must-have for any SuperCollider user and highly recommended as a general resource for anyone interesting in computer music programming and production.

This book is definitely not a SuperCollider For Dummies. If you know absolutely nothing about the language I suggest reading first the Wikipedia page on SuperCollider to get a sense of the language design and some of its typical purposes. With that information in mind, new users should begin the book by reading the Beginner's Tutorial by David Cottle. Follow his recommendations (i.e. install, configure, start, and use SuperCollider), then read and follow the whole tutorial again. It has a few OSX-specific parts Linux users can safely ignore, and his presentation sails along briskly, but the chapter is an excellent general introduction to SuperCollider. It's a hands-on tutorial, and though you might not understand completely how or why things work you will have seen and heard a small sample of SuperCollider's power and how to use it.

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Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World Of SuperCollider3, Part 2

Dave Phillips — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:55:10 +0000

by Dave Phillips

In the first part of this series I introduced SuperCollider3 and its most basic operations. Now let's make things a little more interesting by adding a little randomization, a neat GUI, and some MIDI control.

Creating A GUI

Let's add a simple GUI to control the synthesizer. We'll employ the services of a SuperCollider Quark called AutoGui to make things easy for us novices :

    a = SynthDef(\sinetest, {arg out = 1, freq = 440; Out.ar(out, SinOsc.ar(freq))}) ;
    z = SynthDefAutogui(\sinetest, scopeOn:false) ;

Easy, just two lines of code to produce the synthesizer control panel seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. SuperCollider's AutoGui Quark at work.

As its name implies, the AutoGui class automatically creates a GUI to represent the elements of a SynthDef, i.e. a SuperCollider synthesizer definition. In the example, the SynthDef is built from our simple synth and an added output channel setter. AutoGui performs its magic on the SynthDef, and voila, we have a synthesizer with a graphic control panel, made with two lines of SuperCollider code.

AutoGui is one of many realizations of SuperCollider's GUI capabilities. Other interesting manifestations include Fredrik Olofsson's red* quarks, James Harkins' dewdrop library, the Crucial extensions, and the EZ-GUI classes. As in other aspects of the system, SuperCollider gives you more than one way to do the job.

Figure 2. The Hadron Quark on display. (Full size)

Before leaving our simple example let's look at something with a more ambitious GUI. Figure 2 shows off Batuhan Bozkurt's Hadron, a SuperCollider quark that include various GUI components. At first Hadron looks a little like SuperCollider in Pd's clothing, but Hadron is a personal system, not a general-purpose GUI. Like most examples of a SuperCollider GUI Hadron was designed originally for its creator's specific purposes, and thanks to its broader utility it's been packaged as a quark for other users to explore. My first experiments included the addition of more synths and effects processors on my canvas layout - with all states saveable and loadable - and I've started to look into the guidelines for writing my own Hadron plugins.

Notes On Notes

By now the sound designer might be a little interested in SuperCollider, but the composer might be wondering what the fuss is all about. Our tiny example merely plays a sine wave at a single frequency and a default amplitude value. However, consider the following code :

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Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World of SuperCollider3, Part 1

Dave Phillips — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Dave Phillips

SuperCollider3

SuperCollider is composer/programmer James McCartney's gift to the world of open-source audio synthesis/composition environments. In its current manifestation, SuperCollider3 includes capabilities for a wide variety of sound synthesis and signal processing methods, cross-platform integrated GUI components for designing interfaces for interactive performance, support for remote control by various external devices, and a rich set of tools for algorithmic music and sound composition. And yes, there's more, much more.

This 3-part article combines a preview of SuperCollider 3.5 and a review of The SuperCollider Book, the latest audio-related tome from the press at MIT. I'll introduce the system and some of its components, with example code and screenshots (I love screenshots), then I'll be your tour guide to some interesting SuperCollider projects and Web sites. I'll conclude with a summary of my impressions of SuperCollider, followed by my review of The SuperCollider Book.

Background Bits

In 1996, SuperCollider was released as a closed-source commercial program available only for the Macintosh computer. In 2002 the source code was released to the public under the GPL. Since then development has been consistent and impressive, and the system is now available for Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows, with a high level of cross-platform compatibility.

SuperCollider has been designed as a client/server arrangement, with a clean division between its audio processing parts (scsynth) and the language used to control those parts (sclang). In a typical application the synthesizer is started in a separate process, then the user writes code in a text editor (e.g. Emacs, Gedit, vi/vim) configured for operation with SuperCollider. The editor configuration usually includes mechanisms for controlling the server state and for sending code to the synthesizer for rendering, often as a realtime process.

A complete list of SuperCollider's capabilities would be beyond the scope of this article. Synthesis primitives are well-represented by a variety of oscillators, filters, effects, and control mechanisms (envelopes, gates, triggers). SuperCollider has borrowed the unit generator concept - i.e. an audio processing "black box" - from the MusicN languages. Users combine unit generators to roll their own synthesis and processing graphs into what SuperCollider calls a SynthDef. Many predefined SynthDefs are available, and it's easy to create your own.

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Linux Audio Conference 2011: A Report From Maynooth

Dave Phillips — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Dave Phillips

On May 7 and 8 I attended the Linux Audio Conference for 2011 held in Maynooth, Ireland. Due to a temporary mental malfeasance - for some reason I assumed the Earth rotated in the opposite direction - I booked my flight for the wrong departure date and was unable to change its itinerary without paying out a hefty sum to the airline. So, on Saturday morning I arrived at NUI in Maynooth, completely out of sync with the local time zone and ready to pack four days worth of activity into two.

LAC 2011

Due to scheduling constraints it's impossible for anyone to attend all the presentations and demonstrations at the conference, so I didn't bother trying. I attended some of the scheduled presentations, but the bulk of my time was spent in inspiring conversations and casual meetings with friends old and new. Of course the talk focused on the conference events, related Linux audio news and stories, and where to find the best pubs in Maynooth.

Before all else I want to send a huge shout-out of thanks to Dr. Victor Lazzarini and his able crew at NUIM. As far as I could tell everything flowed smoothly from time slot to time slot with no logistical disasters. The presentations I attended were well-prepared and very enjoyable, thanks especially to the great efforts of the organizers.

Time worked against me, but I was able to catch Jeremy Jongepier's hands-on demonstration of his creative use of Linux audio software such as QTractor, Yoshimi, QSynth, and others; Joern Nettingsmeier's lecture on loudness metering and why it matters; an update on recent improvements to the Fluidsynth soundfont synthesizer; and Conor Dempsey's unveiling of the WADE system, a portal for on-line audio synthesis. Of course I missed a dozen other presentations, due primarily to those lively conversations that went on constantly in the halls at NUIM and at the restaurants and pubs in Maynooth.

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A Report From Beyond: Linux Sound & Music At Virginia Tech

Dave Phillips — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Dave Phillips

From April 7 through 9 I attended Beyond, a series of lectures, workshops, and concerts promoted by the DISIS group at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg VA. The festivities included presentations from Professor Brad Garton and Create Digital Music's Peter Kirn, plus some incidental ramblings from yours truly. The concerts featured performances by VT's own Linux Laptop Orchestra, accompanied at times by percussionist extraordinaire Ron Coulter and a group from the Boys And Girls Club of Roanoke. Other performances included improvisations with some unique hardware controllers (more about those performances below) and original works composed by the participants.

Brad Garton: A Man, His Books And Toys

Brad Garton is the director of the Computer Music Center at Columbia University. His involvement with electronic/experimental/computer music is extensive and rich with associations and accomplishments, and he continues to stay on the edge of new developments in music technology. His presentation at the DISIS fest included an improvisation with his own iRTCmix synthesis software running on an iPhone and controlled by a fascinating instrument called a Manta.

iRTCMix is a logical extension from Brad's RTCmix, an on-going collaborative project that adds realtime scheduling and other features to Cmix, a computer music language designed by composer Paul Lansky. While RTCmix and the original Cmix run on Linux, iRTCmix has been designed for use with Apple's iOS and its supported devices.

Brad demonstrated how iRTCmix can be used to provide synthesis and algorithmic composition capabilities to an application destined for an iPhone. Superficially it's a simple affair - you write your program on a host equipped with Apple's Xcode SDK and the iRTCmix library, connect your phone to your machine via USB, prototype your app and send it on to the external device. Brad's demos showed off some neat synthesis and GUI capabilities, but alas, the whole process depends on Apple's decidedly proprietary SDK, so Linux is barred from the shop. That process was interesting to observe, but I found as much fascination in Brad's account of his dealings with Apple.

Given the restrictions imposed by the hardware, Brad coaxed a lot of interesting sounds out of his applications. He agreed that programming for the iPhone and similar devices forces the programmer to attend to the hungry details of his or her code, harkening back to Ye Olden Tymes of "bumming" code in order to squeeze the most action out of very limited resources.

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Friends Of JACK

Dave Phillips — Tue, 03 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Dave Phillips

Friends Of JACK

The JACK audio server/master transport control system is the cornerstone of the modern Linux sound production studio. That's certainly true in my own studio, and given JACK's complexity I also employ a number of useful "friends of JACK", i.e. software that reveals and extends JACK's capabilities. This article looks at some of those friends most commonly in action here at Studio Dave.

Taking Control: QJackCtl, Patchage, And jack.*

JACK is completely configurable at the command prompt, of course, and it isn't even especially difficult to use there. But by now I've been assimilated utterly by the GUI, so I must have a graphic utility to set up my JACK systems. Happily, I have two excellent choices, Rui Nuno Capela's QJackCtl and Dave Robillard's Patchage.

QJackCtl (Figure 1) needs little introduction to regular readers of my articles. It's been my control station for JACK for many years, as witnessed by its presence in many screenshots in those articles. The program's development naturally follows JACK's development track, with new features appearing in QJackCtl that complement JACK's latest capabilities, e.g. the JACK Session panel. The QJackCtl UI also includes a set of virtual buttons for operating JACK's transport control system, very handy for working with GUI-less programs such as Ecasound or Csound.

Figure 1. QJackCtl

Patchage (Figure 2) appears to be a very different creature, but its nature as a connections manager for JACK clients is identical to QJackCtl. However, Patchage presents the clients as graphic modules that can be moved and connected freely on a background canvas. The graphic arrangements can be saved and recalled, and their visual components can be re-organized as you like. As far as I can tell Patchage doesn't supply transport controls or other JACK management features, but its GUI is super-cool and it is the popular alternative to the ubiquitous QJackCtl.

Figure 2. Patchage

As mentioned, the GUI is not a necessity for complete control of JACK. Rohan Drape has created jack.*, a set of command-line utilities for managing JACK's client connections and operating its transport controls. The package also includes handy programs for recording and playback from the terminal prompt.

The JACK Soundfile Editor: mhWaveEdit

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Introducing Mixbus And The Ardour3 Alpha

Dave Phillips — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Dave Phillips

Mixbus (Figure 1) is a version of Ardour2 for Linux and OSX that replaces Ardour's native mixer with one designed by the Harrison company, a manufacturer of professional audio mixing boards. Harrison consoles have been used to mix the soundtracks for many popular movies - see the advertisements on the site - and their products can be found in major broadcast, film, and audio post-production studios, as well as in live performance venues. Mixbus has been designed to emulate the best features of an analog mixer with the added value of Ardour's audio capabilities and Harrison's unique DSP core. Indeed, current Ardour users will find familiar territory in the Mixbus recorder/editor and a whole new world in the mixer section.

Figure 1. Harrison's Mixbus For Linux. (Full-size)

Getting The Goods

I'll get the potential downside out of the way: Mixbus is a closed-source application that sells for real money ($79 US). However, it is also reliant upon to and materially supportive of the Ardour project, and a portion of your Mixbus purchase goes to fund Ardour's development.

Mixbus can be purchased from the Harrison Web site. After retrieving the tarball unpack it in your home directory, enter your new Mixbus-xxx subdirectory, and run the install.sh program (as root user). Desktop and menu icons will be installed for easily launching the program, and once the program's installed it's ready for use.

Harrison's recommended minimal hardware requirements for Mixbus for Linux include a dual-core CPU and 1G memory. I tested the program on two machines, a laptop with a dual-core AMD Turion-X2 and a desktop box with a single-core AMD 3800+ clocked at 2.4 GHz. Both machines use nVidia graphics chipsets that are roughly equivalent in performance. Mixbus runs on the 3800, but its screen redraws are struggling to keep up. Audio processing sounds fine on the single-core machine and created no xruns at fairly low latency. However, the sluggish graphics adversely affects the enjoyment and productive use of the Mixbus user interface. By comparison, the laptop's video performance was noticeably better. I can say that Mixbus will run on the 3800, but I will not recommend a single-core box. For best performance heed Harrison's advice and use a multi-core machine.

The Mixer

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