audio

Pitch Perfect Penguins

Shawn Powers — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 21:10:29 +0000

My daughters love the movie Pitch Perfect. I suspect our XBMC has played it more than 100 times, and I'm not exaggerating. Whether or not you enjoy young-adult movies about singing competitions and cartoon-like projectile vomiting, I'll admit it's a pretty fun movie. The question my girls ask me most often is about the audio-mixing software the protagonist uses to make her "sick beats".

Although Anna Kendrick uses a Macintosh in the movie, and the software's name is obscured or changed in close-ups, it's easy to tell the software she uses is Mixxx. The cool part for me is that while indeed Mixxx works on OS X, it's an open-source application that works natively in Linux as well. That means, in the eyes of my daughters, Linux is now super-cool.

Mixxx is an editing package with incredible visual tools. It's designed to "mix" several songs or rhythm tracks and export a completed song. The very nice GUI makes mixing audio easy to understand, and the interface itself is apparently cool enough for Hollywood. So whether you want to make your own "wicked tracks" or join an a cappella group, Mixxx is just the tool for you. Also, I recommend watching Pitch Perfect, one or two of those XBMC viewings might have been my own!

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Songbird Becomes...Nightingale!

Shawn Powers — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 21:01:38 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Several years back, Songbird was going to be the newest, coolest, most-awesome music player ever to grace the Linux desktop. Then things happened, as they often do, and Linux support for Songbird was discontinued. I've been searching for a favorite music player for years, and although plenty of really nice software packages exist, I generally fall back to XMMS for playing music—until now.

Nightingale is truly everything I want in a music player. It is simple, yet powerful. The default install makes listening to music an educational experience. In Figure 1 you can see that as my Jonathan Coulton song plays, I automatically see the lyrics, plus instant information on the artist. If that sort of information doesn't interest you, no problem, Nightingale is highly customizable with plugins, and there are dozens and dozens available from its Web site (Figure 2 shows a handful of plugins recommended during the installation process).

Figure 1. Playing a Song Shows the Lyrics and Artist Info

Figure 2. Plugins Recommended during Installation

Every music-playing software package I've tried has disappointed me in one way or another. In my brief relationship with Nightingale, I haven't found a single thing to dislike. The latest version even provides integration into Ubuntu's Unity interface, if that's the desktop environment you prefer. Due to its simple interface, extendible underpinnings, and its continued devotion to the Linux desktop, Nightingale earns this month's Editors' Choice award. Get it for your computer today: https://www.getnightingale.com.

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Short Notices: News In Linux Audio

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

by Dave Phillips

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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At Home With AV Linux

Dave Phillips — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:26:58 +0000

by Dave Phillips

My studio computer collection includes two custom-built desktop machines and a Hewlett-Packard G60 laptop. As described in my previous article, the primary desktop box has been running an old but rock-steady 64 Studio 2.1 that has recently been replaced by a shiny new 64-bit Arch system. The secondary desktop machine and the laptop are both running the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 10.04. However, while I like and enjoy using Ubuntu I hardly require two identical installations of the same Linux distribution, so I decided to replace one of them with AV Linux.

What It Is

AV Linux is a complete Debian-based Linux distribution that includes optimized audio and video subsystems along with the expected wealth of system utilities and productivity software. A live version can be tested and used without disturbing your installed system, and an installer is provided if/when you decide to permanently add AV Linux to your boot menu.

Figure 1. AV Linux 5.0.1, at your service. (Full-size)

The AV Linux Web site tells us that the system is based on the stable "Squeeze" release from Debian Linux, the LXDE desktop and Openbox window manager, and the Remastersys utility. That last item is of particular interest - Remastersys can make a distributable copy of a personalized Debian or Ubuntu system, which is how AV Linux came into existence. At some point in 2007 Glen Macarthur recognized that his custom Debian-based audio/video production system could be useful to more users, so he spruced it up with some neat extras, pulled it all together with Remastersys, and voila, he created a new Debian-based media-optimized Linux distribution.

You can read the full story of the growth of AV Linux in its excellent manual. It's enough here to note that AV Linux has become a popular and recommended audio-centric Linux distribution. For good reasons, too, as we shall see.

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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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Giada: Hard-Core Live Looping

John Knight — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:18:42 +0000

by John Knight

Live DJs chasing a simplistic but attractive application are going to love Giada. At the same time, Giada also covers something I've been wanting for a year now, which is a way to trigger individual samples from a computer keyboard simply in real time. According to the documentation:

Giada is a free, minimal, hard-core audio tool for DJs and live performers. Load up to 32 samples, choose to play them in single mode (drum machine) or loop mode (sequencer), and start the show with your computer keyboard as a controller. Giada aims to be a compact and portable virtual device for Linux and Windows for production use and live sets.

The Giada hard-core looping program for real-time DJ performances with a GUI that's sleekly minimal.

Giada in its full-flight recording mode lets you layer a live performance piece by piece.

Installation

Using Giada is pretty easy, but its ease of use comes at a price. It's a freeware binary. This is the first freeware program I've covered, but don't worry, I won't make a habit of it.

The project's Web site consists of a (well-designed) single page, with download links for both the Windows and Linux versions of Giada.

As far as library requirements go, the documentation states:

Giada is based upon RtAudio and FLTK (GUI). They are both statically linked, but the former needs libjack.so to provide JACK's features. In a modern Linux-based OS, you should be able to run Giada without any further installation or hack.

Regarding binaries, the manual also noted: "This software is compiled for x86 processors; we still don't know what happens if you run it under a 64-bit OS/environment; try it and tell us your experience." Yes, I'm on 64-bit Linux, and it runs just fine.

Once you have the dependencies out of the way, download the latest tarball and extract it. Personally, I found I could just open the new folder, click on the binary, and it worked. For those wanting more control, open a terminal in the new folder, and enter the command:


$ ./giada_lin

Usage

Once you're inside, using Giada is actually pretty easy. Although I was rather confused at first glance, a quick bit of "RTFM" shows that its methodology is very basic, but you need to understand a few things from the outset.

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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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