[SGVLUG] Linux Audio

[Dustin]

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, Douglas Burton wrote:

> Dustin wrote:
> 
> >As we speak, I'm installing the DeMuDi (Debian Music Distribution)  
> >packages on top of Sarge.  Is anyone brave/foolish enough to want to
> >install the equivalent for their distro?  (Planet CCRMA for Fedora,

> I'll give it a try. Do you know of one for Suse? If not, I'll try DeMuDi.

I guess I should post some links, huh?  First, if you haven't done any of
this before, I recommend you try Audacity:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

It's probably packaged in your distro already.  It has its limits, but I
found it to be a *very* easy to use soundfile editor.  It can also do
simple multitrack recording, though Ardour is *much* better for serious
work.  On the other hand, Ardour is a no-holds-barred audio workstation
and has a steep learning curve.  Audacity makes simple things simple,
which made it very nice to start with.

I won't mention hardware; *serious* audio work requires a real
music-quality low noise A/D input board (even great consumer soundcards
apparently skimp on the inputs because the output is where their market
is, plus musicians expect low-impedance XLR inputs).  That seems to start
at $400-$450 once you decide you need a breakout box to get it out of the
noisy computer case.  But at the moment I'm doing my experimenting with
the inputs on the soundcard built-in to my motherboard.  For studio
recording that is kind of unthinkable, but all the tools work and I get
results I enjoy listening to so it means I can learn the software before I
decide how many hundred dollars I want to spend on the board.  I even get
away with vocals.

If someone wants to know what I've learned about boards and their price 
points, just ask.

OK, add-on packages for distros:

DeMuDi (for Debian)
http://demudi.agnula.org/

Click on "FAQ" to find the instructions on upgrading an existing
installation (the main page gives you a link to the less helpful APT setup
page without a pointer to the FAQ).

Planet CCRMA (for Red Hat/Fedora)
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

AudioSlack (guess which distro?)
http://www.audioslack.com/

Thac's RPMs (for Mandrake/Mandriva, though it looks like it is 
             transitioning to PCLinuxOS)
http://rpm.nyvalls.se/

Linux-Sound list of distros, including several live CDs that would be
interesting to check out
http://linux-sound.org/distro.html

And while we're at it:

A Sound On Sound article on Linux Recording and Mastering
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb04/articles/mirrorimage.htm

O'Reilly "Rockin' In the Free Software World" Article, focused on
utilities for guitarists rather than recording
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2001/07/20/linux_guitar.html

Dustin