The times they are a-changin'

So, there's been some changes afoot and I figured it's time to tell you about them.

I no longer do music tech. I graduated in July with a 2:1. I have now started a Master's course in Creative Technologies. I'm still at DMU, but now I'm working in the Institute Of Creative Technologies. You can find some links to various IOCT-related things over on the right.

What this means, is that this blog is now going to broaden its scope to cover all kinds of creative technology, rather than just those that are music related. I'm not changing the name though, as that's too much hassle.

Also, for those that don't know, Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) is being released in a few days. I plan to once again do a complete reinstall, as that should fix various things I've broken in the course of using Feisty for the past six months. I shall obviously give a full report on that endeavour when it's all over.

A learning experience

So, on tuesday the mUbuntu project took its first few tentative steps and I introduced some Leicester college students to the world of OSS and Linux. All seemed to go well, until we sent them off for lunch and they never returned. Not so much of a problem for me as my part of the day had finished, but a major problem for Martin, who was planning on teaching them about Tracker software in the afternoon.

All in all, it's been a learning experience. I've learnt:

• Macs have an odd bug which means that if they're not connected to the internet while you install the OS, they'll decide it's 1904 and Linux doesn't like that...
• I have no clue how to shutdown a mac running OS 9
• As simple as it looks, ZynSubAddFX will slow an iMac down quite easily
• As impressive as Linux can be, it's hard to impress with it quickly other than playing with Beryl and going "look at teh cube!!!11"
• Don't let unsupervised college students go for lunch when what you're teaching them isn't mandatory...

Oh well, Live and learn!

In other news, despite my original post about not wanting to switch to Ubuntu studio just yet, I have switched! I discovered I could "upgrade" to it without losing anything, so I did. It's pretty damn awesome, even if I can't use XGL with the low-latency kernel. Even if you don't fancy using it, I highly recommend installing the theme as it's beautiful. My former theme, while similar and also beautiful, suffered from some readability problems, so this is perfect ^_^

More soon!

-Andy

Open source + windows

While this project mainly focuses on open source software, and therefore Linux, some people will still be using Windows. So, I thought I'd make a quick post with some links to music tech applications that can be run on windows along with quick descriptions taken from their Sourceforge pages. Stuff in bold are the ones I recommend.

Audacity
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together, change the speed or pitch of a recording, and more!

Psycle
Psycle is a Music tracker (like FastTracker 2 or Impulse Tracker) combined with plugin modularity. It supports its own plugin API, the VST2 plugin standard, and a tracker style sampler playback.

VioLet Composer
A cross-platform modular multispace desktop music composer. Features realtime wavelet processing, flexible arrangement, extensible sample types, runtime plugin development, ASIO support, out-of-order PCM processing, autosaving and much, much more.

modplug
Modplug is a 'Win32' X86 based audio application used to produce music. The application was initially a private project developed by Olivier Lapicque and is a popular 'tracker' used by many musicians.

Frinika
Frinika is a free, complete music workstation software for Linux, Windows, Mac OSX Tiger and other operating systems running Java 1.5 (J2SE5.0). It features sequencer, soft-synths, realtime effects and audio recording.

OpenSebJ
An audio production & mixing tool, featuring a - Sequencer, Beat Box, Wave Recording, Frequency Modulation, DJ Scratch interface, MP3 and sampler playback (the ability to assign any sample to any key) - For Windows, written in C# .Net 2.0 with DirectX.

Mixere
Mixere is a standalone Windows application for mixing audio files. It has a spreadsheet-like interface that's ideal for live performance, and especially live sound collage. Imagine unlimited racks full of CD players, all connected to an automated mixer.

ZynAddSubFX
ZynAddSubFX is a powerful realtime, multi-timbral software synthesizer for Linux and Windows. It is microtonal, and the instruments made by it sounds like those from professional keyboards. The program has effects like Reverb, Echo, Chorus, Phaser...

gAlan
gAlan is an audio-processing tool (both on-line and off-line) for X windows and Win32. It allows you to build synthesisers, effects chains, mixers, sequencers, drum-machines etc. etc. in a modular fashion.

For more, just have a browse through the various projects over at Sourceforge.

-Andy

A couple of articles

So, I thought I'd post a few interesting Linux/recording articles.

Let's start off with what got me to try Linux in the first place:

What's so bad about Microsoft?
What alternatives are there to Microsoft?

Then there's this article about using a solely open source set-up in a recording studio:

Using Linux for recording and mastering

Finally an article by Keyboard magazine talking about Linux as a musician's OS and various music-orientated distros:

Linux: It's not just for computer geeks anymore
Linux as a musician's OS? (Slashdot thread)

The first event of the mUbuntu project is taking place this Wednesday. I'm gonna be installing Ubuntu 7.04 on some old iMacs borrowed from DMU and introducing some BTEC Leicester college students to the wonders of Linux. A report and pictures, etc. will follow soon. Wish me luck!

-Andy