[Lancaster] audio workshop

[Andy Baxter]

I've decided to have a go at doing the first part of this (as described in my 
original email) next Tuesday if that's OK with everyone. I think trying to 
everything I set out is going to be too much for one meeting, so this will be 
more covering the tecchy side of showing people how the different sound 
systems work and how to set them up, rather than looking at the sound 
recording / editing / composing programs and how to use them.

If anyone wants to bring their own machines down to work on, that would be 
good.

I'm hoping to get down to the basement tomorrow afternoon to work on setting 
up as many machines as I can to play audio, in time for the workshop on 
Tuesday - if anyone wants to come and help, it would be appreciated.

I've copied what I'm thinking of doing below.

:: part 1 - setting up the hardware and applications.

- The two hardware driver systems (OSS and ALSA), what they do and how to set 
them up.

- These can only accept one audio source at once, so then cover the various 
audio daemons that have been written to get round this. ARTS (which comes 
with KDE), esd (used with gnome I think?), and jackd. Jackd is different 
again because it lets you route audio streams between apps as well as letting 
different apps share the sound card.

- Setting up player applications like xmms, zinf, alsaplayer, xine, mplayer, 
etc to use whatever sound system you have configured (e.g. ALSA plus ARTS). 
Conflicts between sound systems and workarounds to avoid them.

- Realtime versus non-realtime sound processing - for top quality audio, you 
want to use programs which take advantage of the real time capabilities in 
the newer kernels.

- the ccrma linux audio distribution. This is red hat based which I don't like 
so much, but it's a good distro if you want to do audio stuff because it's 
been put together by a group of people (from stanford uni in the states) who 
do a lot of audio work, and it includes working versions of all the major 
linux audio apps. Other audio-specific distros like Dynebolic (A live CD 
distro for media activists)

andy.

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Thanks, andy.