[Lancaster] Linux audio workshop - first thoughts

[Andy Baxter]

Hello all,

At the last meeting I went to, I said I'd have a go at running a short 
workshop on Linux audio stuff - setting up the drivers and applications, and 
using some of the audio editing / recording / composing applications. I'd 
like to get an idea of whether people are still interested and what sort of 
things you'd like me to cover, so here are my first thoughts on how I'm 
thinking of doing it, with any comments or suggestions welcome.

One thing is whether to do it as a short, fairly low key, session as part of 
one of the lug meetings, or make it a whole or half day and ask a few more 
people. Atm, I'm thinking start with just the lug, and then see if anyone 
else is interested.

The way I'm thinking of doing it, is do it in two parts, with some time for 
people to play with things between each session. After each part, I've listed 
some of the things I could cover.

:: 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)

Then give people time to try out some of the above - e.g. setting up their 
machine or one of the machines in the basement to play mp3 files etc.

:: part 2 - more advanced audio work.

Here I'm thinking of things like:

- sound recording and editing using apps like audacity, ardour, and rezound.

- basics of different file formats - e.g. difference between compressed and 
uncompressed formats like ogg/mp3 and wav. How to convert between formats.

- command line sound toolkit programs: sox, ecasound, oggenc, and LAME

- (ripping and burning audio CDs.)

- I can do a bit on the basics of using midi / drum machine type apps like 
rosegarden, Muse, and hydrogen, though I'm no composer so don't expect too 
much.

- audio effects using the LADSPA plugin framework and jackd.

- Basics of audio streaming under linux - how the basic architecture works (a 
client/encoder encodes the audio to a compressed stream which is then sent to 
a server to be relayed over the net to each of the listening client 
programs). A quick intro to some of the server and client programs available 
under linux.

Most of these would have to be covered in passing just to let people know 
what's out there and then carry on for themselves, rather than give a full 
tutorial on each program.

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For the venue, I'm thinking of the basement, using the good machine to 
demonstrate things on, and try and get the other machines set up well enough 
for people to try out at least some stuff in the breaks.

I'm not sure if this is going to be too much to do in one meeting, so any 
other suggestions welcome. If people want to pick just a few topics out of 
the above and I'll concentrate on them, that would be OK. Also, if anyone 
else wants to help run this, I'd be glad for the help - I'm pretty sure of 
what I'm doing from the technical side with the topics I've listed above, but 
I'm not much of a musician, so I feel a bit out of my depth from that side of 
things.

Could you let me know what you think?

cheers, andy.

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Thanks, andy.