[Lancaster] Linux audio workshop - first thoughts

[Ken Hough]

Andy,

Wow! There's food for thought!

I'm interested in sound processing/editing, but so far mainly for 
recovering some of my old LPs to CD.

I have used the likes of Krecord, Broadcast2000, Audacity and gramofile.

You may recall that I am a SuSE user, so that after installation things 
usually just work! I do not yet understand much of what the sound 
systems do "under the hood" and would like to make progress on that 
front. I tend to jump in and play with things to figure them out. 
(rarely RTFM)

I am NOT a musician and cannot play any instruments.

I could provide a PC or two to play with. For example, an Athlon 
XP2200/512MB RAM or a 500Mz K6II/400MB RAM, both with hard drive caddies 
and plug in carriers which we could configure to suit the occasion and a 
laptop (800MHz PIII) with SuSE v9.1 installed, but internal sound 
hardware is a bit naff.

The Basement sounds good, but unless I can find local parking (or a 
passing sherpa), the desktop boxes could be a problem.

A final point: Untill the problem of PCs and hardware blowing up or 
dying at the Basement is sorted (refer to Max), I'm reluctant to bring 
PCs that will be plugged into the mains.

BTW, I shall be away for a week as from 30th May.

Regards

Ken Hough

Andy Baxter wrote:
> 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.
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 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.
>