[Fedora-music-list] Better information needed for noobs like me

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 5:08 AM, birger wrote:
> Thank you all for a very nice initiative, getting all the great audio
> software working on a great linux distro. :-)
>
> I have browsed archives a few months back, and I have looked at the
> 'obvious' places.
>
> As a complete noob regarding studio work, mixers, effects and the whole
> 'audio workstation' thing I would love to see a little documentation
> holding my hand through the first configuration steps. Something that
> tells me how to do it for the latest Fedora release so I know I am not
> following incompatible howtos for different applications and different
> distros.
>
> I think something like this would work:
>  - Basic setup (something like the articles at
> http://www.passback.org.uk/music/ updated for latest Fedora)
>
>  - Simple special purpose workstations. Simple separate howtos building
> on the basic one but setting up simple environments for various
> purposes. Examples would be 'guitar utilities and effects processor',
> 'connecting a MIDI keyboard', and so on. Making sure everything gets
> done in a coherent fashion so bits and pieces can be mixed without
> running into problems later on.
>
>
> Some of the problems I have run into trying to master this are:
> guitarix not starting without qjackctl and arts installed. No messages
> until I ran from command line.
> Correct user configuration for jack (audio group membership).
> Choppy sound in tuxguitar, and no matter what I do I cannot seem to get
> completely rid of it. Probably because I don't quite understand what I
> am doing to fix it. There are so many options...
> I cannot find my USB headset in Jack audio. Is it possible to use it? It
> works fine in pulseaudio.
>
> These are issues that don't work out of the box yet, and I hope someone
> can write a little documentation on how to do it all the correct fedora
> way. :-)
>
>
> With kind regards
> birger
>

Hi,

Martin gave a good summary. Let me add my 2 cents into the subject.
(Well it will be more like 10 cents :))

* The documentation is possibly what we lack most for the time being.
Feel free to help us out if you have time and will to do so. We have
started a page in the Fedora wiki a while ago
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AudioCreation
for listing our audio creation type software (Fedora only) but yet it
needs a lot more work.

* PlanetCCRMA is ready for F-11 and F-12. See for instance:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/12/i386/
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/12/x86_64/
You probably need the planetccrma-repo package from that repo. (Be
careful about  the architecture)

* Install the multimedia-menus package
yum install multimedia-menus
This is new for Fedora 12. It will create submenus in your Multimedia
(Sound&Video in Gnome) menu and sort audio/video related applications
so you can find things easier.

* For guitarix, after you filed the bug, I saw that the application
looks for qjackctl and if it is missing it looks for a ~/.jackdrc file
in your home directory. If it cannot find either of them, it fails.
The ~/.jackdrc is always there when you have a working jack setup. I
didn't think about the case where someone would start guitarix on a
fresh installation, which hasn't run jackd yet. I will let upstream
developer know about the issue. Normally, guitarix shouldn't need
qjackctl. But I'll add that dependency today.

* Check out the updates-testing repository frequently. New updates
usually go there first. Typically they stay there for 2 weeks and if
no bugs are reported they go to stable. For example, Martin is a very
good tester and I appreciate his contributions. But of course, having
more testers won't hurt :)

* Pulseaudio is pain. As a Fedora developer, normally I shouldn't
recommend anything about not using it. But it is pain, at least for
me. It blew up my harddrive at some point and I stopped using it
since. Although pulseaudio is supposed to play nice with jack these
days, I am not planning to support it myself. As audio creation
people, we want control over our sound hardware. Hiding many of the
sound card's controls is a "feature" of pulseaudio for the sake of
simplicity. And this is against my use case. At the end of the day, it
is your choice what sound servers you want to use. I just want you to
know that one of the primary audio creation packagers of Fedora does
not have time and will to support pulseaudio.

* Look at /usr/share/doc/jack-audio-connection-kit-0.118.0/README.Fedora
Part of it is obsolete information by now. But it will get you
started. Make sure you add your user to the correct groups

* For tuxguitar, please try the version from updates-testing. It
should sort things out. There are many independent ways to get good
sound out of it. In the version in updates-testing, I made it default
to fluidsynth/fluid soundfont combination. It is supposed to work out
of the box now.
(Alternatively, you can use gervill (java sound API), or forward the
midi output of tuxguitar to qjackctl, and connect it to qsynth...
There are still more ways to do it.)

* qjackctl and qsynth are your friends.

* For recording&mixing, ardour is still the best in my opinion. And we
have a bunch of lv2 and ladspa plugins for sound effects. For
drumming, I primarily use hydrogen. And with jack, you can hook up
every application that uses jack to each other rather easily. Push the
Connect button on qjackctl.

* As Martin said, PlanetCCRMA list is a good  list to subscribe. It is
a lot more active than this one. And we have Fernando, the Great there
:)


Unfortunately, I am leaving tomorrow, and I will be away for a break
until mid January. You folks will probably not hear from me during
this period. I have a couple updates that I will push to the testing
today. And they will stay there until I get back. I don't want to push
something broken into stable because I won't have time to fix it. I
hope you figure your way out by the time I am back.

Cheers and welcome,
Orcan