plug_in

MOD sysadmin

jeremy, , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A sysadmin is also jumping in to help with the infrastructure – mailing lists and wiki – so we can make sure there are usable tools available to us, after all, a brand new community is to be born!!!

From the MOD Kickstarter page, update #29.

So yes, I’m an official member of the MOD team now! I’m going to help out maintaining the current infrastructure and with the upcoming release of the MOD Duo some parts will have to be rebuilt or built up from scratch.

I will also be beta testing the MOD Duo, I’m eagerly awaiting for it to arrive in the mail. The MOD team has made some real good progress in getting the most out of the Allwinner A20 board they’re using. Also the amount of plugins that will be available for it will be staggering. This won’t be just an ordinary modelling FX unit but a complete all-in-one musical box that can also be used as a synthesizer or a loop station. And it’s going to be a rock-solid unit, the team working on making this possible contain some big names from the Linux audio community. The MOD Duo beta testing unit I will be receiving has been with Fons before for example, from what I understood he has done an in-depth analysis of the audio codec being used on the MOD Duo board.

MOD Duo final revision
MOD Duo final revision
MOD sysadmin

Workshops Music Production with Open Source Software: Introduction and Basic Principles

jeremy, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This Saturday my series of workshops about music production with open source software will kick off. The first workshop will be an introduction to the open source ecosystem and attendees will get acquainted with some basic Linux audio principles; different work-flows (monolithic vs modular), ALSA/JACK/PulseAudio, most used and most useful applications and maybe a bit about plug-in frameworks (LADSPA/DSSI/LV2/VST). I will also outline the content of the following workshops and this workshop is a gauge to see if there is enough interest. So people should show up in considerate numbers because I’m not going to invest another 5 Saturday afternoons for just a few people. After all, I’m doing this for free (as in beer).

Announcement on the site of De Bakkerij

Facebook event

Workshops Music Production with Open Source Software: Introduction and Basic Principles

The wait is almost over

jeremy, , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

For years users have been asking for a ZynAddSubFX or Yoshimi plug-in with a GUI for Linux. It seems the wait is almost over thanks to the great work of Filipe Coelho aka falkTX.

ZynAddSubFX-LV2 Test #1 (Qtractor)

According to falkTX work on the plug-in is almost 90% done. Parameters can be restored too as the following video shows.

ZynAddSubFX-LV2 Test #2 (Ardour)

Apparently the developer of ZynAddSubFX is working on exposing all parameters so in the future it should also be possible to automate Zyn’s most relevant parameters. Needless to say this stuff is still highly experimental so use at your own risk. I’ve done quite some tests and the plug-in keeps up well, also if you use many of them within a project (I’ve tested with a project with about 15 ZynAddSubFX-LV2 instances). But this doesn’t mean the plug-in doesn’t have any flaws, closing its GUI could crash your DAW for instance. Further tests should reveal all the obvious bugs so everyone, get that code and test it! Build instructions can be found in the aforementioned forum thread.

Many, many thanks to falkTX for making this possible!

The wait is almost over

Carla on the Raspberry Pi

jeremy, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 19 Comments

Last week I managed to get Carla running on my RPi. Carla is a really nice plugin host that supports the most important plugin frameworks available for Linux (LV2, DSSI, LADSPA and VST) with some awesome extra features like a built-in ZynAddSubFX synth and support for SF2, SFZ and GIG files. The latter didn’t work until yesterday but I managed to compile LinuxSampler (which is needed by Carla in order to be able to load SFZ and GIG files) for the RPi with the help of Paul Brossier aka piem from the Aubio project.

I just wrote him a mail:

Hello Paul,

I’m trying to package LinuxSampler for Raspberry Pi but I’m running into an issue when compiling which fails with a message related to RTMath.h. After some googling I ended up here:
http://bb.linuxsampler.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=514#p3156
So I started scouring the interwebs and found this:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/linuxsampler/news/20050806T210205Z.html
Where there is a reference to a possible fix. But the diff.gz that contains the patch is untraceable. I know this announcement is almost 8 years old but do you think you still have the diff or maybe an idea what changes you made to the code?

Thanks in advance and keep up the good work with Aubio!

Best regards,

Jeremy Jongepier

And guess what, he replied almost instantly! He gave me some pointers where to add some extra code and even though I’m not a coder I started trying things out. But then I stumbled upon actual patches to resolve this issue. I needed both the ARM and atomic patch and after applying those LinuxSampler compiled flawlessly in my Raspbian ARM chroot. The few lines of code I cooked up myself were almost identical so I got quite far actually. I should really pick up learning how to code, I think I’d learn fast.

So after compiling LinuxSampler I could rebuild Carla against the freshly created LinuxSampler libs. Installed the deb on my RPi and loaded some SFZ’s. It all worked like a charm. Carla is like a Swiss Army Knife, I’m really starting to appreciate this piece of software. Kudos to falkTX! And thanks to Paul Brossier for responding so quickly and helping me to get on the right track.


text-align: center;

Carla running on the Raspberry Pi

Carla on the Raspberry Pi

Nog meer LV2!

jeremy, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Het Portal MOD project is bezig een aantal LADSPA plug-ins om te zetten naar LV2, waaronder CAPS, TAP, SooperLooper en guitarix. En voor zo ver ik begrepen heb werken ze ook aan een van rakarrack afgeleide LV2 plug-in.

CAPS is al omgezet naar LV2 en heb source pakket klaar om up te loaden naar de KXStudio-Team plugins repository. Maar wacht nog even de puntjes op de i af.

Ondertussen is een van de main devs van guitarix ook met LV2 aan het experimenteren.  Hij zit alleen nog te dubben of hij heel guitarix in één plug-in gaat stoppen of dat hij alle losse componenten van guitarix om gaat zetten naar LV2.


guitarix amp head als LV2 plug-in

Voeg daar nog aan toe dat degene achter LV2, David Robillard (aka drobilla), er aan zit te denken om een boek te schrijven over LV2 en je begrijpt wel dat LV2 op het moment best wel een hot item is. Gaat het ooit gebeuren dat er een open source, cross-platform plug-in framework VST naar de kroon gaat steken? De LAD community is er klaar voor, de wrapper tools staan in de steigers (DISTRHO) en met NASPRO is het al mogelijk om eigenlijk alles als LV2 te draaien.

Nog meer LV2!

LV2 galore!

jeremy, , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

De afgelopen tijd zijn er aardig wat nieuwe LV2 plug-ins gereleased. Daarom wat screenies.


text-align: center;

amsynth classic subtractive synthesizer

 


text-align: center;

Triceratops polyphonic subtractive synthesizer

 


text-align: center;

synthv1 old-school 4-oscillator subtractive polyphonic synthesizer

 


text-align: center;
samplv1 old-school all-digital polyphonic sampler synthesizer

 


text-align: center;
drumkv1 old-school drum-kit sampler

 


text-align: center;
setBfree DSP Tonewheel Organ (screenshot van standalone versie)



text-align: center;

Fomp LV2 port of the MCP, VCO, FIL, and WAH plugins by Fons Adriaensen
LV2 galore!

Loomer Cumulus

jeremy, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Het aantal aanbieders van commerciële plug-ins voor Linux is klein. Heel klein. Het zijn er eigenlijk maar vier, Loomer, LinuxDSP, Pianoteq en DiscoDSP. Daar staat tegenover dat de beschikbare plug-ins van hoge kwaliteit zijn en dat vooral Loomer en LinuxDSP niet onwelwillend staan tegenover verzoeken, vragen en eventuele bugreports vanuit de community. Voor die kwaliteit en servicegerichtheid betaal je wel wat maar alle drie de aanbieders hebben demo’s beschikbaar en Loomer heeft nu ook een magware plug-in uitgebracht, Loomer Cumulus.

De plug-in, beschikbaar als 32 en 64 bits LinuxVST en standalone JACK applicatie, staat op de DVD die bij het blad Computer Music zit. Niet echt freeware dus, je moet het tijdschrift wel eerst aanschaffen, maar Cumulus is zeker de moeite waard om eens uit te proberen. Het is, naast Loomer’s eigen Sequent, de enige goed werkende plug-in voor Linux waarmee je samples kan laden en deze realtime kan bewerken (DiscoDSP’s HighLife is een specifieke sampler maar werkt niet goed). De standalone applicatie werkt prima, met de LinuxVST plug-in heb ik nog wat problemen aangezien Qtractor wat moeite heeft met deze plug-in. Ardour 3, dat inmiddels ook ondersteuning heeft voor LinuxVST’s, doet het beter maar waarschijnlijk komt Cumulus het beste tot zijn recht in software als Renoise.

Het is goed om te zien dat een blad als Computer Music Linux als audio platform serieus begint te nemen. Niet alleen staan er Linux binaries op de DVD maar ook staat er een positieve review van Harrison Mixbus 2 in het laatste nummer van het magazine zelf en staan er Linux demo’s van Mixbus en energyXT op de DVD.

Loomer Cumulus