My opinion about everything (TL;DR)
Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2019 7:23 pm
Hopefully I won't come across as too self important....
I've used Linux off and on for at least 15 years. But you know what? There are still some things I don't know about it and I learned a few here. So hats off to this community, I thank you.
For example, I'd never even heard of the "inxi" tool but that zoomed in on an overheating GFX card that seems to have been at the heart of my stability problems. I'd even go so far as to guess that Fedora with the RT kernel MIGHT have been working OK modulo the GFX card issue. But, since I'd recently been switching distros, I figured any changes must have been due to that rather than something completely unrelated that may or may not have happened around the same time.
My recommendation to anyone who experiences stability problems, before you start hopping distros, do a basic check of your system using inxi and memtest86. I installed memtest86 on a USB stick and it took more than 4 hours to check 8 GB but nothing came up. I used this PC yesterday for several hours and did not experience a reboot after changing out the gfx card with the frozen fan.
My next reflection is about the variety and quality and state of music apps from a VERY brief bit of time spent looking. As you may have picked up from my other posts, I'm trying to get a to a very specific kind of tracking setup that is conducive to capturing song ideas from the guitar.
I remember when I first saw a MIDI demo in 1984, I was ecstatic - but I didn't play the keyboards. I always wanted that kind of flexibility when recording guitar music - note a little late? Ah, just slide it back into place. Wrong note? No problem. Even with a plugin like Melodyne, correcting timing and pitch in audio files is REALLY A LOT OF WORK. I actually had to learn to play better!
I have had such a hard time with various complex DAWs, compared to hardware looper pedals, I really started trying to figure out why and see if there was some way to bridge the gap.
And I've come really close now with SooperLooper and Hydrogen. I don't care about adding anything else because my assumption is that whatever gets captured at this stage will get imported into a DAW for editing, arrangement, etc. and that could happen anywhere. Of course, right here on the same PC is the ideal place.
Other people have commented that the Linux audio world is turning more towards the monolithic full featured apps like Reaper, Ardour, etc. which are cross platform as well.
My two favorite Linux apps at the moment are open source projects that stopped real active development 5 or 10 years ago. I've managed to set up my computer to compile these and several other apps, but with a code base that old, one faces the dilemma of continuing to use outdated or unfashionable tools such as Qt or yet-another-variation-on-an-open-source-graphical-widget library, or perhaps rethinking these things in more modern terms using modern tools.
Supposing someone really wanted to move Hydrogen forward. That would be a LOT of work. Writing music apps which have to process stuff at audio sample rates, manage threads properly, etc. etc. is NOT EASY. I did do an open source project once, it was all I thought about for 3 years, and then... more or less "poof" the motivation left me. I kinda see that in these abandoned apps.
Suppose I wanted to combine SooperLooper with the UI from luppp, and integrate Hydrogen so I'd have a single app that did exactly what I wanted with no setup and just a single file save/open needed. Again, that would be a ton of work mostly because none of the graphical libraries used are the same.
A very large percentage of the apps which I've tried work OK on their own, but do not work so great when combined with other bits that supposedly follow the same standards (i.e. JACK). This is exceptionally difficult to debug. I have a pretty high tolerance for frustration because I deal with computers and networking all the time for my job, but everything's got a limit.
I'm not going to predict where my whims will take me because my focus is on trying to make music in an optimized way rather than allegiance to any hardware or software platform. I think the closest I've come so far was the iPad app "Quantiloop", but it has a hard time sync'ing properly to the iPad drum machine apps I tried and has a several-step procedure to get stuff to the PC via iCloud (sorry I'm not going to do DAW work on the iPad if I can help it). But then there's this "Beat Buddy" programmable drum pedal that supposedly it integrates really well with.
I also like using different tools to get different results. I have a modular synth setup that I don't use a bunch but that takes one in a completely different direction that can have nothing to do with MIDI or computers at all. So I think that I will keep using Linux for audio in some way, but it probably won't be the only way I go about doing things.
I've used Linux off and on for at least 15 years. But you know what? There are still some things I don't know about it and I learned a few here. So hats off to this community, I thank you.
For example, I'd never even heard of the "inxi" tool but that zoomed in on an overheating GFX card that seems to have been at the heart of my stability problems. I'd even go so far as to guess that Fedora with the RT kernel MIGHT have been working OK modulo the GFX card issue. But, since I'd recently been switching distros, I figured any changes must have been due to that rather than something completely unrelated that may or may not have happened around the same time.
My recommendation to anyone who experiences stability problems, before you start hopping distros, do a basic check of your system using inxi and memtest86. I installed memtest86 on a USB stick and it took more than 4 hours to check 8 GB but nothing came up. I used this PC yesterday for several hours and did not experience a reboot after changing out the gfx card with the frozen fan.
My next reflection is about the variety and quality and state of music apps from a VERY brief bit of time spent looking. As you may have picked up from my other posts, I'm trying to get a to a very specific kind of tracking setup that is conducive to capturing song ideas from the guitar.
I remember when I first saw a MIDI demo in 1984, I was ecstatic - but I didn't play the keyboards. I always wanted that kind of flexibility when recording guitar music - note a little late? Ah, just slide it back into place. Wrong note? No problem. Even with a plugin like Melodyne, correcting timing and pitch in audio files is REALLY A LOT OF WORK. I actually had to learn to play better!
I have had such a hard time with various complex DAWs, compared to hardware looper pedals, I really started trying to figure out why and see if there was some way to bridge the gap.
And I've come really close now with SooperLooper and Hydrogen. I don't care about adding anything else because my assumption is that whatever gets captured at this stage will get imported into a DAW for editing, arrangement, etc. and that could happen anywhere. Of course, right here on the same PC is the ideal place.
Other people have commented that the Linux audio world is turning more towards the monolithic full featured apps like Reaper, Ardour, etc. which are cross platform as well.
My two favorite Linux apps at the moment are open source projects that stopped real active development 5 or 10 years ago. I've managed to set up my computer to compile these and several other apps, but with a code base that old, one faces the dilemma of continuing to use outdated or unfashionable tools such as Qt or yet-another-variation-on-an-open-source-graphical-widget library, or perhaps rethinking these things in more modern terms using modern tools.
Supposing someone really wanted to move Hydrogen forward. That would be a LOT of work. Writing music apps which have to process stuff at audio sample rates, manage threads properly, etc. etc. is NOT EASY. I did do an open source project once, it was all I thought about for 3 years, and then... more or less "poof" the motivation left me. I kinda see that in these abandoned apps.
Suppose I wanted to combine SooperLooper with the UI from luppp, and integrate Hydrogen so I'd have a single app that did exactly what I wanted with no setup and just a single file save/open needed. Again, that would be a ton of work mostly because none of the graphical libraries used are the same.
A very large percentage of the apps which I've tried work OK on their own, but do not work so great when combined with other bits that supposedly follow the same standards (i.e. JACK). This is exceptionally difficult to debug. I have a pretty high tolerance for frustration because I deal with computers and networking all the time for my job, but everything's got a limit.
I'm not going to predict where my whims will take me because my focus is on trying to make music in an optimized way rather than allegiance to any hardware or software platform. I think the closest I've come so far was the iPad app "Quantiloop", but it has a hard time sync'ing properly to the iPad drum machine apps I tried and has a several-step procedure to get stuff to the PC via iCloud (sorry I'm not going to do DAW work on the iPad if I can help it). But then there's this "Beat Buddy" programmable drum pedal that supposedly it integrates really well with.
I also like using different tools to get different results. I have a modular synth setup that I don't use a bunch but that takes one in a completely different direction that can have nothing to do with MIDI or computers at all. So I think that I will keep using Linux for audio in some way, but it probably won't be the only way I go about doing things.