New classical guitarist from Victoria Canada

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Reeman
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Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2014 9:50 am

New classical guitarist from Victoria Canada

Post by Reeman »

I am 62 years on the planet much of which has been spent learning classical guitar. And lately Linux audio functions. Fortunately I do not play the lute otherwise according to a famous composer from the baroque era thirty one years of my time on this planet would have been spent tuning the instrument!

I have used Linux for high quality audio purposes for a very long time and despite the frustrations involved in having the analogue I/O of my M-audio 24/96 essentially blacked out by pulse audio, I have finally managed to start doing some decent recordings with a fast booting Musix Linux live USB key and a system without network connection that only writes what I record to ram or an esata portable drive mounted as fat32 so I can take it anywhere or plop the tracks onto any portable media like a second usb key.

My off line daw system is a discarded government surplus high end Lenovo core two duo Intel 8400 with 6 meg of L2 and no hyperthreading (which makes it stellar for rt work!) and most importantly a fairly low 65 max watt processor that does not make the fan sound like a leaf blower when in use converting a pcm file to flac or a high quality lossy ogg or whatever.

Most of my recording will be done at straight 24/48 or 24/96 pcm so non of the 16 32 44100 CD wave nonsense for this camper. I will knock it down into mp3 or whatever for the uninformed Ipod masses and youtube.

My first audio recordings with Linux used a custom RT 2 series kernel on my own install of Slackware to a P111 450 dual processor asus board with 512 meg of ram and the very same 24/96 M-audio card that I still use today. I was using ecasound for a while but I never spent enough time to get good at writing startup chain setup scripts and switched to the audacity gui when it became stable and RT capable. Mind you back then I was using sysV and the envy24 drivers with OSS without alsa configured in the kernel compile so things just worked until alsa finally got the ice1712 driver up to snuff and compiling a Slackware kernel in RT without alsa compiled in became a nightmare. Just ask the guys who wrote Zenwalk about Slackware and an RT kernel and you will see where I am coming from.

THEN ALONG CAME PULSE AND I ADMIT IT I SWITCHED TO XP. In shame and horror I freely admit my guilt.

But the bandits from Redmond knocked at my door first with Vista and then wanting more money for 7 and now they want more money for 8 whatever and again my DAW setup with ms windows goes south.

So In the past two years I have started to return to semi (desktop) Enlightenment or at least something which works like it with NextStep type menus.

But back to musix. I will be recording some pieces composed by Frederico Moreno Torroba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Moreno_Torroba That were first recorded by Segovia and several of the enigmatic Catalan Folk Songs written out and harmonized for guitar by Miguel LLobet and many other gems by composers like Silvius Leopold Weiss, Domenico Scarlatti and my other greats that I have played over the years.

I am using fairly inexpensive but transparent high grade old mics and gear into the latest daw setup with Musix Linux running off a live USB stick. Which seems to work better and does not bjork the ADC/DAC I/O on envy24 based cards or step on audacity the way pulse audio based distros do. :roll: Having to kill pulsed dependent processes all the time is a royal pain to say the least and put me off using linux as a DAW for quite a few years.

It has been a long and difficult winding road but at least with Musix Linux all I have to run with a terminal is alsamixer, but who knows maybe I will go back to using straight ecasound for audio recording purposes as jackd without a gui is my nemesis so I have avoided Ardour and all things MIDI and VST which to me are essentially useless appendages that cloud the sound.


Greeting my name is Eric and I will be posting my recordings to youtube.

"Controlling a laser with Linux is crazy, but everyone in this room is crazy in his own way. So if you want to use Linux to control an industrial welding laser, I have no problem with your using PREEMPT_RT." -- Linus Torvalds
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