Beginner help needed for KXStudio on laptop

What other apps and distros do you use to round out your studio?

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boscaiolo
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Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2018 5:36 pm

Beginner help needed for KXStudio on laptop

Post by boscaiolo »

I am a bit out of my depth here, being neither a musician nor a computer science graduate,
so apologies in advance. I have 20 years of experience with Linux (RedHat, SuSE, Debian,
Gentoo, Arch,...) so I am familiar with configuration files, but I lack knowledge of what
the component parts of audio processing do, so need some help with the following.

My wife has an HP probook laptop. She wants to connect to her Yamaha electric piano and
to learn what the range of tools for music creation and processing can do. I installed the
KXStudio distribution for her, and also tried adding KXS repos to her Ubuntu-16 system and
upgrading to a recent low-latency kernel. In both cases, we lost all sound output. A lot
of searching produced many "magic formulae" but, of course, the net is stuffed with
explanations of how to solve problems through the GUI by people who do not say even which
WM they are using. Nowhere did I find a clear overview of what each software component
does, what input it receives in what format, and what output it sends where and why.
So we were working in the dark. Eventually, I discovered we needed to alter the
settings of QJackCtl to point input and output to the Intel HD Audio card. This provided
duplex communication to the electric piano connected via USB. We thought we had the
solution.

We then found that ordinary applications no longer could output sound -- I mean the
web browsers etc. (we tried chromium and firefox). I spent a couple more days of
experiments and websearching, including eventually removing the battery and resetting
the BIOS. Nothing seemed to help. So I added a third distro, kubuntu17, adding in also the
KXS repos, and the latest low-latency kernel (4.13.0-32). With this install, with ALSA but no
Pulseaudio, Youtube talked to us again! I logged into the other two distros, the Ubuntu16
and the KXStudio. Got sound from the browser, aplay, and from VLC on all of them. Took
the laptop back to my wife to show her. Then she logged on with her own username, and
there on the desktop reopened one of the KXS applications that we had opened in an earlier
session to try to understand what it was for. Possibly it was Carla. We closed it
instantly, but there was no sound output from the browser -- or VLC or anywhere else.
Logging back into my account on any of the distros showed that sound was totally disabled
on all of them for all applications.

So my question has two parts

- Is there anywhere a simple explanation of the purposes and configuration options of
the software components, and of the data streams transmitted between them, preferably
with a clear diagram or two?

- Can anyone suggest a way to have sound work both for everyday apps and for music
creation on a humble Intel-ful HP probook running, well, any *nix at all. This is only
for a beginner, we are not expecting to create a professional studio, but it would be
great to be able to learn the basics and still watch a video.

TIA
fraslo
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Re: Beginner help needed for KXStudio on laptop

Post by fraslo »

Hi,

a quick fix for Ubuntu 16.04:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-module-jack
Reboot
Choose sound settings, switch sound output to "Pulseaudio Jack sink". Now all not Jack aware programs will produce sound again.

Frank
boscaiolo
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2018 5:36 pm

Re: Beginner help needed for KXStudio on laptop

Post by boscaiolo »

frasio: Thank you. Your brief instruction was enough to get the sound working -- after some fiddling with pulseaudio and jack settings.

This leaves me with the general question of whether anybody can point us to a clear technical summary of the complex of software and firmware that make it all happen.
fraslo
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Re: Beginner help needed for KXStudio on laptop

Post by fraslo »

boscaiolo wrote:This leaves me with the general question of whether anybody can point us to a clear technical summary of the complex of software and firmware that make it all happen.
Do you mean something like this site?
http://libremusicproduction.com/workflow

Frank
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