LinuxMusicians

OK - I'm glad thats sorted then.

I moved the BIOS-based troubleshooting bit to the bottom because its less likely that BIOS users will run into trouble when (multi)booting. In most cases, GRUB issues for BIOS users will get fixed with executing those two grub commands. If only things were so simple for UEFI users!

We should put all the warnings about UEFI before we even get to explaining how to install because its pretty much guaranteed that anyone dual or multibooting with a recent Windows is not going to have GRUB set up correctly to boot into KX. This is because the Ubuntu 12.04 installer only seems to correctly install GRUB for UEFI machines when you let the installer use the full drive and auto-create partitions. UEFI multibooters NEED to have a bootable disc with Boot-repair on to switch grub-pc for grub-efi unless they know how to do that manually (no newb would) but chances are BIOS users will get up and running without any 3rd party rescue discs hence SGD2 isn't as essential to a BIOS user than boot-repair is to a multi-booting UEFI user.

Dan, while I understand how tough the back-and-forth of community documentation can be, it's a necessity for proper docs. Try to hang in there

On this note, I think documentation which is subject to change (read: All linux doco; read: kxstudio doco) should be on a dynamic page like a wiki so that the pages can be edited/moved/etc according to change.

The 'ALSA and KXStudio' chapter is pretty much done now:

http://www.wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku ... d_kxstudio

I've not gone into any real detail over the Cadence ALSA bridges. Whilst I'd like to see the ALSA/JACK bridge options documented as part of the official Cadence docs I'm not sure there is much need to cover their options in a manual for newbs. At least I know I've not had any need to change the ALSA bridge default settings but if someone had to change any ALSA bridge settings please explain why and maybe we'll include a bit more info if we think it could affect newcomers.

Dan, great work!

First, you are right, no special explanation of bridges is needed here. For 12.04.2, the bridge will be fine because the problems that had been are now fixed with the 3.8 kernel. And otherwise, Cadence docs can reference the details.

I have added some edits and am explaining them here:

• The wording about ALSA not supporting Firewire yet was extraneous. That's included in the other page already. I kept the import point.
• I changed "spanner" to "tool". First, different icon sets do not all show the same spanner, although KXStudio will obviously have the default set. More importantly, "spanner" is not used in America, is not a word that people will understand here.
• I clarified about Audacity (your statement that it "pretends" to support JACK wasn't really accurate). Thing is, I'm not sure if LMMS or Skype, for example, are like Audacity or are truly ALSA-only, so perhaps this could be further clarified.

I made a few other inconsequential edits. I'm sure there's still room for improvement, but I think it's already very good.

Thanks Wolftune - I didn't know spanner was a Brit exclusive!

I've made some small changes to the TOC in the OP and I've started writing the 'Intro to Cadence' chapter but gotta get out now.

Dan, Wolftune, good to see you working harmoniously (pardon the awful pun) once again, the results are fantastic. Most impressive that so much solid info is conveyed so quickly, already I have a much better understanding of how things work in Linux audio.

I'm a pretty typical potential convert to something like KXStudio, just popping in to mention how things look from my perspective, for what (if anything) it's worth:

Windows: I just did a clean install of Windows 8 Pro. The good: it's faster and better, no question. Average user might not notice but if you're pushing an underpowered machine to its limit, it's an improvement. Also wi-fi/ASIO issues are fixed.

The bad: the new UI is an utter trainwreck, what are they thinking? It's not difficult, exactly, just . . . stupid. Won't go into details, but the inexplicable decision to force PC owners to use a tablet-GUI is good news for Linux.

Linux: who knows, but docs like this are absolutely the key. Nobody, but nobody thinks to himself "I've never used this Linux thing, but all the best producers are onboard, and everyone says it's faster and easier to get on with the difficult work of pro-audio!" Nobody ever said this. The converts are people like myself, at least semi-computer literate, sick of the Windows-knows-best treatment, and well-disposed to FLOSS in general. Reading through the KX docs provided here it strikes me that if I'd had something like this at the outset (a completed version that is,) I'd likely be running KXStudio instead of Windows 8 right now.

Looking forward to reading the rest of the docs, thanks for all your work.

just popping in to mention how things look from my perspective

Likewise.

Because if nobody says, "This is great," you guys might feel lonely and unappreciated!

This is great

Thanks v.much Heb + Thad!

Some very complimentary and encouraging words there. Its nice to know our work is appreciated and in demand!

Like Heb, I'm in no doubt there is a very real need for these docs. F does an amazing job - could not ask for more - with supporting KX but I know there is a large chunk of potential users who are interested but maybe not quite prepared to essentially start from scratch with their computer-know-how and unwilling to trawl and post to forums for help. In fact that pretty well describes almost every non-Linux user I know.

I got sick of hearing 'Linux audio is an unintelligible mess' or words to that effect. I hope these docs will put an end to such comments and make F's (+ the Linux (audio) communities) superb tools accessible to all. Well, it may remain a mess but at least it'll be a mess people can make sense and use of!

Good news F!

Now for more good news for Cadence! Things really get interesting for the KX manual with the 'Introduction to Cadence'

http://www.wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku ... troduction

Hi F!

Feel free to copy and use what you want, where you want.

I was expecting you'd have a few corrections to make - I needed to spur you into telling us how it really works!

falkTX wrote: I need to make some small adjustments there though, some information is wrong or misleading.
(wolftune has the lock)

I have what??

I don't know what you mean, sorry… you need me to do something?

Anyway, I made a few edits to the new page which was, as usual, overall excellent.

EDIT: Oh you mean I was editing the page and didn't submit yet so it blocked you from editing! Sorry, didn't realize that I was almost done when I had a lesson and had to stop and focus on my student!

Cheers

Thanks for the kind words and edits wolftune! I just made a few small corrections to your edits so now we're just waiting for F to correct our mistakes.

What is up there is how Cadence SEEMS to work to me now, anyway.

I've been thinking about the content of the next chapter of the mini KX manual so I was looking at Cadence's JACK settings window when I realised an important hole in my understanding of Cadence - what is the purpose of the MIDI driver option on the ALSA driver tab? I was under the impression that the a2j MIDI bridge is essentially serving the same purpose as choosing 'ALSA sequencer' as the MIDI driver so that if you're running the a2j MIDI bridge you have no need to enable the ALSA MIDI driver?

Thats what I thought. So, unless someone who is wanting to use MIDI hardware can't use Cadence's JACK midi bridge (highly unlikely as that is), they would have no reason to ever use the ALSA MIDI driver because its basically not as good.

All I can really write for configuring JACK with Cadence would be how to configure it for ALSA. I think people will be able to figure out how to use firewire devices from looking at the ALSA instructions. We'd just need to make them aware of ffado mixer.

I've never tried JACK over a network. Do Cadences Net and NetOne options work? What about loopback? Has anyone tried that?

I don't think much detail is required for anything other than ALSA and firewire for my newb guide but I want to know if people have had any success with using the Net, NetOne (wha?) and loopback drivers please.

EDIT

Looks like netone is the newer, J2 only version of netjack. Anyone tried this stuff with Cadence? What for?