I found out about this forum from the LinuxQuestions.com forum. The reason why I joined that place was because I had specific questions about how to set up a decent functioning DAW in Linux. I already have one running on a Win7 platform and it does most anything I can ask of it, but there's a curious area where I might be better off running a Linux DAW than a Windows one, and that's if I want to run old sound cards. Seems like the folks over at ALSA have a much better selection of drivers for old cards than what's available with Win7. I have at least four old sound cards that I'm interested in working with and it's because these old cards have synth chips onboard. Sure, softsynths are cool and all, but it's hard to beat the latency of a card that has its sounds on a chip, isn't it? Or at least so I hope. A couple of the old cards I have, have some very cool sounding voices on their chips too. Cool enough to try to put together a system just to see if I can get them to work.
I'm also interested in trying out some of the software that's been written for Linux. Especially Rosegarden. Call me old-fashioned, I don't care. I prefer composing music using a staff and those funny-looking note squigglies. They mean a whole lot more to me than piano rolls do.
Okay, I guess that's about it for now. I'll see ya on the boards.
Howdy from Houston, Texas
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baconature
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Re: Howdy from Houston, Texas
Hey,
I thought to say welcome to the forum to you.
I hope you can find an effective (for you) setup of software in Linux. I also have an old win machine, though win 98SE that I still prefer even to Linux for a DAW. I somehow think most of these Linux folks have no idea what a good music audio system looks like or how good ones perform. I run cakewalk pro audio 9.x. I really want to have the same functionality in Linux that that single piece of software provides, its ease of use and the flexibility in its performance. Having experienced some of the high end features that Ardour has, I am sure that its capability is higher in quality than what the old cakewalk offers. And then there is that "control" issue of proprietary bunk, the get the money side of planned obsolescence. Some of us can't purchase those systems repetitively. I understand that I remain ignorant of a lot of software and or the functionality there in, available for us in Linux, so I keep looking.
I am sort of like you in the desire for some of what Rosegarden provides and the potential to use musical score (mostly for copyright issues). Personally I have found that the piano roll interface is faster than placing notes on a staff. This is likely due to my personal visual issues with dyslexia. I can't really read music fluently due to that issue. I do understand the significance of musical notes on a score, and your desire for that, because of its quantitative definition. Yet I still seek the midi interface that will write midi well (note by note), having each note's duration defined. What I have found thus far has a paint the duration of a note (piano roll) rather than selecting the duration and placing that defined duration in a specific time location. I have used the notation on staff interface in cakewalk, which is pretty smooth, but still the piano roll interface is quicker for me. Keep on looking and let me know if and when you find what you want. I don't think it is correct to call you old fashioned, you understand music well enough to require/desire, proper definitions of it.
I was fooling with Rosegarden last night, trying to connect it and synth (?) to jack allowing sound to flow. Not successfully I might add. It is possible I know. I am also interested in trying Muse, not there yet though.
Best of luck,
I thought to say welcome to the forum to you.
I hope you can find an effective (for you) setup of software in Linux. I also have an old win machine, though win 98SE that I still prefer even to Linux for a DAW. I somehow think most of these Linux folks have no idea what a good music audio system looks like or how good ones perform. I run cakewalk pro audio 9.x. I really want to have the same functionality in Linux that that single piece of software provides, its ease of use and the flexibility in its performance. Having experienced some of the high end features that Ardour has, I am sure that its capability is higher in quality than what the old cakewalk offers. And then there is that "control" issue of proprietary bunk, the get the money side of planned obsolescence. Some of us can't purchase those systems repetitively. I understand that I remain ignorant of a lot of software and or the functionality there in, available for us in Linux, so I keep looking.
I am sort of like you in the desire for some of what Rosegarden provides and the potential to use musical score (mostly for copyright issues). Personally I have found that the piano roll interface is faster than placing notes on a staff. This is likely due to my personal visual issues with dyslexia. I can't really read music fluently due to that issue. I do understand the significance of musical notes on a score, and your desire for that, because of its quantitative definition. Yet I still seek the midi interface that will write midi well (note by note), having each note's duration defined. What I have found thus far has a paint the duration of a note (piano roll) rather than selecting the duration and placing that defined duration in a specific time location. I have used the notation on staff interface in cakewalk, which is pretty smooth, but still the piano roll interface is quicker for me. Keep on looking and let me know if and when you find what you want. I don't think it is correct to call you old fashioned, you understand music well enough to require/desire, proper definitions of it.
I was fooling with Rosegarden last night, trying to connect it and synth (?) to jack allowing sound to flow. Not successfully I might add. It is possible I know. I am also interested in trying Muse, not there yet though.
Best of luck,
Tom ~ Idaho USA
UbuntuStudio 20.04, Intel i5 3.30GHz 6600, Asus Q170Mc MotherBoard, 32Gb ram
My Music
UbuntuStudio 20.04, Intel i5 3.30GHz 6600, Asus Q170Mc MotherBoard, 32Gb ram
My Music
Re: Howdy from Houston, Texas
Hey SR, what part of Houston are you in? I'm in Old Spring Branch, a couple of miles as the crow flies northwest of the I-10W/I-610W interchange.
I wouldn't mind meeting up with you sometime -- swap some ideas or hot licks or whatever.
Baconature, you sound a lot like you are now where I was about 12 years ago. I put together v1.0 of my DAW back then, one piece at a time as I could afford things. I too was running Win98, putting up with BSODs, which didn't exactly occur frequently, but they did occur. And the crowning glory to my DAW was Cakewalk's Pro Audio 8, which I upgraded soon after purchase to Pro Audio 9. To this day, my purchase of Pro Audio 8 was the most money I've ever spent on a piece of software. But as you indicated, it was a very full-featured and robust program, and did almost everything I needed to produce two CDs of music. The link in my sig will take you to them. Give 'em a listen if you're interested.
I'm not familiar with Ardour, but I don't see how any sort of music production software could be much more full-featured than Cakewalk Sonar, which is what I work with now -- X2, specifically. The only reason why I didn't pay as much for Sonar as I did for Pro Audio is because I got a small break for being a Cakewalk owner. I just googled up Ardour. It's an impressive looking DAW, but it also looks like it doesn't support musical notation. Which is not a total deal breaker, as long as I can compose using a package that will save to MIDI, which I can then import into something like Ardour.
I think that a lot of people who wish to stay current on the software they use just see the practically annual upgrades as just installments in the cost of doing business. Really, if you follow that path with Cakewalk, the upgrades from one version to the next are not all that expensive, but it's just a never ending process as they continue to churn their products, often making changes just for the sake of making changes and not because the software needed it. In fact, Adobe has finally called a spade a spade and with their latest products, they're no longer selling version x.x licenses, but are now putting their products in "the cloud" and offering monthly subscriptions for their use. Well, we'll see if that catches on or not. Personally, I think what will happen is folks will continue to use the old version x.x stuff for as long as they possibly can before they're dragged, complaining quite loudly, into cloud use. And all this will be a golden opportunity for competitors to cash in, thus causing Adobe to feel a real hit in its revenues. Awww too bad.
I'm like you, though. I will often go for a few years or more between upgrades -- which ends up costing more when I finally do, but it's still cheaper than if I were to upgrade annually, if you total up the annual upgrades, that is.
As far as a MIDI interface goes, pretty much any digital music composition you do is gonna be MIDI, whether you enter the note pitch and durations in on a piano roll or musical stave, or whether you play the notes on a MIDI instrument, like a keyboard. The beauty of MIDI, apart from being able to assign just about any conceivable voice to a sequence of notes is that you have complete control over they way they behave. Although this often means your having to work straight from the event list, which, once you get the hang of it, can be fun.
Honestly, I've just never tried doing much with the piano roll. The few times I tried working with it, it did not seem at all intuitive to me. Now, perhaps if I were better at keyboards, I'd think differently. But I'm a guitarist and I've been a classical player for many years, so I'm used to musical notation, so naturally I prefer it. Most folks seem to do very well using a piano roll. I suspect the way they actually end up using it, though, is more of an editing tool. They probably play the part on a MIDI keyboard and then edit it with the piano roll.
Yeah, for sure, I'll let folks know what I find that works for me. But bear in mind that my requirements will probably be quite different from others. Mostly I'm interested in getting a few old sound cards I have to work. Thanks to the large selection of drivers for old cards, brought to us by the efforts of the ALSA folks, I should be able to get these cards to work better in Linux than in Win7. But that's only part of the task. I plan to put the cards on my DAW's MIDI network, so the Linux PC will be networked to the Win7 PC by means of the DAW's MIDI network, which exists more or less independent from the two machines, sort of like the way SCSI works.
In theory, it should work. We'll see how well it does in practice.
I wouldn't mind meeting up with you sometime -- swap some ideas or hot licks or whatever.
Baconature, you sound a lot like you are now where I was about 12 years ago. I put together v1.0 of my DAW back then, one piece at a time as I could afford things. I too was running Win98, putting up with BSODs, which didn't exactly occur frequently, but they did occur. And the crowning glory to my DAW was Cakewalk's Pro Audio 8, which I upgraded soon after purchase to Pro Audio 9. To this day, my purchase of Pro Audio 8 was the most money I've ever spent on a piece of software. But as you indicated, it was a very full-featured and robust program, and did almost everything I needed to produce two CDs of music. The link in my sig will take you to them. Give 'em a listen if you're interested.
I'm not familiar with Ardour, but I don't see how any sort of music production software could be much more full-featured than Cakewalk Sonar, which is what I work with now -- X2, specifically. The only reason why I didn't pay as much for Sonar as I did for Pro Audio is because I got a small break for being a Cakewalk owner. I just googled up Ardour. It's an impressive looking DAW, but it also looks like it doesn't support musical notation. Which is not a total deal breaker, as long as I can compose using a package that will save to MIDI, which I can then import into something like Ardour.
I think that a lot of people who wish to stay current on the software they use just see the practically annual upgrades as just installments in the cost of doing business. Really, if you follow that path with Cakewalk, the upgrades from one version to the next are not all that expensive, but it's just a never ending process as they continue to churn their products, often making changes just for the sake of making changes and not because the software needed it. In fact, Adobe has finally called a spade a spade and with their latest products, they're no longer selling version x.x licenses, but are now putting their products in "the cloud" and offering monthly subscriptions for their use. Well, we'll see if that catches on or not. Personally, I think what will happen is folks will continue to use the old version x.x stuff for as long as they possibly can before they're dragged, complaining quite loudly, into cloud use. And all this will be a golden opportunity for competitors to cash in, thus causing Adobe to feel a real hit in its revenues. Awww too bad.
I'm like you, though. I will often go for a few years or more between upgrades -- which ends up costing more when I finally do, but it's still cheaper than if I were to upgrade annually, if you total up the annual upgrades, that is.
As far as a MIDI interface goes, pretty much any digital music composition you do is gonna be MIDI, whether you enter the note pitch and durations in on a piano roll or musical stave, or whether you play the notes on a MIDI instrument, like a keyboard. The beauty of MIDI, apart from being able to assign just about any conceivable voice to a sequence of notes is that you have complete control over they way they behave. Although this often means your having to work straight from the event list, which, once you get the hang of it, can be fun.
Honestly, I've just never tried doing much with the piano roll. The few times I tried working with it, it did not seem at all intuitive to me. Now, perhaps if I were better at keyboards, I'd think differently. But I'm a guitarist and I've been a classical player for many years, so I'm used to musical notation, so naturally I prefer it. Most folks seem to do very well using a piano roll. I suspect the way they actually end up using it, though, is more of an editing tool. They probably play the part on a MIDI keyboard and then edit it with the piano roll.
Yeah, for sure, I'll let folks know what I find that works for me. But bear in mind that my requirements will probably be quite different from others. Mostly I'm interested in getting a few old sound cards I have to work. Thanks to the large selection of drivers for old cards, brought to us by the efforts of the ALSA folks, I should be able to get these cards to work better in Linux than in Win7. But that's only part of the task. I plan to put the cards on my DAW's MIDI network, so the Linux PC will be networked to the Win7 PC by means of the DAW's MIDI network, which exists more or less independent from the two machines, sort of like the way SCSI works.
In theory, it should work. We'll see how well it does in practice.
Re: Howdy from Houston, Texas
Hey Michael. I live in the Tomball/Spring area north of Houston and work downtown. Absolutely we can meet up whenever you want.
Re: Howdy from Houston, Texas
Cool -- I don't get to downtown much. Typically for jury duty. Or Tomball, either, far as that goes. But I can always make an exception.SR wrote:Hey Michael. I live in the Tomball/Spring area north of Houston and work downtown. Absolutely we can meet up whenever you want.
Are you familiar with meetups.com? They have a few groups I subscribe to, a couple of which are music related. One of them is Creative Musicians and Songwriters, a group that typically gets together about once a month at a music store down in the Town and Country area, sort of southwest of the Tollway 8/I-10 interchange. I haven't been to one of their meetups yet, but they have a "Blues Jam" coming up on Saturday the 15th at 11:00am. I'm figuring it'll be one big clusterf**k or a decent get-together, depending upon how well it's run. Check out the groups page at meetups:
http://www.meetup.com/Creative-Musician ... 160033152/