Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

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All in One Wish
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Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

Post by All in One Wish »

Hello everybody! Happy to be here

No matter how much I think I've learned (I must be pretty thick lol) I am a forever Linux newbie and do not think I've got enough of a grasp on how crazy modular things are in Linux to be able to get things together, so I'm glad you guys are here.

My music experience
Started playing guitar at 14, started playing covers at 16, became a private guitar instructor for beginners at 17, have a few "compositions" that I've recorded for myself, first on a Tascam 4-track cassette tape, which at some point I synchronized to a 386 with Cakewalk Pro 3.0 and a Roland MC-300 and an Alesis HR-16B, later a Tascam 8 tracker came along and then I have had a variety of recording "PC environments/contraptions". Cakewalk 3.1 marked my life but doesn't run in wine though I still use it thanks to (DOSBOX + Win 3.11) I also use Cakewalk Pro Audio 7 from I think 1998 or so? Both I find essential music wise in my not perfect workflow. Cakewalk Pro Audio 7 does work beautifully in wine and I can write very fast on that thing on the event list. It's a matter of muscle memory for me. Got to use Cubase back in the late 90's and coming from the old analog days I really felt in love with the mimicking of racks, connecting them and loved the skeuomorphic effort behind the initial iterations of Cubase but I then would still use my faithful Cakewalk Pro 3.0 to do the sequencing and would do some sort of MIDI loopbe to connect Cakewalk to anything else in Windows or in the Hackintosh. My workflow using Cakewalk products was ruined after Cakewalk 8 (way before Sonar). I discovered Mac when I put together my first Hackintosh in 2008 and the aesthetics of Snow Leopard made a long lasting impression in me. I would then run Windows 3.11 on DOSBOX with virtual MIDI cables in the Mac in order to keep using my faithful Cakewalk 3.0.

Going from Windows into Linux and Mac
I used Windows for many years but grew frustrated with each iteration. Learned a little VB5 on my own over the years, enough to make some educational fretboard displays for teaching and then came .NET and got rid of all my control arrays for good. I heavily resented that. I regret the notion in which "innovation" requires drivers to learn how to drive every time a new car model comes out. I'm glad the car manufacturing industry consistently features cars with steering wheels, glove compartments, seats and so on... AND I'm also happy I can actually use my muscle memory to hit the breaks!
So when I tried Mac, I noticed that if I wanted to reach the control panel to check let's say the connection to the network, I could go on the first iteration of OSX to the last one and reproduce the same exact steps to do so. Despite what I consider a decline in design choices ever since Mountain Lion came out, it seemed like they had some degree of commitment to core functionality and workflow unlike Windows in which reaching the network went from "The Network Neighborhood" to "My Network Places", to "Network and Sharing Center" to who knows what now and with a different clicking pattern to reach it every time. Renaming and relocating the steering wheel can't be called "innovation". I wonder what was their revenue for training entire teams of people in different industries that would migrate to their different operating systems. I find it incomprehensible stupid to have a new kid changing the names of the streets every few years and changing the driving lanes back and forth. I bet we'd have the cure for cancer now if we had a solid and consistent workflow without all these silly change of interface distractions. I want a prettier car, faster, more comfortable, more spacious, but I don't want to learn how to drive over and over, that isn't "innovative".

My introduction to Linux
During that time though I would recycle any computer hardware that would become obsolete and that's how I started repurposing older laptops with a variety of Linux distros. Hard drives where much more expensive then so I would run stuff from live USBs. I realized that live USBs where the most reliable way to have something that WILL ALWAYS WORK so it became my wish to have an All in One distro in which I could take all the Windows software I've ever used for making music, video , or graphics, no matter how old and run it on the same machine along with newer stuff, like virtual instruments and multitrackers for the audio and so on.

Showing some gratitude
The abundance of generous contributions of so many talented people to the community of musicians that use Linux makes it unfair to single out anyone, however, being the case that I've seen AVLinux's Glen out here I'd like to express my gratitude for his generosity, energy, time and effort. I've been using his MX Linux "Patito Feo" version for the last couple of years and have used before previous iterations of his Distro. I've been modding it to fit my needs so I can put together my All In One USB stick that I could use live in any computer, without the need for installation anywhere and in which I could just put all my Windows software and plugins. I've been able to happily achieve quite a bit of that but since it is a rather ambitious goal my lack of knowledge crashes the endeavor into a million roadblocks. I've reached a point in which I realize I can't go much further without help so here I am.

Best regards everyone,

Ed

Last edited by All in One Wish on Tue Dec 13, 2022 5:58 pm, edited 19 times in total.
All in One Wish
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Re: Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

Post by All in One Wish »

And here's Cakewalk Professional 3.0 which doesn't run in wine :|

Image

And below is the event list which is where I can write on demand:
Image

One of my goals in life is to fund the creation of a cross platform MIDI plugin that would mimic this event list with all of its original shortcuts. (Basically the MIDI plugin wil be a sequencer within a sequencer). There is a modest budget I have for that purpose and would love to have a list of developers of MIDI plugins to see if I can afford one of them. I assume that anyone who might have put a sequencer together and understand how to put together a MIDI plugin could come up with that.

Last edited by All in One Wish on Tue Dec 13, 2022 4:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
All in One Wish
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Re: Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

Post by All in One Wish »

And for what is worth, the link below is an mp3 with excerpts of stuff I've written over the years. Other than real guitars and an occasional real bass line (when time permits) all the MIDI has been written (typed in the event list) on Cakewalk 3.0 using some sort of General MIDI tone module. I used to own a real Sound Canvas so some of these excerpts might feature it.

http://musicinstructor.net/quick-e-Demo ... Torres.mp3

I don't have a sound cloud account. Incidentally, my apologies for the lack of modesty in the advertising of that page, but who practices modesty in advertising? :lol: The page is poorly configured, it was put together before Covid started and it's been abandoned ever since as I am currently making a living doing anything else but music to keep a roof over my head.

And here's a little video, meant as satire. All done with Cakewalk 3.0 and Cubase 5 I think (it was years ago). Did the video editing and graphics too. You have to be acquainted with The Beatles' Dear Prudence and a few old classic rock tunes to gather the intention of the mashup. If you do you'll definitely have a laugh at this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxVw3WauHF4

Tried to put "the extreme left" of John Lennon and "the extreme right" of Lynnyrd Skynnyrd in "true Stereo" by making them sing the same song lol. Hence the confederate flag in the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover lol! This was before things got further polarized in America though, I meant no ill will on doing any of this other than a good laugh, yet the audio is much older and I didn't anticipate the making of a video back then.

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Re: Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

Post by Basslint »

Hello Ed, welcome, glad you decided to join us!

All in One Wish wrote: ↑Tue Dec 13, 2022 4:27 pm

One of my goals in life is to fund the creation of a cross platform MIDI plugin that would mimic this event list with all of its original shortcuts. (Basically the MIDI plugin wil be a sequencer within a sequencer). There is a modest budget I have for that purpose and would love to have a list of developers of MIDI plugins to see if I can afford one of them. I assume that anyone who might have put a sequencer together and understand how to put together a MIDI plugin could come up with that.

I don't know if this exist but if not, you could use that budget to fund the development of a free and open source plugin of that kind, so that everybody can benefit for it and the program will survive the test of time, just like Linux did! :D

The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. [Acts 4:32]

Please donate time (even bug reports) or money to libre software 🎁

Jam on openSUSE + GeekosDAW!
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Re: Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

Post by fraslo »

All in One Wish wrote: ↑Tue Dec 13, 2022 4:27 pm

And below is the event list which is where I can write on demand:

One of my goals in life is to fund the creation of a cross platform MIDI plugin that would mimic this event list with all of its original shortcuts. (Basically the MIDI plugin wil be a sequencer within a sequencer).

Qtractor has an event list:

midi-events-qtractor.png
midi-events-qtractor.png (125.94 KiB) Viewed 4110 times

HTH

Frank

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Re: Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

Post by All in One Wish »

fraslo wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 9:00 pm
All in One Wish wrote: ↑Tue Dec 13, 2022 4:27 pm

And below is the event list which is where I can write on demand:

One of my goals in life is to fund the creation of a cross platform MIDI plugin that would mimic this event list with all of its original shortcuts. (Basically the MIDI plugin wil be a sequencer within a sequencer).

Qtractor has an event list:

HTH

Frank

Hi Frank,

True, in fact, almost every DAW has an event list. I've got used to all the keyboard shortcuts of the 1993's Cakewalk event list to the point that it became my main writing tool. As the software evolved, some shortcuts became default for editing tasks. Their key binding preference would allow you to customize them at your wish so that you could emulate any DAW's shortcuts but their own previous versions. No matter for how many years I reported it they had other priorities (bugs to fix that affected more users). No difference with Bandlab. I gave up on them. A MIDI plugin, that would write notes to the tracks. It's entirely possible.
I have used a variety of workarounds. I've used DOS-Box with an installation of Windows 3.1 but I want to write straight to the tracks rather than having to import a MIDI file with each change. Sadly wine doesn't work in this version of Cakewalk either but in an older one that works great but I'd like a tighter integration with the DAW which is the reason why I want to fund (if within my means) the creation of such a MIDI plugin.

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Re: Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

Post by All in One Wish »

Basslint wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2022 10:30 am

Hello Ed, welcome, glad you decided to join us!

All in One Wish wrote: ↑Tue Dec 13, 2022 4:27 pm

One of my goals in life is to fund the creation of a cross platform MIDI plugin that would mimic this event list with all of its original shortcuts. (Basically the MIDI plugin wil be a sequencer within a sequencer). There is a modest budget I have for that purpose and would love to have a list of developers of MIDI plugins to see if I can afford one of them. I assume that anyone who might have put a sequencer together and understand how to put together a MIDI plugin could come up with that.

I don't know if this exist but if not, you could use that budget to fund the development of a free and open source plugin of that kind, so that everybody can benefit for it and the program will survive the test of time, just like Linux did! :D

The shortcuts I liked so much on that old event list were:
β€’ Pressing the "insert" key would enter a C5 | 100 Velocity | quarter note duration |
β€’ You'll move between fields exactly like in a excel sheet with ↑ ↓ ← β†’ (no clicking ever)
β€’ If highlighted field was on top of a note name simply typing E2↡ would get you a low E (open 4th string on a bass)
β€’ If instead of enter you'd type E2β†’ or ↑ ↓ ← β†’ the cursor would move to another field. No πŸ–±οΈ no ↡ necessary
β€’ If on top of a note and pressed the + or - key the note would change a half step up or down

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Re: Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

Post by Impostor »

Almost sounds as if a tracker would be perfect for your workflow!

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Re: Forever Newbie Seeks The Light

Post by AlkuK »

As you stay learning, the light will reach you β€” or you will reach the light πŸ˜€

Thanks for baring your soul, and good luck in all your future goals.

Sometimes I feel like a music and tech vet, but this Linux atmosphere is liberating, for someone whose intro into (personal) Ubuntu was almost an off-chance.

Thanks to an old... Under the lethargic fashions of commercial systems β€” was I seeking a breather? All I know is I'm thankful for this libre flavored part of life... Ah, the spirit of music...

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I'm willing to pay for this

Post by All in One Wish »

For what is worth, I am willing to pay for the development of such plugin.

Many guitarists would like a guitar with certain measurements to fit their technique and sound. I want to do the same. My instrument is a MIDI Event List Plugin with the specific custom shorcuts I want in combination to the deprecated shortcuts from 1993's version of Cakewalk Professional 3.0 for Windows 3.1

Here is my 3 digits proposal:
viewtopic.php?t=25373
viewtopic.php?p=152430#p152430

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Re: I'm willing to pay for this

Post by Impostor »

All in One Wish wrote: ↑Tue Jan 24, 2023 9:09 pm

For what is worth, I am willing to pay for the development of such plugin.

I understand where you're coming from: I started with Impulse Tracker and used it for years. With no other tracker I can get into the flow I had with IT (except for Schism Tracker, but that's because it's an IT clone:::)::). Currently I'm trying out Renoise, but every little thing there, which differs from the IT way of doing things, just annoys me no end. I also would be willing to throw a little more money their way if they only...

But I don't give up just yet!

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Re: I'm willing to pay for this

Post by All in One Wish »

Impostor wrote: ↑Wed Jan 25, 2023 12:59 pm
All in One Wish wrote: ↑Tue Jan 24, 2023 9:09 pm

For what is worth, I am willing to pay for the development of such plugin.

I understand where you're coming from: I started with Impulse Tracker and used it for years. With no other tracker I can get into the flow I had with IT (except for Schism Tracker, but that's because it's an IT clone:::)::). Currently I'm trying out Renoise, but every little thing there, which differs from the IT way of doing things, just annoys me no end. I also would be willing to throw a little more money their way if they only...

But I don't give up just yet!

When you feel somewhat proficient playing an instrument you want to preserve it and keep playing it. It's like you might consider that visiting other countries could be fun but visiting and moving are two completely different things.

So, at least when it comes to commercial software, I'm glad pets aren't their product. Can you imagine your dog needing a vet update every year? And that your dog was an established product that was expensive? And that then one good day you saw a ton of young people (who couldn't afford a dog) causing rave with a cheap bird and the dog maker, instead of creating a competing bird would have ready an update for your dog at the vet. Forget skeuomorphic, they will give your dog a beak and cut its front legs, put it in a dark theme, make it flat instead of 3d and would make your audio interface a paper weight and will call all that "progress" and "the future" and will say that you are old, obsolete and resist changes.

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