just a hello note to say hi and how glad i am to find this forum, nice to have a whole community who are equally baffled by some of the complexities of linux music making
about me: well, i'm a computer person as a day job, and pretty much have been since the dawn of time [or it feels like it] - but in reality, since about 1988... started using *nix in 1991 as an admin on sun SparcStations for CAD/CAM and loved *nix ever since...
have always done "computer based music recording" since school - a school project back in '86 was writing a keyboard triggered sampler on a ZX Spectrum, nasty machine code, and some A/D D/A converters that the music and electronics teacher had built as a project...
i've been using Cakewalk on windows since i got my first PC back in 92ish and have stuck with the Cakewalk line since then [now using Sonar on windows] - and only changed this by adding Reason to the stack when that came out...
i've tinkered with linuxes since i first came across a cover disk distro of mandrake 10 years ago, and was glad to get back into a *nix os... but have always been excited, but let down, by the audio support... originally this was because i tended to have weirdass soundcards which weren't supported... but now i find the temptation of all the wonderful applications for linux all the more tempting to try and use linux as a full mature production machine...
in all honesty, i still don't think that the linux music "stack" is mature enough yet to cope with anything more than experimental works [ my present soundcard still isn't supported out-of-the-box and even on configuring it, it doesn't work very well or crashes my usb - which i'll need help with soon here i'm sure ]
but, i'm a tinkerer, and i don't mind getting my hands dirty on an operating system if it works in the end...
so, anyway, on windows i use Sonar + Reason and produced my first album using these tools. but i think that using some linux based applications and tools and processors will add a bit of experimentation to my next album release.
so last week, my new laptop arrived, preinstalled with vista, and without further ado i installed ubuntu8 [and then this week ubuntuStudio8, once i found the distro] and have been wasting lots of fun time twiddling with all the apps and things...
still haven't got my soundcard working very well tho
it's a Tascam US428, i've used the usxloader and all that [following the guide for the 224 here http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/Tascam_US-224 - but substituting the 428 specific bits where required] - and it "works" but very unstable...
anyway... more on that some other time,
peace and stuff,
ingie.
- i will use ardour, it does seem to do most of what i use sonar for in production, and it does it well - but i need full midi time sync for my external devices and for "live" performance - i want something as good as Ableton Live for that really