Re: [Fedora-music-list] Better information needed for noobs like me
On Wed, 2009-12-23 at 14:15 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote: On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 07:46:40 -0500, Orcan wrote: * Pulseaudio is pain. As a Fedora developer, normally I shouldn't recommend anything about not using it. But it is pain, at least for me. As a side-note, it has started to burn Ubuntu users, too. It will be interesting to see whether that will result in any fixes. A lot of work on it has happened and it is getting better, but (sorry, no personal attack to the very busy developers meant here) there seems to be some sort of reality negation field surrounding it when more advanced users miss features that were there before. The need is there, apparently there are not enough of us (users that need better control of the audio configuration through the alsa mixer - default answer is use alsamixer) to make any difference. In fc12 it does play nice with a properly packaged jack so that is very good (in fc11 that only happens if you use the Planet CCRMA jackd as it has a perl wrapper script that deals with pulse properly - bugs in pulse make the dbus interface not work when trying to release the card). Maybe in time... -- Fernando ___ Fedora-music-list mailing list Fedora-music-list@redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-music-list
Re: [Fedora-music-list] Better information needed for noobs like me
On Sun, 2009-12-27 at 11:15 -0800, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: On Wed, 2009-12-23 at 14:15 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote: On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 07:46:40 -0500, Orcan wrote: * Pulseaudio is pain. As a Fedora developer, normally I shouldn't recommend anything about not using it. But it is pain, at least for me. As a side-note, it has started to burn Ubuntu users, too. It will be interesting to see whether that will result in any fixes. A lot of work on it has happened and it is getting better, but (sorry, no personal attack to the very busy developers meant here) there seems to be some sort of reality negation field surrounding it when more advanced users miss features that were there before. Not a fair assessment, I guess. From the outside it looks like there is an absolute focus on making things work for the average or low end user, simplifying the exposed interface to the absolute minimum possible. Anything that might distract or divert resources from that goal is just ignored. -- Fernando ___ Fedora-music-list mailing list Fedora-music-list@redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-music-list
Re: [Fedora-music-list] Better information needed for noobs like me
On Sun, 2009-12-27 at 11:11 -0800, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: They is just me and I did not have time to update the web site before I left on vacation (I never recommended fc11 as it had a basic bug with the alsa sequencer not being loaded that took a _full_ release - 6 months! - to get fixed). Fc12 is basically there, there's basically just a few meta-packages missing. That explains a lot. In hindsight it is of course easy to recommend that the reason for omitting F11 should have been mentioned on that page so the project didn't seem like it had been without maintenance for 6 months. There are always a lot of dead or dying branches in the open source world and it is very easy to dismiss anything that looks stale and just search elsewhere. But then of course Hindsight is foresight that happens too late. It isn't easy to see that when you work on the project and know it's alive. :-) birger ___ Fedora-music-list mailing list Fedora-music-list@redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-music-list
Re: [Fedora-music-list] Better information needed for noobs like me
On Wed, 23 Dec 2009, birger wrote: As a complete noob regarding studio work, mixers, effects and the whole 'audio workstation' thing I would love to see a little documentation holding my hand through the first configuration steps. Something that tells me how to do it for the latest Fedora release so I know I am not following incompatible howtos for different applications and different distros. Even if this mailing list is a good initiative, there is not much traffic (yet). Hopefully this will change in the future ? My advice: also take a look at PlanetCCRMA. 1. Do a google search for Planet CCRMA Fedora or something like that and do some reading. 2. Install the Planet CCRMA yum repo. The Planet CCRMA website will tell you why and how. 3. Join also the planet-ccrma mailinglist. There are a lot of friendly and helpful people there, both experienced people and newbies sharing one passion: using Fedora to make music. Read and learn more about the real time kernel, about (not) using pulseaudio, alsa, jack, configurations, and things like that. For serious music making many Fedora musicians use a combination of the Fedora repositories, planet-ccrma, and rpmfusion-free/nonfree repositories. -- MT ___ Fedora-music-list mailing list Fedora-music-list@redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-music-list
Re: [Fedora-music-list] Better information needed for noobs like me
On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 5:08 AM, birger wrote: Thank you all for a very nice initiative, getting all the great audio software working on a great linux distro. :-) I have browsed archives a few months back, and I have looked at the 'obvious' places. As a complete noob regarding studio work, mixers, effects and the whole 'audio workstation' thing I would love to see a little documentation holding my hand through the first configuration steps. Something that tells me how to do it for the latest Fedora release so I know I am not following incompatible howtos for different applications and different distros. I think something like this would work: - Basic setup (something like the articles at http://www.passback.org.uk/music/ updated for latest Fedora) - Simple special purpose workstations. Simple separate howtos building on the basic one but setting up simple environments for various purposes. Examples would be 'guitar utilities and effects processor', 'connecting a MIDI keyboard', and so on. Making sure everything gets done in a coherent fashion so bits and pieces can be mixed without running into problems later on. Some of the problems I have run into trying to master this are: guitarix not starting without qjackctl and arts installed. No messages until I ran from command line. Correct user configuration for jack (audio group membership). Choppy sound in tuxguitar, and no matter what I do I cannot seem to get completely rid of it. Probably because I don't quite understand what I am doing to fix it. There are so many options... I cannot find my USB headset in Jack audio. Is it possible to use it? It works fine in pulseaudio. These are issues that don't work out of the box yet, and I hope someone can write a little documentation on how to do it all the correct fedora way. :-) With kind regards birger Hi, Martin gave a good summary. Let me add my 2 cents into the subject. (Well it will be more like 10 cents :)) * The documentation is possibly what we lack most for the time being. Feel free to help us out if you have time and will to do so. We have started a page in the Fedora wiki a while ago https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AudioCreation for listing our audio creation type software (Fedora only) but yet it needs a lot more work. * PlanetCCRMA is ready for F-11 and F-12. See for instance: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/12/i386/ http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/12/x86_64/ You probably need the planetccrma-repo package from that repo. (Be careful about the architecture) * Install the multimedia-menus package yum install multimedia-menus This is new for Fedora 12. It will create submenus in your Multimedia (SoundVideo in Gnome) menu and sort audio/video related applications so you can find things easier. * For guitarix, after you filed the bug, I saw that the application looks for qjackctl and if it is missing it looks for a ~/.jackdrc file in your home directory. If it cannot find either of them, it fails. The ~/.jackdrc is always there when you have a working jack setup. I didn't think about the case where someone would start guitarix on a fresh installation, which hasn't run jackd yet. I will let upstream developer know about the issue. Normally, guitarix shouldn't need qjackctl. But I'll add that dependency today. * Check out the updates-testing repository frequently. New updates usually go there first. Typically they stay there for 2 weeks and if no bugs are reported they go to stable. For example, Martin is a very good tester and I appreciate his contributions. But of course, having more testers won't hurt :) * Pulseaudio is pain. As a Fedora developer, normally I shouldn't recommend anything about not using it. But it is pain, at least for me. It blew up my harddrive at some point and I stopped using it since. Although pulseaudio is supposed to play nice with jack these days, I am not planning to support it myself. As audio creation people, we want control over our sound hardware. Hiding many of the sound card's controls is a feature of pulseaudio for the sake of simplicity. And this is against my use case. At the end of the day, it is your choice what sound servers you want to use. I just want you to know that one of the primary audio creation packagers of Fedora does not have time and will to support pulseaudio. * Look at /usr/share/doc/jack-audio-connection-kit-0.118.0/README.Fedora Part of it is obsolete information by now. But it will get you started. Make sure you add your user to the correct groups * For tuxguitar, please try the version from updates-testing. It should sort things out. There are many independent ways to get good sound out of it. In the version in updates-testing, I made it default to fluidsynth/fluid soundfont combination. It is supposed to work out of the box now. (Alternatively, you can use gervill (java sound API), or forward the midi output of
Re: [Fedora-music-list] Better information needed for noobs like me
On Wed, 2009-12-23 at 07:46 -0500, Orcan Ogetbil wrote: * The documentation is possibly what we lack most for the time being. Feel free to help us out if you have time and will to do so. We have started a page in the Fedora wiki a while ago https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AudioCreation for listing our audio creation type software (Fedora only) but yet it needs a lot more work. I will be happy to write a little once I feel that I know what I am writing about :-D * PlanetCCRMA is ready for F-11 and F-12. See for instance: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/12/i386/ http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/12/x86_64/ You probably need the planetccrma-repo package from that repo. (Be careful about the architecture) They have just forgotten to mention it on the web page? I only found links to the repo packages for F7 to F10... I'll add the ccrma repos if I bump into something that I want from there. For now it seems like everything I have needed has migrated over to rpmfusion. * Install the multimedia-menus package Already done. :-) * For guitarix, after you filed the bug, I saw that the application looks for qjackctl and if it is missing it looks for a ~/.jackdrc file in your home directory. If it cannot find either of them, it fails. The ~/.jackdrc is always there when you have a working jack setup. I didn't think about the case where someone would start guitarix on a fresh installation, which hasn't run jackd yet. :-D That explains a lot. I guess this may bite more packages if they are the first jack app to get started. * Check out the updates-testing repository frequently. New updates usually go there first. Typically they stay there for 2 weeks and if no bugs are reported they go to stable. For example, Martin is a very good tester and I appreciate his contributions. But of course, having more testers won't hurt :) I have a desktop PC at work running rawhide, so I am used to testing :-) * Pulseaudio is pain. As a Fedora developer, normally I shouldn't recommend anything about not using it. I understand the dilemma. What are the options for having jack and pulse coexist? I will not give up pulseaudio on my work PC, but I guess that in the end I will need a dedicated PC for music. Currently I have pulseaudio running with my USB headset as default output since jack doesn't see it yet. Jack then gets the soundcard. Both seem happy :-) * Look at /usr/share/doc/jack-audio-connection-kit-0.118.0/README.Fedora Will have a look. :-) * For tuxguitar, please try the version from updates-testing. Will definitely do. I tried getting it connected to jack, but it didn't seem to react to anything I did in qjackctl so I guess it was still talking to some other driver. * qjackctl and qsynth are your friends. Must look at qsynth then. Thanks for the tip. * For recordingmixing, ardour is still the best in my opinion. Great. I wasn't looking forward to wading through the app list to find what I needed for mixing. * As Martin said, PlanetCCRMA list is a good list to subscribe. It is a lot more active than this one. And we have Fernando, the Great there :) I will definitely have to add myself there even if I don't plan to use the repos yet. :-) I will play around with all this new knowledge and see if I can find a suitable PC after the holidays. In the meantime, I'll just wish everybody here a merry christmas. ___ Fedora-music-list mailing list Fedora-music-list@redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-music-list
Re: [Fedora-music-list] Better information needed for noobs like me
On 12/23/2009 10:27 PM, birger wrote: I have 3 kids with guitars. I have a keyboard somewhere. I need to learn how to set up the software for them :-D Move over Jonas Brothers... The future is getting ready. You mightn't think so, but even 'beginners' can be good documentation writers. Put down what steps it takes, and how it differs from earlier material (that you reference). The fact that it's written by a beginner could help it to be more easily used by other beginners... The wiki suggestion is good. I think the key is to try to write fairly short, task specific wiki pages, and then some fedoraproject process/tools can convert the individual pages into a spruced up, conforming document. See the Fedora 12 user guide [1], or pdf [2], and the source for that eg [3]. I think that you do need to sign a contributor license agreement before you can edit the fedoraproject wiki. This basically says that you won't post copyrighted material, and that you are making your contribution available as open content. One limitation of using fedora's wiki is you might not be able to directly link to troublesome, out of fedora, sites or packages. A first step would be to develop a table of contents in the wiki, to try to break the installation of audio tools into specific areas, and then break those tasks down into smaller tasks. eg. Working with MIDI and so on. [1] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/user-guide/f12/en-US/html/sect-User_Guide-Managing_software-Advanced_Yum.html [2] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/ [3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Guide_-_Managing_Software David. ___ Fedora-music-list mailing list Fedora-music-list@redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-music-list
