On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 7:19 PM, Girish Venkatachalam <
[email protected]> wrote:

> You have many ways by which you can process audio and video.
>

An elegant and beautiful audio framework I'd add is the Jack audio
framework: http://jackaudio.org/ Jack audio folks brought "real time" to
Linux. Jack has plenty of super high quality software that fit the Unix
philosophy of "do one thing and do it right", which surprisingly is also
the philosophy of real audio hardware. You can have stand alone effects
processors, standalone drum machines, standalone midi sequencers,
arpegiators, synthesizers, recorders, etc., all being co-ordinated by the
jack audio framework. You can mix, master and even have remote computers
act as parts of these standalone components using netJack (works over UDP
and in an experiment I found it pretty ok to use remote MIDI apps (which is
the whole point because this way you can consolidate all the CPU power into
a centralized place where all the cpu intensive audio processing can be
carried out)). Jack simply kicks ass and is ought to be the dream come true
for DIY audio studio'ers.

Distributions such as AVLinux (semi proprietary), Studio64, Ubuntu Studio
are customised and packed with a lot of jack audio software (and even then,
I end up occasionally finding a better jack gem out there on the interwebz
somewhere, like qmidiarp). These distros typically come with jack support
by default or atleast make setting up jack easier.

One of the main hinderances of using jack with regular desktop apps (like
firefox / flash) is that regular apps are compiled against, typically,
pulseaudio framework. In contrast, the main step in getting jack to work is
to stop pulseaudio first. So this becomes a pain to play alongside your
favourite youtube video or even have a working browser while you are making
music. With jack you can not only do that but also rewire the
inputs/outputs to send the "Audio-Out" of firefox to some effects processor
or a recorder (or if you've got multiple sound outputs, then to different
output ports). AVLinux folks have taken the pain and care to recompile
general desktop apps like firefox/flash against jack so that you can have a
seamless audio experience. It almost feels like a mac without all the jazzy
graphics ;)

So, there, jack audio: http://jackaudio.org/ and I highly recommend AVLinux.

Cheers,

  -Suraj
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Career Gear - Industry Driven Talent Factory
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