Greetings: In the last issue of the Linux soundapps pages I mentioned that I should have the new look on-line by mid-August. It didn't happen, but I am still working on it. A prototype is being installed at a test site, and hopefully the bugs will be knocked out soon. There really will be a nice new look to the pages, and some new amenities for users. So it's coming, it's just taking a lot of time (that I don't really have). Meanwhile, I thought I'd post a little catch-up news to LAD readers. My book is still delayed, sad to say. No Starch now informs me that it should hit sellers' shelves during the first week of October. If you're subscribed to review it you should have a copy sometime during September. All I can do is sigh and wait... :( Linux audio software development marches on. With the current mess regarding Fraunhofer and their MP3 patent, people are beginning to look at alternative audio compression schemes. I haven't got to Vorbis yet, but I did try the XMMS Shorten plug-in from http://sdf.lonestar.org/~jason/shn-utils/. A link to Shorten 2.3 can be found there too. I was rather amazed at Shorten's speed and the fact that it's a lossless compression technique. Definitely worth checking out. The XMMS plug-in is completely transparent and works great. I've been playing with ecasound quite a lot recently. What a program ! I'm still discovering all that it will do: recent releases include support for aRts, LADSPA plug-ins, and multichannel multitrack recording with cards like the MIDIMan boards. Ecasound is certainly the only command-line app that does what it does, but its Qt interface is also very nice if you prefer working with X-based apps. Morris Slutsky has ported his ELE (Excellent Low-latency Effects, available from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mslutsky/ele2/index.html) processor to SVGA, abandoning the Gtk interface. This move may seem rather backwards to some users, but I happen to like SVGA apps. Beyond its own utility, ELE 2.01 clearly shows that items such as an SVGA-based wave editor would be possible. Personally, I'd love to have a full suite of graphic audio apps usable from the Linux console. Any volunteers ?? Spiral Synth (http://www.blueammonite.f9.co.uk/SpiralSynth/) and PSIndustrializer (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~foxx/industrializer/index.html) are two new soft synths to check out. I've been using PSIndustrializer to create some cool percussion sounds for use in SoundTracker. Spiral Synth is 'way cool to just play, and you can capture your performances to disk. Very neat stuff. If you haven't checked out the synths from UltraMaster, do it today. They're trying to make commercial-quality soft synths for Linux and sell them at a low cost. Their plan includes giving back to the community, and their products are definitely fine. Check them out at http://www.ultramaster.com/. ALSA continues making great strides. I've been happily using 0.5.9b for my SBLive Value and PCI128 cards. Sound quality is terrific and the installation gets easier with each release. Wonderful work from Jaroslav and his team at http://www.alsa-project.org. 4Front Technologies (http://www.4front-tech.com) have not been resting. The latest OSS/Linux includes new support for various digital audio boards, as well as a limited-time only price reduction. It's often overlooked that 4Front is a major contributor to the XMMS open-source media player project. The number of interesting plug-ins is increasing almost weekly, and the player has become one of my favorite "show-off" Linux apps. The OSC synthesizer control interface has been added to the unofficial Csound. A set of Tk sliders can control Csound synth parameters in realtime even on remote machines. Check out the latest unofficial Csound at http://web.tiscalinet.it/mupuxeddu/csound/index.html. Also, I'm trying to update Fred Floberg's ALSA support code in Csound but I've hit the wall with my minimal programming skills. Anyone want to join in on this fun ? It would be nice to have native ALSA support back in Csound. Well, I have to get back to an article I'm writing for the O'Reilly Network. It's about the OpenAL specification for 3D audio, interesting stuff. I'll let y'all know when it goes on-line. Now go ye forth and make a mighty noise... Best regards, == Dave Phillips http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/index.html http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linuxsound/
