Home Studio Upgrade - mobile workstation

I recently made 2 purchases to allow a more flexible, complete, mobile solution to my DAW. I now have the ability to take my studio on the road and use my Sony Vaio.

First I have added a simple E-MU XMIDI 1x1 USB interface ($25) so I can use my midi keyboard with a USB port.

Secondly, I needed a USB audio interface / preamp. After some research I found an excellent solution that offers a substantial "bang-for-your-buck" using an ART USB Dual Pre ($80) which does not require any drivers. When you plug it in you will find "USB audio codec" added to your sound I/O hardware options. However, you don't have to select this for your system if you run most of your studio software on top of JACK. Instead, just change the input and output preferences in the JACK setup and you are good to go!

I also found software designed to be a guitar effects simulator called Rackarrack which also has an on-board tuner and can route your guitar notes to midi events. Although it has limited sensitivity, this may be a good way to score midi data for someone (like me) who plays guitar/bass better than keyboard.

Soft Studio Solved?

Whilst the misses was away (Vegas Wedding - 4 days) I made it a goal to upgrade my system: 1. Upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on new HD 2. Reconfigure my software studio. I had just purchased a WD Caviar Blue 160 GB HD (ultra quiet!) and installed Ubuntu 9.10. Eventually I will get smart and make a remaster of my system so I don't have to reconfigure everything when doing something like this, but it is rare that I have to move to a new HD. Still, I had to start rebuilding my software suite. I can manage this to 95% completion in about 2 hours which I banged out early one morning.

I accomplished a network upgrade to 10.04 (lucid) in about an hour, however I had to troubleshoot a few bugs, two of which were related. The login screen lagged a very long time and my USB drive would not automount on boot like it used to. Searching the web, I found a fix and after deactivating the floppy drive (I don't even have one) in the BIOS settings this was corrected.

After installing my standard (and more) suite of software, I made my "Studio" menu and fired up JACK, Qsynth, and Qtractor to test things out. Unfortunately, I was unable to record midi from my keyboard! After racking my brain a bit, I decided to uninstall Qtractor and build it from source. Although this is always a non-trivial task (although getting easier), it fixed the problem. I also installed LinuxSampler, and the front-end GUIs Qsampler, and Jsampler (see earlier post 3.10) from the CVS repos.

I had hoped that the LinuxSampler engine would eventually be my "go-to" for running multiple samples on different channels simultaneously. However, I cannot figure out why the GIG files (or any samples for that matter) sound lousy, bad, terrible, fuzzy, etc (keywords!). Really annoyed after having built Gigedit, LinuxSampler, and Qsampler from source. I decided to play with Qsynth (.sf2 soundfont sample handler GUI for FluidSynth).

After some digging and tinkering I believe I have a solution. Use Qsynth with Qtractor and Hydrogen (on top of JACK of course) to build all my MIDI files in real-time with a MIDI keyboard and then record into Ardour. The breakthrough was figuring out how to play multiple samples (.sf2) from Qsynth simultaneously. Here is how:

Qsynth loads audio "engines" and you can set up several at once. However, you only need one!
In setup I select alsa_seq as the midi driver, and jack as the audio driver. Then under "Soundfonts" tab select each of the soundfonts (.sf2) files you want to have available for your Qtractor piece. Then edit each entries "offset" so they are different (0, 1, 2, etc). This sets the "stack" with different banks. Save and leave "setup." Then select "Channels" from the main Qsynth interface. Right-click the channel of interest and select "edit." Then you can select different "banks" and assign different soundfont samples to different channels! Now give your neglected 2 year-old a high five!

RPM Challenge

I registered for the RPM Challenge and I have been working on my music project called Nuclear Overhauser Effect (nOe) which I decided will be experimental and thus a learning tool to catalyze other musical endeavors. As of right now, nOe-i has 8 tracks with 2 more to record. I also want to doctor-up one or two of the existing tracks, but the RPM challenge deadline is Feb. 28, so I'm not sure if that will happen. The concept for this album is to use my iPod Touch to compose, record, and generate field-samples almost exclusively. So far I have been using the following equipment for this project:

Hardware:
iPod Touch-2G 8GB (firmware: v. 3.0)
Desktop PC (home-built) with Pentium IV 2.8 GHz, 2GB DDR RAM, Audigy Soundblaster Platinum with mounted breakout-box (operating system: Ubuntu-9.10 with linux-rt kernel v. 2.6.31.9.10)

Software:

- iPod -
Voice Recorder
Xewton Music Studio
i808
Flare (virtual turn-table)
Thereminator
Noise.io Pro
Guitar Pro
BassGuitar
GigBaby
RjDj
DrumMeister

*Ubuntu-Desktop*
JACK
Muse
Ardour2
Hydrogen
Qsynth
ZynAddSubFX

Now with just a little left to do and possibly not enough time to do it, I want to document a few ideas to add to the project:

- add theremin/scratch? to nOe-i06
- add noise.io synth/field-samples? to nOe-i09
- use field-samples for nOe-i10
- find noise cancellation software (audacity plugin?) for nOe-i08
- need artwork and liner-notes

Xewton Music Studio for iPod Touch

Xewton Music Studio (XMS) is an amazingly powerful MIDI sequencer with a complete set of instrument samples for the Apple iPod Touch or iPhone. Despite several limitations, this app is quite powerful, very intuitive and loads of fun to use. It is well worth the current $15 list price. I am currently working on my first nOe album using this software almost exclusively for composition. It exports compositions as .wav files and has built in server capabilities which enables you to access the files from you desktop/laptop with a web-browser and download them.

Ubuntu Studio 9.10

Shortly after I burned my first ISO of PCLinuxOS, I configured my first serious desktop with a dual boot of Ubuntu Studio 8.04 and XP. As I recall I had many growing pains configuring my audio with UbuStu, however, at some point I was successful and was able to recompose a song I wrote in high-school using Rosegarden.

At some point, I decided to upgrade to UbuStu-9.04 as I had been enjoying the usability of Ubuntu-9.04 (Jaunty) and 9.10 (Karmic) at school. Sadly, I had some major issues with this install that forced me to move to Ubuntu-9.10. I knew I would probably try UbuStu-9.10 when it was released with the hope that the earlier incompatibility would be corrected. It seemed to work okay, however I could not get it to work with my Ralink Wirless card. Also, I was frustrated that the UbuStu developers didn't include some of the slick upgrades (namely the Ubuntu Software Center) that is steadily improving the usability of Ubuntu. I had no way of accessing the web without "ruining my life" so I moved on to 9.10 and decided to go on a significant "shopping spree." I installed loads of science, education and music apps from the Software Center, as well as the kernel-rt from synaptic.

The most significant challenge was getting the JACK audio server to run and I eventually found that I had to add my user to the "audio" and "pulse" groups under System -> Administration -> Users and Groups. The follwing URLs were helpful for me:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=600626
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1336078
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=453486

and most significantly:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1143784

I still get the following error from Rosegarden however:

System timer resolution is too low
Rosegarden was unable to find a high-resolution timing source for MIDI performance.
You may be able to solve this problem by loading the RTC timer kernel module. To do this, try running sudo modprobe snd-rtctimer in a terminal window and then restarting Rosegarden.
Alternatively, check whether your Linux distributor provides a multimedia-optimized kernel. See http://rosegarden.wiki.sourceforge.net/Low+latency+kernels for notes about this.

64 Studio: A solid DAW Desktop....almost

After the failure that was ubuntu studio 9.04, I thought I would look into any other possible solutions to my ultimate DAW desktop.  Reading about the different choices, I settled on 64 Studio to try next, due in part to the fact that it is very similar to ubuntu with its debian roots.  My first attempt at installation failed on one of the install steps, likely due to a bad burn/image download.  I tried again, unscientifically adjusting all the variables: I downloaded the latest beta instead of the pronounced stable release (2.1) and I burned to a DVD-R instead of a DVD+R.  The install completed.  

One of the key comparisons made between 64 Studio and Ubuntu Studio is that the 64 Studio team was more selective in the applications added, and overall have worked harder at optimizing the "real-time" (RT) kernel to produce the lowest latencies in audio work. One of the problems I had recently with Ubuntu was the sound stopped working and sound is pretty critical for an audio studio. So far, the sound drivers are all working fine with 64 Studio, I just had to adjust the ALSAMixer the first go to get the correct channel unmuted.

But 64 Studio has yet to be completely trouble-free.  For whatever reason, the latest kernel build 2.6.29 was not picking up my Ralink wireless network card. I did a little research and found someone else had this same problem but fixed it by rolling back the kernel to 2.6.26-1. I had to get creative with the network cables in the house to get them to stretch, but once connected to the WEB, I found that the commands: apt-get install kernel did not work right away, but somehow I eventually got it to work after running the update manager and installing a couple hundred other packages first.

I rebooted into the new kernel and sure enough, a wireless network option was now present in the network configuration dialog. Then in the course of an hour, I somehow picked up the wireless signal (rather quickly as I recall) and then later lost it and could not retrieve it. Somehow having success initially and then ending up back where you were feels worse then just failing at the outset!

DAW Links List

Here's a list of links I'm compiling for my Digital Audio Workstation set-up:

Audigy2: review/drivers

Creative Labs Audigy2 Sound System Review

http://www.linuxquestions.org/

http://ubuntuforums.org/

http://www.alsa-project.org/

Reviews for Linux Music Produciton

http://createdigitalmusic.com/

Linux MIDI Software Collections

http://linux-sound.org/

http://www.linuxlinks.com/

http://tldp.org/

http://www.linuxjournal.com/

http://freemusicsoftware.org/

http://www.openstudioproductions.org/

Ardour on ubuntu

http://ubuntuforums.org/

Configure Rosegarden MIDI

http://ubuntuforums.org/

Kubuntu Studio?

http://kubuntuforums.net/

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/ (jack)

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/

Ex-Research Chemist School Teacher Linux Musician:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/

http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/bruce.h.mccosar