Last week, on Thr 15 May 2008, the MerriLUG group met at Martha's Exchange in Nashua. We were privileged to have Christoph Doerbeck presenting on "Linux DAW". Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 people were there. You can find the slides from the presentation on the GNHLUG web site:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/LinuxDigitalAudioWorkstation "DAW" stands for "Digital Audio Workstation", and basically means using a computer to produce and manipulate sound or music. Christoph demonstrated that Linux/FOSS is a real contender in this space. And when I say "demonstrated", I mean it. He brought a portable kit that was quite impressive. A moderately sophisticated Yahama keyboard, a FireWire audio I/O deck (Focusrite Saffire Pro/26), power console with lamps, amplified speakers, all tied together into a laptop and rigged up on a stand like a pro. Woot! Christoph started off by talking about some general concepts -- what sequencing is, how MIDI works, the joys of electrical problems and their impact on analog audio, etc. MIDI has evolved, and one can now run virtual MIDI ports over USB. I got to learn a little about MIDI works at the protocol level, but his slides do a better job of explaining than I can. Having introduced the general concepts, Christoph got into how he made it work on his laptop. He's running Fedora 8, and there's some community support focused on audio with Fedora. He recommended the CCRMA ("karma") project, which is an add-on repository featuring updates, additional software, and customized kernels. He also gave pointers to the Fedora Project's audio SIG. To prove that this wasn't limited to his slides, he then fired up the Rosegarden music editor and let us see that it really worked. He was able to open existing file and have it play back via MIDI using the Yahama keyboard. He showed us the "matrix" editor, where one can configure instruments and tracks, and the notation editor, which is like electronic sheet music. He showed percussion mode as well regular instruments, and then played a song on the keyboard and had Rosegarden "record" the musical score. To a musical layman such as myself, it was all extremely impressive. He did mention that it wasn't all fun and games; some work was involved. Like a lot of active FOSS efforts, this stuff is evolving constantly. That means that things get better all the time, but it also means that sometimes things aren't as easy as they could be. For example, Christoph found that Rosegarden did not come with a "canned" configuration for his Yahama keyboard, so he had to write his own file to define it's capabilities. Once he'd done that, he discovered a utility which would take a MS-Windows-format file and convert it to the Rosegarden format, thus saving most of that task. Still, as Christoph explained, the alternative is spending thousands of dollars on closed, commercial software for Microsoft Windows, and living with all the limitations and drawbacks thereof. And I have yet to find a non-trivial software program that doesn't have a learning curve or need some set-up. So I can definitely see how the Linux software competes. Christoph has been presenting on Linux DAW concurrently at BLU (http://www.blu.org), and will be returning there on Wed 20 May (today!) to go into more depth. Next month in Nashua, Marc Nozell will be presenting an introduction to MySQL -- assuming the MerriLUG curse doesn't strike again. ;-) Hope to see you (and Marc) there! -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
