On Tuesday night (July 21st) I gave a talk at a meeting of the Manchester Free Software group. It was about audio production with Linux and Free Software. Basically how I produce many podcasts and other things using only Free and Open Source software. I wanted to upload the slides and share them here with everyone. I hope they’ll be interesting and somehow useful on their own, but don’t worry there was HD video taken on the night – courtesy of Tim Dobson – which I hope to be able to share with you very soon. Everything is available under a Creative Commons license, naturally.

Download The Original ODF Presentation File

I wanted to say thanks to all those who came along and crammed into that room (literally) to hear my talk. We couldn’t have gotten any more people in if we’d tried. The talk seemed to go well, with a live demo of some tricks I use in Audacity, and a good discussion about how we can improve music production on Linux. I’m going to be using some of the feedback people gave in a new project. As the slides say, I think audio production on Linux is already at a more than proficient level, but music production with synths, drum samples and so on still has some way to go. I think we can improve things with a little more communication and perhaps organization. The first step is addressing the problem and defining it, then we can really start to fix it. I’ll be testing that theory in future.I have big ideas as usual and this time I hope the amount of time and effort required to realise them will be available too.

So, I hope everyone attended got something useful out of the talk, or at least had a laugh at some point. Thanks to Lucy for inviting me to speak and everyone else for making me feel so welcome. Keep an eye out for that video in future