Hi folks, just a quick note to let you know that the interview I recorded with the Open Source Musician podcast a few weeks back is out now, for your listening pleasure… I hope I can’t remember what I said at and I need to listen to it again but it went pretty well from what I recall. Massive thanks to Dan and Steve for kindly inviting me onto their show, I had a great time. You should really check them out if you have any interest in making music and or audio seriously with on Linux. They’re the only show I know of covering this area and they do a great job of informing and entertaining.

I was interviewed in episode 35 which you can now download.

It’s even spurred me into working harder on sorting out music production on my Ubuntu Studio set up this week. I still use Windows XP for the odd music job which I’ve always been honest about. However, all podcast production and other audio is done on Linux and has been for a very long time I’m proud to say. I’ve got some hardware gripes with a possibly faulty audio card but I’m on the case now. Earlier today I started working on a new blues song in Ardour. It wasn’t planned but a nice riff popped out of my brain and I started recording, I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ve not had time to produce much music in the last few months and I don’t see that changing very soon, but I do want to do more music on Linux and really see the how strengths and weaknesses stack up. It’s long been a goal of mine but time just hasn’t allowed it. Hopefully that will all be fixed in 2010!!

Ok enough rambling, enjoy the interview. See ya,

Dan

Just a quick post to let you know about an interesting event coming up in Liverpool next month. I mentioned in recent updates that I’ve been chatting with Ross Dalziel of Sound Network (amongst other people), about events in the city next year. He organised Open Source City which I attended, and did a really great job. He’s into creating music with technology, hacking and general geekery. What’s not to like about that? Well, Ross has an event of his own coming up soon at the FACT building in Liverpool City Centre. It will feature what he’s calling the “DS Orchestra” and anyone is free to come and join in. As the name suggests it will feature a lot of people using special software to make music with their Nintendo DS handheld consoles. There’s some custom software that’s been written for this by PixelH8, who some of you may well have heard of already. He’s pretty well known in the chiptunes scene and should even be there to play alongside everyone else on the day. You don’t have to have a Nintendo DS to join in you can use any geeky device as long as it’s capable of paying notes and making a tune. That’s good news for me as I don’t have a DS. I wonder if taking my laptop and midi keyboard along would be cheating? It might be a bit hard to carry around anyway, I’d need to invent some kind of harness, a true geek approach to the problem hehe

If you’re interested in getting involved have a look at this article on Wired.com. It’s 6pm to 8pm  on Thursday the 17th of December at FACT and it’s gonna be a lot of fun. Part of the idea is to get kids excited about technology and show them that games consoles can do s much more with a little imagination. Who knows, maybe we’ll inspire a new scouse Kraftwerk somewhere along the way, “Kaftwerk La!”.  So if you have kids with a Nintendo DS bring them along to see what’s happening, it’ll be fun. I’ll see you there!

Beep beep,

Dan

I have something of a treat for you today. Well, I hope it will prove to be a treat anyway. It’s the long awaited video from my talk to the Manchester Free Software group in July. Not surprisingly it was in Manchester, at the Lass O’Gowrie pub. It’s just over 2 months since I made the talk, but I finally have the video for you all to see. Big thanks to Tim Dobson for taking this video, editing it and even uploading it to Archive.org, he deserves all the credit for that. Thank you also to Lucy for inviting me to speak, and most of all, thanks to the 30 odd people who crammed themselves into the smallest room known to man. It was hot, stuffy and not always so comfortable but I think it went well. It was great too see so many people there.

In this talk I take you through how I produce podcasts like the Software Freedom Law Show using only Free Software and Open Source solutions. Sound engineering is something I’ve done for a long time and it’s a real passion of mine. I hope that comes across in the talk. As you can see there wasn’t even a projector in the room, so I’m just using my laptop to try and show the slides to everyone. If you have any questions please feel free to post them in the comments here and I’ll do my best to answer them.

You can find the slides I used here, if you want a closer look.

I’ve embedded the video player from Archive.org but I also advise downloading the original Ogg Theora file. It looks slightly better. Hope you enjoy the talk, thanks

Dan

P.S – I haven’t actually watched this fully myself yet as I’m too nervous. Stupid I know because it’s in the past now but it still feels odd. I’ll be sitting down to watch it soon. I have to know what I said in case people ask questions anyway

An Ubuntu CD

I don’t know if everyone’s aware of it but the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is open for submissions at the moment. We mentioned it on Linux Outlaws before Christmas and I said at the time I’d make an audio entry but had since forgotten in my usual hapless manner. I’ve finally rectified that and created my entry which I’ll tell you about later but first I should probably explain exactly what the competition is. The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase was first brought in during the Ubuntu 8.10 Interpid Ibex development cycle and since 8.10 is still the current release of Ubuntu it’s a relatively fresh concept. The premise is simple, you have the chance to get your artwork, be it audio, video or graphic into the next Ubuntu release. The winning entries will be places into the “examples” folder and shipped on every disc and lovingly packaged into each downloadable ISO image. It may not sound like much but think about how many people are likely to see or hear the results, millions, literally millions. It’s estimated that Ubuntu has about 8 million users and while a lot of these figures seem to be made up with a lottery machine I think it’s a fair estimate, there’s certainly a few million around the world at least. So getting your art onto an Ubuntu release could help you reach a potentially massive audience and who knows what that could lead to hmm?

As with every competition worth it’s salt, there are some rules you must abide by to enter. Firstly, file size limits, which seem rather severe to me but I suppose they are fighting to fit everything into a 700mb disc image and there’s a lot of software to go in, notably Mono 2.0 which I’ve been told by many people is “bloody huge!!”, their words not mine.  Audio entries must be in Ogg Vorbis format and no larger than 1mb in size, yes you heard me right 1mb. Video entries must be in Ogg Theora format and no larger than 2.5mb, finally graphics entries must be in PNG or JPEG format and no larger than 512k. A lot of people have criticized these heavy restrictions on size and I can see their point, it’s difficult to do much with 2.5mb of space for a decent video. The same applies to the audio, 1mb is about 1 minute of audio encoded at any kind of reasonable quality for music, hi-fi buffs would probably still scream at 128kbps and I wouldn’t blame them. I wonder if perhaps the limits are so strict to put off people sending in their 2 hour student films or 10 minute opera (not the browser) masterpieces? Whatever the reasons those are the constraints. The pieces must be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license and obviously free of any 3rd party copyright material such as samples. They must also contain nothing that people could get offended by such as swearing, nudity and so on. If you think you can work within those limits without destroying your artistic “vision” then I urge you to enter something and take part. Provided it’s not better than my entry of course or I shall storm off in a big huff and pull faces, really ugly faces, way worse than my normal one, which is not easy to do believe me.

Creative Commons

I had originally thought the competition closed at the end of February but it doesn’t it actually finishes on the 6th of Feb, so be quick if you want to get your entry in for Ubuntu 9.04. The competition will be opened up again for the next release so don’t cry if you can’t finish in time there’s still hope. As I mentioned earlier I’ve submitted my audio entry and it’s a song some of you may have heard before, it’s a bit of a jazzy tune called “Truth”. We played it on a very early episode of the Linux Outlaws podcast, I don’t remember which number it was now though I’m afraid, it’s far too long ago. I have trouble remembering what I did this morning let alone 18 months ago, unless there’s some kind of scar to remind me. I’ve attached the ogg file I’m entering so you can all have a listen if you like, it’s not compulsory though. The song was recorded about 3 years ago so it’s not new and in the interests of full disclosure I should point out it was recorded partially with freedom hating software, you can almost hear the evil ring out in every note. In my defense it was a long time ago before I learned the error of my ways and repented. To be honest getting all of the music work I do onto Free Software is still a challenge I haven’t fully met to this day and one which people ask me about all the time. I’m still working on it and I’ll update you on that soon I promise. In the meantime check out the track and see what you think, I had to do a quick fade after 2mins to make it shorter and also encode the ogg at 64kbps to hit that 1mb target but I’m quite pleased with the results. If you’d like to hear a higher quality version in full you can find the track on my music site. I’m impressed how good ogg actually sounds at low bit-rates, it’s far superior to mp3 and it’s annoying more manufacturers won’t use it but that’s a topic for another day. All the instruments on this were played by my good self and yes it is me singing, people never believe me but it honestly is. I sing like a girl which is hilarious if you know what I look like

Sonic Real Estate – Truth (short edit)

Hope you enjoy the tune and let me know what you think in the comments, if you have some artistic talent why not enter the competition too but be quick! I don’t think I’ll win but you never know, I’d be chuffed to say my music was on the Ubuntu CD that’s for sure, at least I could say I had one gold disc… ok maybe more brown but I’m gonna call it gold

Hey Folks, Just a quick update to let you all know about my latest project. It’s a brand new podcast from the fine people at The Software Freedom Law Center in New York and they’ve asked me to come on board as producer. Of course I said yes immediately and I’m very excited about it, I’ll be editing and mixing the show, helping out with recording techniques and general audio stuff. With a background as an audio engineer and also my podcasting experience from Linux Outlaws I hope I can help to bring them the best audio quality possible.

The show will be called The Software Freedom Law Show and will comprise a 30min discussion of legal matters in the FLOSS world from people who actually know what they’re talking about. They’ll also have guests and it should be released every 2 weeks. It’s presented by Bradley M. Kuhn, president of the Software Freedom Conservancy and also former Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation and Karen Sandler one of the legal counsel at the SFLC. I’ve been working with them for a few weeks but we didn’t want to announce anything until the first episode of the show was released and I’m very pleased to say that now it is!!

You can find it on the SFLC website in ogg (of course) and mp3 formats. So please go and check it out. I think it sounds great (but then I would hehe) and I’m really excited to be working with such well respected names in the free software world. I think this is an area that few people could cover authoratively and the SFLC are just the experts for the case… no pun intended.

I hope you enjoy the show

Dan

Hey folks, not many new reviews here the last couple of weeks I know, I’ve been busy with the podcast and the madness surrounding LugRadio Live. I have been plotting a new project though which will hopefully bring together two of the things I love most, open source software and record production.

You’ll probably know this if you’re a regular reader but I’ve been a musician since I was kid, I went to music college when I finished school and on to work as a sound engineer for a while before getting into computers. I have a small home studio and still produce music when time allows, it’s a real passion of mine. I post my music over at www.shedmusic.net as often as I can. My heroes are producers like Brian Wilson, Trevor Horn and Brian Eno. There’s something about this studio however which is the source of some shame to me… it’s based around a Windows XP computer. Shock horror!! I use Linux in every part of my house except the studio, so I figured it was time to see if I could really set up a professional quality studio around Linux and open source tools. I also want to produce some music with this new studio and see how it compares to the old freedom hating stuff.

The Plan:
Much like the video and graphic production industries, the music production world is still dominated heavily by proprietary software. Windows and Mac are the favoured platforms and in the past Linux hadn’t quite caught them up. This is the key thing for me really, I love open source and I love Linux but I’m afraid I won’t compromise when it comes to making music, I want to be able to do everything I do now but in the Linux studio with similar ease. Linux has advanced so much in the last couple of years I want to find out if it’s possible these days and if not why not? I’ll document the whole process and maybe help find solutions to some of the problems too if I can. I’ll also list the hardware and software, hopefully making some sort of guide for any other musicians who want to embrace the open source philosophy.

At the moment I mostly use a program called Cubase SX by Steinberg, this is a proprietary Windows application and it’s quite popular among musicians, along with the likes of Pro Tools by Digidesign. These programs allow you to sequence and mix all of your audio and midi tracks, combining synths, drum machines, samplers and even video if you want. A powerful sequencer or DAW (digital audio workstation) is really central to any computer-based studio I’d say and in Linux the best option I can see is Ardour. I haven’t used Ardour too much yet but it looks very professional and I hope it can do everything the proprietary apps can do. I have some reading to do but I’ll make an effort to learn Ardour and really get the most out of it. I also make heavy use of VST plugins which are proprietary for things like guitar amp modelling and virtual istruments, I’ve heard you can make VSTs work on Linux and I’m curious to see how well this compares.

I have a rough plan for the project which breaks down into convenient phases. So here they are:

1. The Hardware Phase – Collect and fit Linux compatible hardware
2. The Software Phase – Install Linux on the studio PC and get it running
3. The Learning Phase – Try and work out what the hell to do
4. The Recording Phase – Actually make some music in this new environment and release it under a Creative Commons license

The Hardware Phase:
One of the major stumbling blocks to an open source studio is hardware or more specifically finding compatible hardware. This was the first issue I ran into as my main audio interface between the PC and the mixer was a Hercules 16/12 Firewire box. It doesn’t seem like there’s a compatible Linux driver for this and I’m not competent enough to write one myself. Since I was already in the process of converting my studio from analogue to digital anyway I decided I needed a new Linux compatible audio interface. I recently bought a Soundcraft 328 digital mixer to base the studio around and this has 16 ADAT optical inputs and outputs, so I wanted a PC interface that could work easily with these. After some research I decided on the RME Hammerfall DSP 9652 PCI card. It gets good reviews on Linux audio forums and has a native ALSA driver so should work nicely with JACK and Ardour. They normally retail for about £350 in the UK but I managed to find one on eBay for just over £200. I’ll be selling some of the old analogue kit to refund this and hopefully break even. Fingers crossed on that one.

Here’s a list of the kit I’m using:

• Soundcraft 328 Digital Mixer
• RME Hammerfall DSP9652 PCI audio interface
• 4 TOSLINK optical cables for ADAT I/O
• 2 Midi cables for machine control
• M-Audio Keystation 61es Midi Controller Keyboard
• Studio PC – AMD X2 4200, 1gb RAM, 30gb HDD, 250gb HDD

There are other bits and peices such as microphones and guitars which I’ll discuss as they come up but this is the core of the studio. The RME card arrived a few days ago and I’ve installed it into the computer. It’s a standard PCI card so wasn’t hard to fit and I’ve connected and labelled the optical cables. I got 4 TOSLINK optical cables to give me full 16 channel digital I/O and bound them into 2 little home made multi-cores. I also labelled the cables up to avoid confusion. Finally I connected the midi cables to the mixer as well to enable automation with the PC. You can see all of this from the pictures. in the gallery I’ve also tested it out with Cubase and a couple of other Windows apps with mixed success, I have a lot of learning to do getting to grips with the digital domain but I’ll get there.

CHECKOUT THE PHOTO GALLERY

What’s next?
The core hardware is installed and phase one is complete, the only problem I have is some minor digital distortion at times due to my incompetence routing everything through the digital desk. I’m getting better though and I expected a steep learning curve, I spent too many years with clunky old analogue mixers and this is quite different. Next I’ll install a Linux distro like Ubuntu Studio or 64 Studio on a spare hard drive and get the software phase under way. I’ll report back and let you know how I get on with that this week.

It’s time to get some open source software installed so wish me luck

Dan