Linux sound is getting better.
No I'm not talking about the free software song sung by Richard Stallman(very funny, but in a low quality .au format). Or the pronouciation of Linus and linux.
To start on this long-journey-of-a-rambling-diatribe-of-words, there's two good audio patches in the SDL bug tracker for the upcoming SDL 1.2.14 release.
One patch is for the pulse audio driver, and the other is for the alsa backend. These solve some of the high latency or scratchy sound issues some have.
That's right a new SDL release very soon... it's over a year since the last 1.2.13 release, and it seems like forever since the SDL 1.3 series begun. Most new development has been happening on the SDL 1.3 tree in the last year... so the 1.2 releases have slowed to an almost stop.
There's a good article on a x-platform atomic operation API for SDL http://www.thegrumpyprogrammer.com/node/16. That's one of the features that's been evolving over a few years, and is being implemented in svn.
In python terms, SDL 1.3 is like python3000. A refinement, and a promise to break backwards compatibility with the ABI. Note, not so much the API... the API is fairly backwards compatible... but some things must change. Also SDL 1.3 has lots of cool features I'm looking forward to.
Even though the SDL 1.3 tree is improving, and many people are now switching over to it, the SDL 1.2 series has a lot of life left in it.
So the SDL 1.2.14 release is all about fixing bugs, and applying patches. There's a lot of bug reports, and also a lot of patches in the main SDL bug tracker.
With free software and open source there is the mantra 'release early, release often' (the other mantra is 'release early, then abandon on sourceforge'). A stable version, that's used by people needs plenty of bug fixes, and people send in patches. Whereas a development version doesn't get the same kind of attention as released-and-used-by-people software. Many of these fixes done on the stable 1.2 tree will also be ported to the 1.3 tree too.
Now enough SDL 1.3 love... what else is improving in linux audio world? now for something completely different.
Well, pulse audio is frantically making releases. Three releases in september... so far, and five for 2009. Pulse and jack are also playing nicer together now(well, not packaged in ubuntu yet... grrrr, see bugs 198048 and 109659 this is critical for allowing many high end audio programs to work along side the 'beep' sound your terminal makes. Hopefully they'll get a good desktop architect (sound experience) from their job posting to fix things).
Jack is the low latency, synchronised audio system used by many professional audio programs on linux. Think unix pipes applied to audio, but in a way that works with the audio latency requirements. Both jack, and pulse audio have been ported to lots of other operating systems these days. Which can only be good for them getting more developer support... and making the linux audio world better along with it. You can see in their change logs, and repository commits that developers on different platforms other than linux are contributing quite a lot.
Even trusty old Open Sound System(OSS) has gotten better. OSS was removed from the kernel, replaced with alsa a while ago... but OSS kept going anyway. OSS4 has lots of things fixed compared to OSSv3 that most people remember using a long time ago. Including a fast transparent high quality in kernel mixer(good for crappy cards that only support one program outputing sound at a time). It also has a "record-what-you-hear" feature... for recording what is coming out of your sound card (a feature MS disabled in vista... booo!) The commercial version is now available as open source with a mecurial repository too! OSS is also quite x-platform.
What about sound applications?
The drum machine Hydrogen got a new release for the first time in three years... and this time it's not just linux only too.
A great DJ program called mixxx is another high quality multiplatform audio program. It's probably my most favourite audio program... just because it's so fun. You can even hook up real vinyl decks to it for scratch control(and midi ones). Unfortunately you can't pipe music in from other audio programs or in from a sound card... so you can't use the vinyl decks in that way. You have to use specially encoded records which the program then reads to figure out where the record is moving. The latest version features javascript scripting of midi and other parts of the program.
(go on, download it and become a dj ninja)
Guitarix is an amp emulator... it tries to sounds like various vintage guitar amps. Pretty fun to play around with.
(plenty of knobs to play with)
Especially in combination with many of the effect plugins available through the hundreds of LADSPA(guitarix is a LADSPA plugin too) and LV2 plugins. Other plugins available include vocoders and all sorts of weirdness.
Lash uptake has been good, and now lash talks dbus... letting it mix in nicely with the rest of the linux desktop ecosystem. Lash is a session system for linux audio programs. It lets you open your 12 different linux audio programs(remember audio in linux is like pipes... pipes with audio running through them instead of water... let's call them wires... but digital... maybe fiber optics... but not using light... ok whatever... why am I explaining it this way?... you're not five... too many dots. sorry.) and save your settings for later. The alternative is to each time open your 12 programs, set up the wiring between six of them, start messing around and finally... 2 hours later... realise you were supposed to be setting them up in a certain way rather than making stupid minimal beep noises to a house vocals mixed with a recording of a fart noise - filtered down to retro 8bit samples. Without lash, you couldn't save that brilliant setup and play with it later.
Audacity, the simple(yet advanced) audio editing work horse is moving towards a 2.0 by the end of the year. Audacity has been around for ages, and has been multi platform for ages. The 1.3 series seems to have been going on forever... but they do regular beta releases, and nightly builds. So it's pretty easy to get fresh versions. Do proper releases matter that much when new releases are pushed out every day? I guess so.
LiVES reached 1.0 earlier in the year after a long time in development... (since 2002!). LiVES is a video editor(which includes audio). It's actually quite useful for editing video! The other cool part of it, is that it's a VJ tool. So you can do those awesome projections you saw the last time you were in a club rushing around the place. You can control much of LiVES with midi too, which is mice.
(Make home movies of your loved ones. Like grandpa Nelson here.)
In fact lots of audio programs available for linux can be controlled by midi. Which is mice for me since you can easily do midi with python and pygame.midi.
Speaking of things midi and pythony... The vj program freej now has python wrappers! There are even five tutorials which use pygame. Unfortunately this is not in release form yet... but all this good stuff happening in the git repos.
(you too can make video art like this with freej... All you need is a crazy mask)
Both LiVES and freej use the frei0r video plugins. Which has nothing to do with linux sound getting better really. So there. Jerk(why did this guy even write this? I wish I didn't waste my time reading it.).
Comments? Important typos I should fix? Interesting linux audio things you're doing? Want to tell me how your tomatoes are growing in your garden? Gott a picture of your cat you'd like to share with me?
To start on this long-journey-of-a-rambling-diatribe-of-words, there's two good audio patches in the SDL bug tracker for the upcoming SDL 1.2.14 release.
One patch is for the pulse audio driver, and the other is for the alsa backend. These solve some of the high latency or scratchy sound issues some have.
That's right a new SDL release very soon... it's over a year since the last 1.2.13 release, and it seems like forever since the SDL 1.3 series begun. Most new development has been happening on the SDL 1.3 tree in the last year... so the 1.2 releases have slowed to an almost stop.
There's a good article on a x-platform atomic operation API for SDL http://www.thegrumpyprogrammer.com/node/16. That's one of the features that's been evolving over a few years, and is being implemented in svn.
In python terms, SDL 1.3 is like python3000. A refinement, and a promise to break backwards compatibility with the ABI. Note, not so much the API... the API is fairly backwards compatible... but some things must change. Also SDL 1.3 has lots of cool features I'm looking forward to.
Even though the SDL 1.3 tree is improving, and many people are now switching over to it, the SDL 1.2 series has a lot of life left in it.
So the SDL 1.2.14 release is all about fixing bugs, and applying patches. There's a lot of bug reports, and also a lot of patches in the main SDL bug tracker.
With free software and open source there is the mantra 'release early, release often' (the other mantra is 'release early, then abandon on sourceforge'). A stable version, that's used by people needs plenty of bug fixes, and people send in patches. Whereas a development version doesn't get the same kind of attention as released-and-used-by-people software. Many of these fixes done on the stable 1.2 tree will also be ported to the 1.3 tree too.
Now enough SDL 1.3 love... what else is improving in linux audio world? now for something completely different.
Well, pulse audio is frantically making releases. Three releases in september... so far, and five for 2009. Pulse and jack are also playing nicer together now(well, not packaged in ubuntu yet... grrrr, see bugs 198048 and 109659 this is critical for allowing many high end audio programs to work along side the 'beep' sound your terminal makes. Hopefully they'll get a good desktop architect (sound experience) from their job posting to fix things).
Jack is the low latency, synchronised audio system used by many professional audio programs on linux. Think unix pipes applied to audio, but in a way that works with the audio latency requirements. Both jack, and pulse audio have been ported to lots of other operating systems these days. Which can only be good for them getting more developer support... and making the linux audio world better along with it. You can see in their change logs, and repository commits that developers on different platforms other than linux are contributing quite a lot.
Even trusty old Open Sound System(OSS) has gotten better. OSS was removed from the kernel, replaced with alsa a while ago... but OSS kept going anyway. OSS4 has lots of things fixed compared to OSSv3 that most people remember using a long time ago. Including a fast transparent high quality in kernel mixer(good for crappy cards that only support one program outputing sound at a time). It also has a "record-what-you-hear" feature... for recording what is coming out of your sound card (a feature MS disabled in vista... booo!) The commercial version is now available as open source with a mecurial repository too! OSS is also quite x-platform.
What about sound applications?
The drum machine Hydrogen got a new release for the first time in three years... and this time it's not just linux only too.
A great DJ program called mixxx is another high quality multiplatform audio program. It's probably my most favourite audio program... just because it's so fun. You can even hook up real vinyl decks to it for scratch control(and midi ones). Unfortunately you can't pipe music in from other audio programs or in from a sound card... so you can't use the vinyl decks in that way. You have to use specially encoded records which the program then reads to figure out where the record is moving. The latest version features javascript scripting of midi and other parts of the program.
(go on, download it and become a dj ninja)
Guitarix is an amp emulator... it tries to sounds like various vintage guitar amps. Pretty fun to play around with.
(plenty of knobs to play with)
Especially in combination with many of the effect plugins available through the hundreds of LADSPA(guitarix is a LADSPA plugin too) and LV2 plugins. Other plugins available include vocoders and all sorts of weirdness.
Lash uptake has been good, and now lash talks dbus... letting it mix in nicely with the rest of the linux desktop ecosystem. Lash is a session system for linux audio programs. It lets you open your 12 different linux audio programs(remember audio in linux is like pipes... pipes with audio running through them instead of water... let's call them wires... but digital... maybe fiber optics... but not using light... ok whatever... why am I explaining it this way?... you're not five... too many dots. sorry.) and save your settings for later. The alternative is to each time open your 12 programs, set up the wiring between six of them, start messing around and finally... 2 hours later... realise you were supposed to be setting them up in a certain way rather than making stupid minimal beep noises to a house vocals mixed with a recording of a fart noise - filtered down to retro 8bit samples. Without lash, you couldn't save that brilliant setup and play with it later.
Audacity, the simple(yet advanced) audio editing work horse is moving towards a 2.0 by the end of the year. Audacity has been around for ages, and has been multi platform for ages. The 1.3 series seems to have been going on forever... but they do regular beta releases, and nightly builds. So it's pretty easy to get fresh versions. Do proper releases matter that much when new releases are pushed out every day? I guess so.
LiVES reached 1.0 earlier in the year after a long time in development... (since 2002!). LiVES is a video editor(which includes audio). It's actually quite useful for editing video! The other cool part of it, is that it's a VJ tool. So you can do those awesome projections you saw the last time you were in a club rushing around the place. You can control much of LiVES with midi too, which is mice.
(Make home movies of your loved ones. Like grandpa Nelson here.)
In fact lots of audio programs available for linux can be controlled by midi. Which is mice for me since you can easily do midi with python and pygame.midi.
Speaking of things midi and pythony... The vj program freej now has python wrappers! There are even five tutorials which use pygame. Unfortunately this is not in release form yet... but all this good stuff happening in the git repos.
(you too can make video art like this with freej... All you need is a crazy mask)Both LiVES and freej use the frei0r video plugins. Which has nothing to do with linux sound getting better really. So there. Jerk(why did this guy even write this? I wish I didn't waste my time reading it.).
Comments? Important typos I should fix? Interesting linux audio things you're doing? Want to tell me how your tomatoes are growing in your garden? Gott a picture of your cat you'd like to share with me?
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