Planet LinuxMusicians

Handmade Music found a new home on New York’s Lower East Side, at Culturefix, an electronics boutique cum gallery, bar, and tapas. The philosophy of this event has long been to simply open the doors, letting a community of people come together, make some noise, and have fun and learn. So we’re indebted to the people who made it happen – and I think there were some lessons to hopefully reproduce.

And yes, part of why I share this is I hope we can work over time to provide more resources, so that it’s easier to organize events and workshops to involve people in discovering the music technologies about which we’re passionate.

Highlights:

Great food and drink and art. First, I owe huge thanks to Ari and Cole and the whole staff of Culturefix for serving up delicious food and drinks in the kitchen/bar. There’s no reason tech has to be served on an empty stomach. I gather some purchases went down up in their drool-worthy audio boutique. (I, uh, bought a mixer…) But perhaps best of all, it was nice being in a gallery with an active show and being surrounded with texture and visual inspiration.

Lots of people soldering and making electronics, even for the first time. We had a wide group of people try out the 1976 phototheremin, an original design by Forrest M. Mims III adapted and executed by Eric Archer. Simplicity makes a difference: Forrest’s original design uses a tiny number of parts, which makes it ideal for a workshop – fewer solder points. Folks who had never soldered before nailed it in no time at all; Brian Biggs’ young children even got in on the action. We benefited from having a mix of people who had soldered before and some who hadn’t. Result: everyone one had a great time. (Thanks, great participants!) And apart from one case of swapped transistors, remedied with a desoldering gun, we had a 100% success rate. I think this is an ideal way to learn; I hope we can do more of these and perhaps create a new library of these projects for the online age.

Video and more photos by Joe Saavedra, who helped out with the workshop:

Chip music, invented guitars, dodecahedron side by side. Guitarist Nick Demopoulos captivated the crowd with his homemade Smomid guitar controller, which aligned MIDI pitches with touch-sensitive strips arranged as frets, for a controller more comfortable for guitar. Ted Hayes talked about the fine details of construction and three-dimensional layouts for sequencers on his Neurohedron – a particular enough task that I think we should probably cover it in more detail with Ted. Pulsewave, the NYC-based chip music series, offered chip music. What was interesting about that was that, by taking it out its usual venue, the music reached a largely unfamiliar crowd. (A number of people were hearing chip music for the first time.) This put the notion of making music with Nintendo handhelds alongside other hacks and DIY solutions for music. Thanks to Peter Swimm for making this happen.

Live videos

Thanks to Robots Dreams for the additional photos and videos. If you haven’t seen this superb hacker-friendly site, it’s a definite don’t miss:
http://www.robots-dreams.com/

And to everyone, yes, we’ll do this again, as well as work on ways of sharing these events across geographic distance, whether that’s publishing additional kit and workshop ideas, promoting events in different places, or … well, really, anything else you’d suggest.

Soundhack, the free audio tool for the Mac developed by audio wizard Tom Erbe, was long a beloved tool for doing strange and wonderful things for sound. It was followed by Spectral Shapers, Mac and Windows plug-ins that built on some of those ideas to do more “timbral morphing” with recorded audio. That includes “timbral filtering” and noise-reducing expansion with spectralcompand, drawn morphing filter shapes with morphfilter, audio positioning with binaural, and a terrific spectralgate for creative dynamics processing.

In what can only come as great news to lovers of patching in the free and open source Pure Data (Pd) and commercial Max/MSP environments alike, those tools are now in beta as objects to include in your own patches. These patching environments really do feel like the virtual modular studios they are. Included:

+binaural, +morphfilter, +spectralcompand, +spectralgate, +decimate, +chebyshev, +matrix, +compand, +delay, +pitchdelay and +bubbler

This release promises a few bugs, so use at your own risk and write good, precise bug reports if you hit any trouble. Windows Max support isn’t there yet, but Mac Max support is, and Pd users can enjoy the software on Mac, Windows, Linux, and even 64-bit Linux. More updates coming later this summer.

http://www.soundhack.com/externs.php

...module files are a family of music file formats originating from the MOD file format on Amiga systems used in late 1980s. Those who produce these files and listen to them, form the worldwide MOD scene...

Inkscape has this dialog hidden in Edit -> Clone -> Create Tiled Clones…:

It has been brought up on the Inkscape-devel list and I decided to have a closer look.

Inkscape defaults to shifting the clones by 100% width of the selected object for columns and 100% height for rows. So the parameters on the Shift page are actually about the deviation from that, but the interface doesn’t make that clear at all.

Shift and Scale only take %, but should allow absolute values with a unit of the user’s choice.

Rows, columns wouldn’t make sense for radial arrangements that should also be possible.

Width, height: it could be made clearer that this option will fill the specified area and in what directions (original defines top left).

Use saved size and position of the tile checkbox: what is the use case for this option?
The tool-tip shows that this needs a lot of explanation: “Pretend that the size and position of the tile are the same as the last time you tiled it (if any), instead of using the current size”.

The Exponent parameter on the Shift and Scale pages depends on the tool-tip to explain that it defines whether rows will be spaced evenly (1), converge (1).

Trace page: Well, non of my tests produced anything sensible or useful.

The Symmetry page only contains a pop-up list (what GTK+ erroneously calls a combo box) full of mysterious items:

These are the 17 wallpaper groups, all possible tilings with translational symmetry. I don’t think knowledge of these should be expected. At the very least, the term wallpaper groups should be mentioned. Even once you know what this is about, the descriptions might not help you much with recalling the patterns or with predicting the outcome based on the selected object.

The Wikipedia article includes diagrams, but I didn’t find them to help much. A page of Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program is much better. There are 11 groups based on rectangles (2 of them can be parallelograms), 1 on right-angled rectangles (rectangles cut apart diagonally) and 5 on hexagon subdivisions.

Here’s an attempt at creating the most simple schematics, leaving out points of rotation and mirror axes to just depict orientation. The place taken by the selected object is darkened:

These could be added to the descriptions given now.

Filed under: Conception, Planet Ubuntu, User Experience

Title:

 

Banter:

 

Software Releases:

- AV Linux 4.0 "Black n' Blue" Edition

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

 

- Ardour 2.8.11 is now available from http://ardour.org/download

It contains only 1 change from 2.8.10, but its an important one:

* Do not prevent transport operations after an export (and potentially at other times)

 

- Denemo 0.8.18 Release - Free and Open Music Notation Editor

Too many additions to mention here. Just check it out at

http://denemo.org/index.php/Get_Denemo

- guitarix 0.10.0 is now availabe at: http://guitarix.sourceforge.net/

lots of new features, including added tonestack and amp models, a cabinet impulse response module, a simple looper, and selectable distortion and EQ models

- LMMS 0.4.7 http://lmms.sourceforge.net/

This version is a maintainance release of the 0.4.x series available for both Linux and Windows

Audio Releases:

 

Tips:

IRC User ScottL (Scott Lavender of Ubuntu Studio fame) has a great video link explaining Ubuntu Studio - helpful also in that it goes into what Jackd is and shows how to use hydrogen and ardour together. http://vimeo.com/12454464

 

IRC User Stuzz has a link to a Linux Audio Users (LAU) mailing list thread he found useful, regarding quality acoustic drumkits for use with hydrogen - http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-user/2010-July/071176.html

IRC User Autostatic links us up to the Guitarix blog where you can find cool videos on use cases: http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/guitarix/

IRC User Unixhag found this episodes cute and fun themed link... An OSM Waffle recipe! http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/40-a-day/osm-waffle-recipe/index.html

Gear:

- DIY microphone kits and resources - (holstein)

http://www.scotthelmke.com/microphones.html

http://www.ribbonmic.rickshawrecords.com/diymickits.html

http://www.mp3forkidz.com/mic/

http://www.diymic.com/

 

- IRC User Stuzz shows a link of the progress of the pandora gaming device as a linux music making device. http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/54484-pandora-as-a-midi-sequencing-workstation/

- IRC user lsd posted a link to the next-generation kit version of the Monome grid controller, which will soon be available for pre-order. The new kit lets you build up to a 16x16 board that connects to your PC via a single USB port. Pricing starts at US$220 for the basic 8x8 kit, without a case or LEDs http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=tech:mk

Announcements:

• Rakarrack 0.5.8 "Equinox" released June 21, 2010. Significant feature upgrade and bug fixes. A summer gift to the FOSS community.

15:47 < Transmogrifox> Anybody who follows Rakarrack git (development): we have recently added multi-band compressor and also an analog tremolo model, "Opticaltrem"

- MIDI Arpeggiator w/ JACK Tempo Sync (holstein)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/arpage/

Finally! OSMP Theme song tracks posted - 1 Bzip of the entire Ardour session, and individual FLAC's to cull for remix. http://www.archive.org/details/OpenSourceMusicianPodcastThemeSongardourSessionForRemix

Rants/Calling BS:

 

Tech Segment:

 

Listener Feedback:

 

Contact Info:

Wiki:

http://opensourcemusician.com

E-Mails

osmp@pipemanmusic.com

Twitter and Identi.ca:

http://twitter.com/pipemanmusic

http://identi.ca/pipemanmusic

http://identi.ca/guitarman

Blogs:

http://pipemanmusic.blogspot.com

http://deadbeatguitarist.com/?feed=rss2

Voicemail:

http://opensourcemusician.libsyn.com

Forums:

http://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewforum.php?f=41

IRC:

#opensourcemusicians on Freenode

Podcast Out!

The Full Circle Magazine (Issue #40) is out, with a new logo:

Ronnie Tucker (editor) liked the middle variant of the last set posted, but considered it too plain. While I don’t agree, I preferred to offer this final solution instead of him going with something entirely different

Filed under: Logos, Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu

I have been at FrOSCon and participated in the keysigning party. About 60 people evaluating each others IDs was … interesting.

My prior exposure to this whole PGP/GPG key business had been just the minimum required for a Launchpad/BZR account and signing the Code of Conduct.

Now the task at hand is signing all the keys where I’m reasonably sure about the ID of the owner and mailing the signatures to them. While there’s no way around going through not just every key, but every uid (a name and email address associated with the key) interactively, everything else about this calls for automation.

The command line tool caff has been recommended and it seems to be the only game in town. It’s in the signing-party Debian/Ubuntu package. No GUI and no out-of-the-box solution in Ubuntu. One could conclude that building a web of trust is not essential

The easiest way to allow caff to send out emails seems to be to set up ssmtp. Installing it caused the removal of the exim packages. Well, there was no way I would deal with the more than 1000 lines long configuration file for exim. Getting ssmtp to work with my account did cost me a few attempts, but wasn’t too hard. It’s a little sad to have a configured account in Evolution and having to use something entirely separated for sending mails from the command line or via scripts, though.

No matter what I do, caff always tells me it can’t import the keys I want to process. It asks if i want to continue anyway and defaults to aborting. Only after trying a lot of things, I decided to choose continue and it looks like the script can do its job nonetheless!?

Meanwhile, I imported and signed the keys via gpg directly, instead. Signing on a per-uid level is really cumbersome and could be much faster with a GUI.

caff assumes the keys are not signed, unless run with a flag to not sign keys. Using that, I did a test run with a single key. Since I couldn’t think of another way to check if the email had the right content and got through, I did send another one via Evolution to ask the recipient.

No answer, yet. This morning, I decided to pick another single key. I’m not aware of any relevant changes on my system, but now caff claims that it can’t find a signed uid for any of the keys. The gpgsigs tool tells me there are signed uids for all keys in my list, so the signatures most definitively did not disappear. Any idea what might be going on?

My inbox shows that several participants got caff to work.

I could help with the interaction/interface design, if somebody decides to write a graphical tool or to extend one of the existing key managers. I wonder if and how this should be integrated with whatever is the default email application of a distribution, though.

Filed under: Planet Ubuntu, Thoughts, Ubuntu

The monome is coming to your town. Unlike tours organized by commercial product vendors, a grassroots effort by monome users pledges to share the music made with the monome and give back to a larger community.

It’s hard to explain the monome. It’s part tool, part lifestyle. And its openness comes in large part from the community of artists who use it, and embrace the controller’s sustainable production and unique design. In fact, it’s hard to explain just what a monome is: this USB-connected grid of light-up buttons is, by design, a blank canvas. It’s what the community has brought to that canvas that has made the monome a surprise revolution. That passion sometimes even makes it an object of ridicule – but let the monome artists show your their chops and love, and all but the coldest hearts melt.

Organizer Frank Rose shares some thoughts on the monome tour.

And since it is as much about the users and their music, we’ve got some music for you to hear. (If you’re using Chrome/Chromium, you can easily queue up all these tracks using the wonderful ExtensionFM – anyone have something similar on Firefox?)

The tour kicks off in Boston, but eventually leaves American shores for Canada, Austria, and Spain – and more dates around the world are in the works. (Got a lead on a venue in your town? Give a shout.)

09.03.2010 – Boston, MA
09.04.2010 – NYC, NY
09.06.2010 – Daytona, FL
09.07.2010 – Houston, TX
09.11.2010 – Boulder, CO
09.12.2010 – Denver, CO
09.13.2010 – Sante Fe, NM
09.15.2010 – San Diego, CA
09.16.2010 – Fullerton, CA
09.17.2010 – Los Angeles, CA
09.18.2010 – Santa Cruz, CA
09.19.2010 – San Francisco, CA
09.21.2010 – Portland, OR
09.22.2010 – Seattle, WA
09.24.2010 – Toronto, ON
10.01.2010 – Edmonton, AB
10.16.2010 – Linz, Austria
11.05.2010 – Barcelona, Spain

Each city has a different lineup (which to me is part of the appeal), and dates are changing, so keep your eyes on their site for the latest:

http://monometour.com/

There are workshop/build days in Boulder and Santa Fe, as well.

The tour also will be accompanied by a compilation 2-disc, 33-track, international music release, all made with monome and initially available only at the tour stops – so go hear some live music.

Frank Rose shares more details with CDM:

We created a compilation that will be available exclusively at tour dates and if there’s any left over, I’ll sell them on the website. Proceeds will go to the performing artists. Any profit afterwards, in the community spirit, will be given away to some deserving charity. 33 songs on 2 discs, featuring only monome community members including Daedelus and Edison.

Schpligidy (Tanner Christiansen) brought up the idea of putting together a tour in April. Tanner got busy, and I took up the role of energizer and got the ball rolling. People signed up to play, others volunteered to organize events in their town. I don’t have alot of experience booking shows so I went forward, as I do with most things, just winging it. It’s worked out fairly well, with some bumps.

The goal is really just to tour and have fun. I think the result, for me anyways, is that I’ll actually meet some of these folks I’ve only talked to online. Of course, we all want to share our own personal creations with a greater audience. The monome is just a thread that all of us have in common. It’s used more as a vehicle for the tour rather than a mechanism for proselytizing.

I’ll get to catch up with the NYC lineup: Portable Sunsets, Makingthenoise, NO SIR E, The Alpha Nerd, Watson, %, Galapagoose, Cigarette Operahouse.

Hear the music…

Note that TheAlphaNerd’s music is all available free, via a Creative Commons license.

Jittery Fingers by TheAlphaNerd

Watson – Fields at Home by watson

MicrowavedBulletsDon’tKillAliens PeopleDo by _raja_

Go to sleep slowly (short mix) by noiseflowr

Noiseflowr also has a remix of the lovely Caribou Sun track:
Caribou – Sun (noiseflowr organistic mix) by noiseflowr

More tracks, for listening exclusively on SoundCloud:
http://soundcloud.com/pauk/electric-jazzmine

http://soundcloud.com/cigarette-operahouse/double-queen

And for access to everything in the monome community:
http://monome.org/

I’m writing a Swedish introduction to Linux and music production for the curious studio freaks at studio.se. Honor to them for having a separate linux section! I’m keeping it up to date and you are most welcome to give feedback.

Vad har jag för möjligheter att skapa musik med Linux?

[Wei] salvaged the internals from an Airport Express that had a blown power supply. From there he built this streaming music box. The case is from an IKEA clock with the face removed. He added some decorative fabric around a grill to make an acoustically transparent front panel. Inside you’ll find the Airport guts connected to a USB charger (replaces the dead PSU) and a set of powered stereo speakers. This simple mashup looks good and frees up space in your junk-parts box.

For those who being using KXStudio, you may have noticed this bug - https://bugs.launchpad.net/kxstudio/+bug/605362.

Basically pulseaudio will randomly crash on real-time kernels...

But, now there's a workaround!
The workaround came from this ubuntu bug report (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-rt/+bug/367671),
and basically all you need to do is create a new file '~/.pulse/daemon.conf', and add "rlimit-rttime = -1" to it.

I've been testing this for some time, and it really works! No more crashes on real-time kernels!

The 'pulse-jack' in KXStudio (or just my PPA) now auto-sets this parameter, so you probably already have this "fix" ;)

There was a time when a drummer would grab some sticks and lay out a groove using the items around him as instruments. [Lsa Wilson] would rather not work quite that hard and has chosen to do the same thing by tapping on an iPhone screen. As you can see in the clip after the break, many of the items in the room around him have been fitted with solenoids. Each is connected to an Arduino which is then controlled by Open Sound Control and interfaced with the iPhone via TouchOSC. We love the sounds being created and can’t help being reminded of the Multixylophoniomnibus.

PHASEX is a great polyphonic softsynth that can create a lot of usable and interesting sounds. Unfortunately development seems to have halted and the server on which sysex.net resides seems down. A few weeks before the server went off-line someone that goes by the handle of disabled decided to revive development of this great softsynth and set up the PHASEX Development Branch project. Today the first stable version, Milestone 1, has been released with some long desired features. To name just a few:
- a Panic button has been added
- Sustain pedals now work with this version
- The GTK System theme now works
- The naming scheme of multiple instances has been changed
- An extra -n (--n) option has been added to set the name of a PHASEX instance

phasex-dev Milestone 1 can be downloaded from disabled's github page.

In this age of the 24-hour news cycle and instant publication of stories, sometimes it’s good to slow down and wait. And thus, while for whatever reason I didn’t get around to mentioning the extreme audio stretching of a certain Justin Bieber track (see Synthtopia), I can’t let an ethereal, ambient reworking of 1998 Internet hit Hamsterdance go unnoticed, here shared on SoundCloud.

As it happens, while folks have taken notice of one of the tools, this strange Web meme opens a door on a lot of free and open source sound software goodness.

HamsterDance Stretched to 800% by Stefan Anion

Thanks to creator Stefan Anion aka Stefan Weise for sending his work our way.

The technique is catching on; now we get to play the game of spotting which producers slip this software into tracks coming out in the next 12-24 months. You can thank free and open source software: Paul Nasca aka Nasca Octavian PAUL has released two tools that use the magic of FFTs, a mathematical process by which it’s possible to transform time and frequency information quickly. HyperMammut (another cool tool that does huge, single-window FFTs on sound and image) and Paul’s Extreme Stretch (the tool used on Justin’s track) are GPLv2-licensed. Lifehacker even did their own how-to on the topic.

http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/ Documentation and software page
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypermammut/ SourceForge home of both Extreme Stretch and HyperMammut (Windows binary, Linux source)
Paulstretch Mac Port for PPC/Intel – your mileage may vary, as this is an unofficial port; let us know how it goes for you in comments, Mac users

Note that Paul is also the author of the terrific ZynAddSubFX open-source soft synth. (Look closely, closely at the title and guess at the feature set and synthesis technique.)

See also the software Mammut on which HyperMammut was based; the former is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Via Anders in comments:

I would like to mention that hypermammut is based on NOTAM ´s (Norwegian Center for technology in music and the arts) Mammut programmed by Øivind Hammer and Kjetil Matheussen

Download: http://www.notam02.no/index.php?/eng/Technology-and-text/Software/Mammut

I’d love to see some of the basic notions of this technique adapted to similar real-time patches. (Pd, ho!) Ideas, sonic wizards?

After I was first introduced to the program in the early 90s at a program at Oberlin’s TIMARA electronic tech center, I spent much of that decade addicted to convolution in Tom Erbe’s strange and wonderful SoundHack, another free sound-shaping tool for the Mac. I watched as the convolution process evolved from something I let run overnight (literally) to something that took an hour or so to something that became near-instantaneous, corresponding to the extraordinary forward march of processing speed.

It’s clear that some of these more obscure processes are going mainstream. It’s likewise evident that, as this audio has gone viral, SoundCloud really has become the “Flickr of audio” I predicted it might when it was launched back in 2008. So, I guess we’ll have to go and find some new sound design secret. We’d better just not tell the rest of you. I know I’m good at keeping lots of secr… doh!

Do, 26.08.2010, 20:00 Uhr

STUBNoIse

Konzertabend mit

Ramunas Jaras (ENDICHE VIS.SAT)
Elektronengehirn
Jetzmann
Y4HK Soundsystem

TBC
RENOISED
--------------------------
ENDICHE VIS.SAT

ramunas jaras is a lithuanian artist known for his inventive musical ventures and multi-stylistic stage productions. jaras is a performance artist, musician, and author. he has organized countless actions, both orchestrated and spontaneous. he is also known for his solo theatrical work as ENDICHE VIS.SAT.

--------------------------
Elektronengehirn: Geburt Der Kunst, erster bis dritter Satz

Der Französische Künstler Robert Filliou erklärte 1963 den 17. Januar als Geburtstag der Kunst. Dieses Ereignis wird international mit verschiedenen Ausstellungen, Performances und Konzerten gefeiert, so auch 2010 im Grazer Medienkunstlabor ESC. Als Mitglied der PD-Graz Gruppe komponierte Malte Steiner aka Elektronengehirn das Stück 'Geburt Der Kunst' in mehreren Sätzen mit der Open Source Software Pure Data und führte das Stück von Hamburg aus via Internet in Graz auf.
Am 26. August ist 'Geburt Der Kunst' zum ersten mal in Hamburg vor Ort zu hören.
--------------------------
Y4HK Soundsystem
Die stubnitz-sealectors präsentieren ihren soundtrack vom schiff.
JETZMANN
Musiker (Bass, Elektronik), Texter, Moderator bei Radio Gagarin (FSK Hamburg), dem Fachmagazin für musikalisch Randständiges, komponiert für Choreographien live:noise mit bass/gitarre,looper,feedbacks mal mit text,mal mit film
TBC (harshnoise hamburg)
sagt eigentlich schon genug.tbc wird euch was zu hören geben,verlasst euch drauf.
RENOISED
spielt e-gitarre ohne computer oder andere playbacks diesesmal erzählt er mit seinem instrument "a sailors tale" und träumt sich damit auf und in die weltmeere

http://sciencegirlrecords.com/chr15m/squeakyshoecore/

I finished this new tune a few days ago but I'm only just getting around to releasing it. Go to the squeakyshoecore page and click song five to hear it.

Here are the Pure Data patches used to create this music.

Hi there community!

I'm now preparing an update for KXStudio, and everyone is welcome to help!
There's a new page in the develop section with info about what still needs to be done.

Some of the planned changes/fixes are:

    * Kernel 2.6.35-lowlatency as default (needs testing!)
    * KDE SC 4.5.1
    * No longer depend on Kubuntu, just install what we really need
    * Update Audio plugins (remove buggy ones, check for new)
    * Add new applications (Renoise and LinuxDSP plugins are coming!)
    * Add 'Klaudia' (LADI Applications Launcher)
    * Workaround PulseAudio crashing on Real-Time Kernels
    * New Artwork

There's a new version available of the 0.018 branch of the CALF Audio Plugin Pack. According to the changelog not a lot changed, a few bugs got squashed, but since this is the first update in over a year it shouldn't just pass under the radar unnoticed.

If you like playing custom WADs, mine might be worthy enough to entertain you a bit!

preserving rare and endagered web species!

I tried to resist, really I did. I fought the allure that comes from the latest and greatest as long as possible. I ignored that newer phones where getting the latest and greatest Android and I was still on 2.1, which I enjoyed and was grateful when the over the air update arrived. However, we have a need for honesty, I'm only human, and I'm subject to wanting the latest and greatest. One option would have been to get a new phone and that would have been a practical one if it wasn't for the fact that I don't want a new contract and I don't have any money. So what's a faithful free software advocate to do but exercise his DMCA given rights and root baby, ROOT!

I have the sad, forgotten by its Android brethren phone, HTC Droid Eris. Knowing full well that it's OTA update future was as bleak as Minnesota's hope of wining an NFL championship. I had little hope of just holding out for Verizon to come through and give me 2.2 OTA. So, I looked into custom ROM options and lo and behold, what should my wonder eyes meet, but a shiny fully functional Froyo port for the Eris on the xda-developers forums by a guy that goes by the handle Kaos.

So, first things first, we need to root. For this I used the one click root also available on the xda forums. It's as simple as running the app, rebooting holding the down volume button and the power, flashing the zip file the app places on your sd card and BAM!, you have root. Now, if all you want is simple things like the ability to tether over wi-fi then this is enough. However, if you want the whole Froyo enchilada it's time to load KaosFroyo.

Kaosfroyo rom is a port of Cyanoginmod 6 to the Eris and overclocked by default to 710mhz. The steps I used to flash are as follows.

1. Download the rom zip onto the SD card(Don't place it in a folder).
2. Reboot the phone into recovery mode(hold down vol-down and power then select recovery from the menu with the track ball.
3. Back up the existing rom using Nandbackup.
4. Wipe the Android and Dalvek partitions.
5. Flash the rom with the flash utility.

There you have it. Froyo on your Eris. What will this give you? Faster, speak to text everywhere, live wallpapers and the ability to tweak your phone to your heart's content. Is it worth it? Hell yeah it is.

After flashing I was given an extremely in-depth tutorial on setting up and tweaking the phone by a very patient and knowledgable IRC user in #droideris on andirc. His handle is the_fly and if you see him in there tell him to get his tutorial on a blog soon so I don't have to remember it all. :)

So, Thank you very much XDA developer, Kaos, the_fly and all the rest of the people behind Android and it's hacker community. You ROCK!

It has been a while since my original announcement of systemd. Here's a little status update, on what happened since then. For simplicity's sake I'll just list here what we worked on in a bulleted list, with no particular order and without trying to cover this comprehensively:

• systemd has been accepted as Feature for Fedora 14, and as it looks right now everything worked out nicely and we'll ship F14 with systemd as init system.
• We added a number of additional unit types: .timer for cron-style timer-based activation of services, .swap exposes swap files and partitions the same way we handle mount points, and .path can be used to activate units dependending on the existance/creation of files or fill status of spool directories.
• We hooked systemd up to SELinux: systemd is now capabale of properly labelling directories, sockets and FIFOs it creates according to the SELinux policy for the services we maintain.
• We hooked systemd up to the Linux auditing subsystem: as first init system at all systemd now generates auditing records for all services it starts/stops, including their failure status.
• We hooked systemd up to TCP wrappers, for all socket connections it accepts.
• We hooked systemd up to PAM, so that optionally, when systemd runs a service as a different user it initializes the usual PAM session setup and teardown hooks.
• We hooked systemd up to D-Bus, so that D-Bus passes activation requests to systemd and systemd becomes the central point for all kinds of activation, thus greatly extending the control of the execution environment of bus activated services, and making them accessible through the same utilities as SysV services. Also, this enables us to do race-free parallelized start-up for D-Bus services and their clients, thus speeding up things even further.
• systemd is now able to handle various Debian and OpenSUSE-specific extensions to the classic SysV init script formats natively, on top of the Fedora extensions we already parse.
• The D-Bus coverage of the systemd interface is now complete, allowing both introspection of runtime data and of parsed configuration data. It's fun now to introspect systemd with gdbus or d-feet.
• We added a systemd PAM module, which assigns the processes of each user session to its own cgroup in the systemd cgroup tree. This also enables reliable killing of all processes associated with a session when the user logs out. This also manages a secure per-user /var/run-style directory which is supposed to be used for sockets and similar files that shall be cleaned up when the user logs out.
• There's a new tool systemd-cgls, which plots a pretty process tree based on the systemd cgroup hierarchy. It's really pretty. Try it!
• We now have our own cgroup hierarchy beneath /cgroup/systemd (though is will move to /sys/fs/ before the F14 release).
• We have pretty code that automatically spawns a getty on a serial port when the kernel console is redirected to a serial TTY.
• systemctl got beefed up substantially (it can even draw dependency graphs now, via dot!), and the SysV compatiblity tools were extended to more completely and correctly support what was historically provided by SysV. For example, we'll now warn the user when systemd service files have changed but systemd was not asked to reload its configuration. Also, you can now use systemd's native client tools to reboot or shut-down an Upstart or sysvinit system, to facilitate upgrades.
• We provide a reference implementation for the socket activation and other APIs for nicer interaction with systemd.
• We have a pretty complete set of documentation now, some of it even extending to areas not directly related to systemd itself.
• Quite a number of upstream packages now ship with systemd service files out-of-the-box now, that work across all distributions that have adopted systemd. It is our intention to unify the boot and service management between distributions with systemd, and this shows fruits already. Furthermore a number of upstream packages now ship our patches for socket-based activation.
• Even more options that control the process execution environment or the sockets we create are now supported.
• Earlier today I began my series of blog stories on systemd for administrators.
• We reimplemented almost all boot-up and shutdown scripts of the standard Fedora install in much smaller, simpler and faster C utilities, or in systemd itself. Most of this will not be enabled in F14 however, even though it is shipped with systemd upstream. With this enabled the entire Linux system gains a completely new feeling as the number of shells we spawn approaches zero, and the PID of the first user terminal is way < 500 now, and the early boot-up is fully parallelized. We looked at the boot scripts of Fedora, OpenSUSE and Debian and distilled from this a list of functionality that makes up the early boot process and reimplemented this in C, if possible following the bahaviour of one of the existing implementations from these three distributions. This turned out to be much less effort than anticipated, and we are actually quite excited about this. Look forward to the fruits of this work in F15, when we might be able to present you a shell-less boot at least for standard desktop/laptop systems.
• We spent some time reinvestigating the current syslog logic, and came up with an elegant and simple scheme to provide /dev/log compatible logging right from the time systemd is first initialized right until the time the kernel halts the machine. Through the wonders of socket based activation we first connect the /dev/log socket with a minimal bridge to the kernel log buffer (kmsg) and then, as soon as the real syslog is started up as part of the later bootup phase, we dynamically replace this minimal bridge by the real syslog daemon -- without losing a single log message. Since one of the first things the real syslog daemon does is flushing the kernel log buffer into log files, all logged messages will sooner or later be stored on disk, regardless whether they have been generated during early boot, late boot or system runtime. On top of that if the syslog daemon terminates or is shut down during runtime, the bridge becomes active again and log output is written to kmsg again. The same applies when the system goes down. This provides a simple an robust way how we can ensure that no logs will ever be lost again, and logging is available from the beginning of boot-up to the end of shut-down. Plymouth will most likely adopt a similar scheme for initrd logging, thus ensuring that everything ever logged on the system will properly end up in the log files, whether it comes from the kernel, from the initrd, from early-boot, from runtime or shutdown. And if syslogd is not around, dmesg will provide you with access to the log messages. While this bridge is part of systemd upstream, we'll most likely enable this bridge in Fedora only starting with F15. Also note that embedded systems that have no interest in shipping a full syslogd solution can simply use this syslog bridge during the entire runtime, and thus making the kernel log buffer the centralized log storage, with all the advantages this offers: zero disk IO at runtime, access to serial and netconsole logging, and remote debug access to the kernel log buffer.
• We now install autofs units for many "API" kernel virtual file systems by default, such as binfmt_misc or hugetlbfs. That means that the file system access is readily available, client code no longer has to manually load the respective kernel modules, as they are autoloaded on first access of the file system. This has many advantages: it is not only faster to set up during boot, but also simpler for applications, as they can just assume the functionality is available. On top of that permission problems for the initialization go away, since manual module loading requires root privileges.
• Many smaller fixes and enhancements, all across the board, which if mentioned here would make this blog story another blog novel. Suffice to say, we did a lot of polishing to ready systemd for F14.

All in all, systemd is progressing nicely, and the features we have been working on in the last months are without exception features not existing in any other of the init systems available on Linux and our feature set already was far ahead of what the older init implementations provide. And we have quite a bit planned for the future. So, stay tuned!

Also note that I'll speak about systemd at LinuxKongress 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany. Later this year I'll also be speaking at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Boston, MA. Make sure to drop by if you want to learn about systemd or discuss exiciting new ideas or features with us.

As many of you know, systemd is the new Fedora init system, starting with F14, and it is also on its way to being adopted in a number of other distributions as well (for example, OpenSUSE). For administrators systemd provides a variety of new features and changes and enhances the administrative process substantially. This blog story is the first part of a series of articles I plan to post roughly every week for the next months. In every post I will try to explain one new feature of systemd. Many of these features are small and simple, so these stories should be interesting to a broader audience. However, from time to time we'll dive a little bit deeper into the great new features systemd provides you with.

Verifying Bootup

Traditionally, when booting up a Linux system, you see a lot of little messages passing by on your screen. As we work on speeding up and parallelizing the boot process these messages are becoming visible for a shorter and shorter time only and be less and less readable -- if they are shown at all, given we use graphical boot splash technology like Plymouth these days. Nonetheless the information of the boot screens was and still is very relevant, because it shows you for each service that is being started as part of bootup, wether it managed to start up successfully or failed (with those green or red [ OK ] or [ FAILED ] indicators). To improve the situation for machines that boot up fast and parallelized and to make this information more nicely available during runtime, we added a feature to systemd that tracks and remembers for each service whether it started up successfully, whether it exited with a non-zero exit code, whether it timed out, or whether it terminated abnormally (by segfaulting or similar), both during start-up and runtime. By simply typing systemctl in your shell you can query the state of all services, both systemd native and SysV/LSB services:

[root@lambda] ~# systemctl
UNIT                                          LOAD   ACTIVE       SUB          JOB             DESCRIPTION
dev-hugepages.automount                       loaded active       running                      Huge Pages File System Automount Point
dev-mqueue.automount                          loaded active       running                      POSIX Message Queue File System Automount Point
proc-sys-fs-binfmt_misc.automount             loaded active       waiting                      Arbitrary Executable File Formats File System Automount Point
sys-kernel-debug.automount                    loaded active       waiting                      Debug File System Automount Point
sys-kernel-security.automount                 loaded active       waiting                      Security File System Automount Point
sys-devices-pc...0000:02:00.0-net-eth0.device loaded active       plugged                      82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller
[...]
sys-devices-virtual-tty-tty9.device           loaded active       plugged                      /sys/devices/virtual/tty/tty9
-.mount                                       loaded active       mounted                      /
boot.mount                                    loaded active       mounted                      /boot
dev-hugepages.mount                           loaded active       mounted                      Huge Pages File System
dev-mqueue.mount                              loaded active       mounted                      POSIX Message Queue File System
home.mount                                    loaded active       mounted                      /home
proc-sys-fs-binfmt_misc.mount                 loaded active       mounted                      Arbitrary Executable File Formats File System
abrtd.service                                 loaded active       running                      ABRT Automated Bug Reporting Tool
accounts-daemon.service                       loaded active       running                      Accounts Service
acpid.service                                 loaded active       running                      ACPI Event Daemon
atd.service                                   loaded active       running                      Execution Queue Daemon
auditd.service                                loaded active       running                      Security Auditing Service
avahi-daemon.service                          loaded active       running                      Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack
bluetooth.service                             loaded active       running                      Bluetooth Manager
console-kit-daemon.service                    loaded active       running                      Console Manager
cpuspeed.service                              loaded active       exited                       LSB: processor frequency scaling support
crond.service                                 loaded active       running                      Command Scheduler
cups.service                                  loaded active       running                      CUPS Printing Service
dbus.service                                  loaded active       running                      D-Bus System Message Bus
getty@tty2.service                            loaded active       running                      Getty on tty2
getty@tty3.service                            loaded active       running                      Getty on tty3
getty@tty4.service                            loaded active       running                      Getty on tty4
getty@tty5.service                            loaded active       running                      Getty on tty5
getty@tty6.service                            loaded active       running                      Getty on tty6
haldaemon.service                             loaded active       running                      Hardware Manager
hdapsd@sda.service                            loaded active       running                      sda shock protection daemon
irqbalance.service                            loaded active       running                      LSB: start and stop irqbalance daemon
iscsi.service                                 loaded active       exited                       LSB: Starts and stops login and scanning of iSCSI devices.
iscsid.service                                loaded active       exited                       LSB: Starts and stops login iSCSI daemon.
livesys-late.service                          loaded active       exited                       LSB: Late init script for live image.
livesys.service                               loaded active       exited                       LSB: Init script for live image.
lvm2-monitor.service                          loaded active       exited                       LSB: Monitoring of LVM2 mirrors, snapshots etc. using dmeventd or progress polling
mdmonitor.service                             loaded active       running                      LSB: Start and stop the MD software RAID monitor
modem-manager.service                         loaded active       running                      Modem Manager
netfs.service                                 loaded active       exited                       LSB: Mount and unmount network filesystems.
NetworkManager.service                        loaded active       running                      Network Manager
ntpd.service                                  loaded maintenance  maintenance                  Network Time Service
polkitd.service                               loaded active       running                      Policy Manager
prefdm.service                                loaded active       running                      Display Manager
rc-local.service                              loaded active       exited                       /etc/rc.local Compatibility
rpcbind.service                               loaded active       running                      RPC Portmapper Service
rsyslog.service                               loaded active       running                      System Logging Service
rtkit-daemon.service                          loaded active       running                      RealtimeKit Scheduling Policy Service
sendmail.service                              loaded active       running                      LSB: start and stop sendmail
sshd@172.31.0.53:22-172.31.0.4:36368.service  loaded active       running                      SSH Per-Connection Server
sysinit.service                               loaded active       running                      System Initialization
systemd-logger.service                        loaded active       running                      systemd Logging Daemon
udev-post.service                             loaded active       exited                       LSB: Moves the generated persistent udev rules to /etc/udev/rules.d
udisks.service                                loaded active       running                      Disk Manager
upowerd.service                               loaded active       running                      Power Manager
wpa_supplicant.service                        loaded active       running                      Wi-Fi Security Service
avahi-daemon.socket                           loaded active       listening                    Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack Activation Socket
cups.socket                                   loaded active       listening                    CUPS Printing Service Sockets
dbus.socket                                   loaded active       running                      dbus.socket
rpcbind.socket                                loaded active       listening                    RPC Portmapper Socket
sshd.socket                                   loaded active       listening                    sshd.socket
systemd-initctl.socket                        loaded active       listening                    systemd /dev/initctl Compatibility Socket
systemd-logger.socket                         loaded active       running                      systemd Logging Socket
systemd-shutdownd.socket                      loaded active       listening                    systemd Delayed Shutdown Socket
dev-disk-by\x1...x1db22a\x1d870f1adf2732.swap loaded active       active                       /dev/disk/by-uuid/fd626ef7-34a4-4958-b22a-870f1adf2732
basic.target                                  loaded active       active                       Basic System
bluetooth.target                              loaded active       active                       Bluetooth
dbus.target                                   loaded active       active                       D-Bus
getty.target                                  loaded active       active                       Login Prompts
graphical.target                              loaded active       active                       Graphical Interface
local-fs.target                               loaded active       active                       Local File Systems
multi-user.target                             loaded active       active                       Multi-User
network.target                                loaded active       active                       Network
remote-fs.target                              loaded active       active                       Remote File Systems
sockets.target                                loaded active       active                       Sockets
swap.target                                   loaded active       active                       Swap
sysinit.target                                loaded active       active                       System Initialization

LOAD   = Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded.
ACTIVE = The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB.
SUB    = The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type.
JOB    = Pending job for the unit.

221 units listed. Pass --all to see inactive units, too.
[root@lambda] ~#

(I have shortened the output above a little, and removed a few lines not relevant for this blog post.)

Look at the ACTIVE column, which shows you the high-level state of a service (or in fact of any kind of unit systemd maintains, which can be more than just services, but we'll have a look on this in a later blog posting), whether it is active (i.e. running), inactive (i.e. not running) or in any other state. If you look closely you'll see one item in the list that is marked maintenance and highlighted in red. This informs you about a service that failed to run or otherwise encountered a problem. In this case this is ntpd. Now, let's find out what actually happened to ntpd, with the systemctl status command:

[root@lambda] ~# systemctl status ntpd.service
ntpd.service - Network Time Service
	  Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/ntpd.service)
	  Active: maintenance
	    Main: 953 (code=exited, status=255)
	  CGroup: name=systemd:/systemd-1/ntpd.service
[root@lambda] ~#

This shows us that NTP terminated during runtime (when it ran as PID 953), and tells us exactly the error condition: the process exited with an exit status of 255.

In a later systemd version, we plan to hook this up to ABRT, as soon as this enhancement request is fixed. Then, if systemctl status shows you information about a service that crashed it will direct you right-away to the appropriate crash dump in ABRT.

Summary: use systemctl and systemctl status as modern, more complete replacements for the traditional boot-up status messages of SysV services. systemctl status not only captures in more detail the error condition but also shows runtime errors in addition to start-up errors.

That's it for this week, make sure to come back next week, for the next posting about systemd for administrators!

I’ve been slack in updating ye olde blog, but I have an excuse — I got a new phone! It’s a HTC Desire, running Android of course, and I’ve been having great fun trying different apps and discovering what I can do with it. I started a lengthy post covering my thoughts on both the Desire and Android, but in lieu of finishing that, I present you instead with an introduction to FingerPlay MIDI, a very cool MIDI controller app for Android.

FingerPlay gives you a selection of controllers — sliders, X/Y controllers, and drum pads — all of which send MIDI messages via Wi-Fi to a tiny Java-based server app on a PC. There, you can connect the MIDI output to whatever app you like, just as you would with any other MIDI controller gear. The controls are set up in separate “pages”; a scroll bar on the right switches between the pages.

I did some quick testing, using the drum pads to trigger drum pads in Hydrogen, and using the sliders and pads to control the gain and muting of individual loops within SooperLooper, and it did a great job, responding quickly and smoothly to my input.

Here are the steps I followed to get it up and running:

1. Install the FingerPlay MIDI app on your device, and download and extract the server app from the FingerPlay MIDI site
2. Load the ALSA “virmidi” driver:
   sudo modprobe snd-virmidi
3. Launch the server app:
   java -jar FingerPlayServer.jar
4. Connect the “Virtual Raw MIDI 1-0″ ALSA MIDI device up to whatever app you want to control.
5. On the phone, launch FingerPlay MIDI, and hit the icon in the top right corner to open the settings screen. Set the “Server Address” to your PC’s IP address (or hostname), and click the “Connect to Server” button.
6. Scroll further down on the settings page and open the “MIDI Out Device” option. In the list, select the top “VirMIDI” option — in my case, it’s “[hw:1,0,0]“.
7. Exit the settings and start hitting some controls!

You can use the usual tools of choice to see what MIDI messages are actually coming out for each control — I tend to use QMidiRoute, since it also lets you remap or process the messages if you need to. As you’d expect, the sliders and X/Y controls send MIDI CCs, while the pads send notes. With Hydrogen, I had to transpose the pads up an octave to match what Hydrogen was expecting, but when I did, tapping out drum lines seemed quite responsive.

One thing to watch out for with tools that have MIDI learn features, like SooperLooper, is that the sliders and X/Y controls send “trigger” CCs when they’re touched in any way, as well as the CCs you’d expect. I had better luck with SooperLooper when I set up the bindings manually instead. My bindings file is available here.

Mobile devices are here, they’re powerful — get used to them. Now, could they just connect to the rest of your noisemakers and studio rigs? That’s the potential of new iOS SDKs for MIDI I/O and keyboard docking. But aside from some restrictions imposed by hardware support on iOS, what many developers are publicly wondering is whether a different path entirely will be most productive.

Hot on the heels of Line 6′s SDK for their MIDI Mobilizer, a MIDI input and output connector for iOS devices, Akai is courting developers for its own music accessory. The SynthStation 25 is a standard 25-key music keyboard with a dock for an iPhone or iPod touch inside.

The proposition for developers: now your sequencer or controller can connect to MIDI gear (with MIDI Mobilizer), or your synth can actually be inside something that looks like a synth, with a real keyboard.

Changes to Apple’s developer agreement have facilitated just this change. But while this is a step forward for developer flexibility, there are still some limitations on what developers can do, and what they can talk about, imposed by the makers of the accessories. Those restrictions won’t discourage all developers, but they’re worth noting, especially as mobile music gear is in early days.

There’s another discussion brewing among developers, too, which is whether the kinds of hardware assumptions upon which these two products are built even belong in the mobile age.

Here’s a look at where we are and how we got there, whether you’re an intrigued developer or just wish to consider how this fits into a larger picture of music gear in 2010.

Why Third-Party Apps for Third-Party Hardware is Now Available on iOS

In April, I wrote an editorial on the direction of hardware support on iOS, which has been a remnant of Apple’s tightly-controlled iPod accessory program, long before their mobile gadgets became real pocket computers. Line 6′s MIDI Mobilizer was the catalyst for the piece:
Of MIDI, iPhones and iPads, and a Restrictive Future for Hardware?

What hasn’t changed since then: Apple’s Dock Connector is not only a non-standard, proprietary adapter specific to their phones, but one for which you must ask permission if you wish to make your own hardware accessories.

What has changed: because of an adjustment to Apple’s legal writing, you can now let developers write apps for your hardware accessories.

Line 6 and Akai, as Apple developers, are not allowed to comment on Apple’s user agreement. (Insert Fight Club reference here.) But the changes to Apple’s Program Agreement are available publicly.

The old agreement

3.3.24 Your Application may interface, communicate, or otherwise interoperate with or control an iPhone Accessory (as defined above) through Bluetooth or Apple’s 30-pin dock connector only if You have obtained a license for such iPhone Accessory under Apple’s MFi Program.

The new agreement

3.3.25 Your Application may interface, communicate, or otherwise interoperate with or control an iPhone Accessory (as defined above) through Bluetooth or Apple’s 30-pin dock connector only if (i) such iPhone Accessory is licensed under Apple’s MFi Program at the time that You initially submit Your Application, (ii) the MFi Licensee has added Your Application to a list of those approved for interoperability with their iPhone Accessory, and (iii) the MFi Licensee has received approval from the Apple MFi Program for such addition.

Source: Twitter user beweeet

Spot the difference?

Apple is now allowing third-party apps to support those hardware accessories – provided Apple approves both the accessory itself, and via the accessory’s maker, the app.

Requirements for Developing for Akai, Line 6 iOS Hardware

Akai and Line 6 deserve some kudos for mediating between Apple and the third-party developer. Again, these developers are not able to talk about their agreement with Apple. But they were extremely cooperative in sharing their policy for working with developers. (In fact, basically, to get started all any interested developer has to do is email them.)

Line 6

A copy of the developer agreement obtained by CDM reveals what’s necessary to become a MIDI Mobilizer developer. At its most fundamental level, that means proposing an application plan to be approved by Line 6 as compatible (as per Apple’s own requirements), and agreeing to non-disclosure regarding any confidential information with which you’re providing (including documentation).

Marcus Ryle at Line 6 confirms with CDM that an additional requirement is sales reporting, though it appears this shouldn’t be a deal-breaker:

We do request reporting on the unit sales of the applications that use the MIDI Mobilizer. This information is kept confidential, and the purpose is so that we can have visibility into which apps are being most widely used by the MIDI Mobilizer. If we were to make any new versions of hardware in the future, we want to be sure that we can continue to meet the needs of our users by understanding what is important to them, and this requires us to know what is being used. We also understand that for some developers this is information that they do not want to share, and we are happy to discuss this directly with them to come to an amicable resolution.

With the SDK itself under non-disclosure, I asked Marcus what this might mean for someone developing an open source app (several of which have already appeared on the App Store):

We do have some limitations with regard to open source usage in our agreement. Specifically, we do not allow the use of open source if our SDK is used in a way that would cause our code to become part of the open source license obligations (unless we have provided written consent), since this typically results in the requirement that our source code would have to be released publicly. If the open source code can be used in a way that does not cause our code to be connected to the open source licensing, then this would be ok.

Akai

Glen Darcey, product manager at Akai, confirmed to me that the SynthStation SDK has some similar requirements in order to maintain their proprietary SDK. But unlike Line 6, Akai is not requesting any sales reporting.

Darcey also downplays the requirements. “Your product is your product,” he says. “Our code is our code. It cannot be redistributed. It can be in your app… Anyone who wants to add support for our hardware can but they have to go through our developers SDK process which is minimal.”

“There are requirements for adding our logos that say the app is compatible with our hardware,” he adds; that appears to me to come from Apple’s program.

As for the NDA, in this case, says Darcey, it’s nothing out of the ordinary: “The NDA is a standard NDA. It basically states that anything we say will be confident as will anything you say to us.”

Will this discourage developers?

Short answer: no – that is, if the developer has the desire to develop for this SDK in the first place.

Developers I’ve spoken to had some concerns about these requirements, but they also didn’t appear to change anyone’s mind one way or the other. That is, those wanting to develop for these accessories found the requirements workable. Those who don’t care … well, don’t care.

I think these restrictions are a deal-breaker for truly open source development on mobile, but for those projects, support for proprietary hardware accessories is generally less appealing anyway.

(If you disagree, of course, you can make yourself heard in comments.)

More than the issues of restrictions on the platform, though, the conversation I’m hearing is one that’s more fundamental.

Time to Move Beyond MIDI (or Wires)?

Line 6 and Akai each promise some exciting applications. But as comments recently demonstrated, many users and developers alike are treating the announcement with skepticism.

First off, even if the requirements for the proprietary SDK are modest, the issue is their competition. A $200 netbook (or a $400 used Mac laptop, if you like) can plug into a $30 MIDI interface without drivers. A variety of free development tools on any platform can then talk to that interface, or you could write your own – we’re talking serial communication, which is hardly brain surgery. And the reality is, a lot of people who use MIDI gear also own these other devices.

Once you add MIDI gear to an iPhone or iPad, you limit some of the device’s elegance and portability. You can also connect only one device at a time, meaning adding a MIDI Mobilizer gives you MIDI but no external audio – and since there are now things sticking out of your iPad, your laptop is suddenly just about as mobile as it is.

I think some of the skepticism here is undue; I still like the idea of a portable, pocketable recorder for MIDI sketching or library backup. But developers like Christopher Penrose, creator of Cosmovox, aren’t necessarily criticizing the availability of these SDKs. They’re saying that energy could be directed somewhere else. From comments, Christopher writes:

It is important to consider the benefits of Open Sound Control and other alternative communication protocols. I don’t believe the future of music entirely belongs to people who have an interest in protecting and extending their hardware investment. But I will say I would consider supporting the MIDImobilizer in some/all of our iOS products if the demand was significant, the API is well designed enough, and the licensing terms are acceptable. But I think developers should be putting their limited energies into viable communication protocols that extend and enrich the music we can make, rather than being bogged down by outdated, replacement-ripe legacy standards…

For independent developers, it may very well be an either/or situation. Time is finite. I have Open Sound Control support well under way and it works without an additional hardware investment.

The other advantage of wireless communication is that it keeps mobile devices mobile. And incidentally, there’s no reason you can’t use a protocol like Bluetooth to do MIDI, as well as implemented OSC wirelessly over a network. It is possible to achieve accurate timing and low latency wirelessly, too, though that’s a discussion I hope we have in greater detail on CDM, so I won’t do it an injustice by faking it now.

I actually had a dream last night in which I was using Bluetooth to do MIDI, so I’m obviously supposed to be getting on this instead of writing lengthy investigations of Apple developer agreements. And I’ll leave it at that.

In the end, I don’t doubt that we’ll see a handful of interesting apps for the Akai and Line 6 gear. And MIDI hardware is something with which we’ll want to interoperate for a long time to come. The question now is, what’s the best path for the future?

FeSTige, my little app that allows you to run Windows VST plugins on Linux (using 'fst' or 'dssi-vst'), as received some love and it's now better than ever!
The plugin list can now be sorted by plugin name or folder, and there is LADI support now! (for 'fst', using a custom built-in version).

FeSTige also makes use of the stable Wine 1.2 + Wine-RT patch, to ensure less xruns on small buffer sizes.

There's a full page about Wine-RT now, just check the 'Tutorials' section.

does anybody know how to decode those Lenovo ThinkPad model IDs? I am interested in the T410s. For example, there's the model NUK3AGE, and there's NUHFXGE, and there's NUHYXGE. Some web sites claim NUK3AGE has Nvidia graphics, others claim VGA is Intel-only. Some web sites claim it has a touch screen, others say the contrary. The Lenovo web site isn't helpful to figure out the differences between the models and what the feature set of the various models really is. I figured out the GE suffix indicates a german keyboard, but what about the remaining code? Anybody knows how to decypher those IDs or knows a reliable source explaining their feature set?

Love,

Lennart

Want to take back control of how your digital audio files become sound? One thing you can do is to build your own digital to analog converter. This one is made from discrete components, centered around a resistive ladder. Yes, there are a couple of integrated circuits in there which are used for demultiplexing the incoming signal but the magic happens in that R-2R network. The project is an interesting read and makes a point of looking at the issues raised when trying to precision match resistors. Apparently it can be done with 0.1% components if you have a lot of them and a multimeter that can measure down to seven decimal places.

[Thanks Bigbob]

Repetition at its finest!

[Ewan Hemingway] tipped us off about his new Android app, Androidome. This is the first one he’s turned out after going through our Android development tutorials. It combines an app running on his Android 2.1 device with a computer running Max/MSP 5. The two don’t needed to be tethered, they just need to be on the same wireless network. This won’t be the best solution if you’re doing live performances, as the buttons on the screen end up being quite small. But as you can see after the break, it’s a great way to get into working with the Monome interface and decide if you want to build a dedicated physical version of the tool.

NeiSynth, a sound bank for Specimen is now ready for release. All sounds are generated with the “cat” command that you can read about in the popular post convert an image to music.

Your browser does not support the audio tag.

demo song | download NeiSynth

[Dave] pulled the head unit out of his dashboard to add an iPod input. He took a much more invasive route than the other hack we saw a few days ago. He actually patched into the audio lines going from the Dolby reader head chip to the amplifier.

The first step was to trick the deck into thinking it had a cassette inserted. He scoped an enable pin on one of the chips to discover the timing and emulated that signal using a PIC microprocessor. From there he popped off the chip that reads the tape data, patching directly into the audio out traces. This presented some noise issues when charging the iPod but [Dave] fixed that with some decoupling capacitors.

[MicroMinded] took us way back to our childhoods with his experiments and subsequent YMstream music player based on the Yamaha YM2149 sound generator used in old arcade systems, computers, and even phones (think chiptune). This reminds us of the Chipophone, only this time the sound is achieved from ICs used back in the day, rather than MCU waveforms.

There is still some work to be done to make the music player have a bit more functionality, but for now source is available if you want to make your own. Of course you might come across a small problem; finding an SSG is a tad bit more difficult than say, an Arduino. If a good resource is found, please share it in the comments!

[Thank you Andrew Kretschmer for sending in the chiptune mp3s]

From 14:00 till open end Malte Steiner lecture about video formats, gives an overview of the free open source applications available for Linux and gives a practical demonstration from capturing via editing till finishing a DVD and online video.

Tonight, 15. August, at 19:00, opens Unlimited Liability, Michel Chevaliers temp art store. On the 22. August I give a workshop on Linux videoediting there, starting at 14:00.

15. August–17. Oktober
Do-Fr: 15-20h
Sa-So: 12-20h
Norderstr. 71 ug
20097 Hamburg
http://targetautonopop.org/

Tape decks in cars? Yes, that used to be quite common before optical media took over road. [Nirav Patel's] 2004 Toyota Corolla had a deck that he used with a tape adapter in order to listen to music from his iPhone. But one day something happened and, although the adapter still worked, the cassette player started making distracting noises. [Nirav] set out to quiet the noise and install an auxiliary audio input for the sound system. There were some tripping points along the way, like breaking everything and starting a small fire, but perseverance got him to his goal. Because these units are built with compatibility for things like CD changers they have a communications bus called AVC-Lan. This protocol has been sniffed out and documented, and [Nirav] even found an existing audio-input hack that he based his design around. Now he’s able to plug directly into the dash and ditch the cassette adapter.

We’ve seen [Nirav's] work a few times before. He’s shown us a first person shooter controller and his site was a resource in our Launchpad programming with Linux post.

[via Make]

For all the wonderful tools and toys for sound out there, sometimes you want to find the couple of tools that, like a great kitchen knife, can accomplish the majority of what you actually need. (And as with the kitchen knife, while it may not eliminate your desire for all those other gadgets, it’s worth some sharpening.) So it is with something like Csound, the tested-and-tried, free synthesis tool. Jim Aikin looked at the QuteCsound front end recently, which puts the power of Csound in a more friendly work environment.

Via Synthtopia, there’s also now a screencast series that covers using QuteCsound, starting with digging into presets. (Yes, that’s right – presets. And here you thought you were going to have to do a lot of coding to have any fun.)

I find two YouTube users uploading how-to screencasts:
http://www.youtube.com/user/mantaraya36 (author of the series starting at top)
http://www.youtube.com/user/ketchupok (start with “Where to start?”

Also worth following is Jacob Joaquin’s excellent Csound Blog, hosted on Noisepages:
http://csoundblog.com/
and on Twitter, follow @TheCsoundBlog

It’s very early in development (“alpha”), but Jacob is already doing amazing things integrating Processing, the non-coder-friendly, artist sketchbook-style coding language, with Csound, in a new library called Csoundo. That’s an ideal combination, because you can do logic and visuals quickly in Processing, then turn to Csound for audio. This is where I imagine work in two of Csound’s most popular rivals – the object-oriented, OSC-savvy SuperCollider and visual patching, Max-descendent Pure Data – may lead, as well. Check out Jacob’s roadmap for more.

By the way, I hear some folks are having some trouble building QuteCsound on Ubuntu, so I’ll see what the issue is, and write up some instructions and send them over to Jacob for his blog.

It’s a good time for Csound and free synthesis in general. With this work accelerating, I think doing a series of absolute-beginner tutorials will be very doable soon. And there’s no reason you can’t integrate a tool like this with your favorite host of choice, from Ableton to Cubase.

KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 have just been released!
Official announcement - http://kde.org/announcements/4.5/

Although this is not the KDE version intended for KXStudio, users can upgrade to it if they want.

I made a very simple tutorial explaining how to upgrade safely:
http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65

Enjoy!

The T-team has released Traverso version 0.49.2. Not a completely new version but an update of the 0.49.x branch with some compatibility fixes and functionality taken from the git-tree. Behind the screens the devs are working hard on a new branch (presumably 0.50.x) which will include elaborate routing functions amongst others.

I’m happy to announce the first ALPHA release of Csoundo, a Csound library for Processing. Processing is "an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions." With Csoundo, users can explore audio with visuals, export f-tables to custom high resolution SVG graphs, and create custom GUI interfaces to their synths. Video of Csoundo in action can be seen here.

Download Csoundo

Members of the Csound community have reported successfully running Csoundo on OS X, Windows and Linux. OS X requires version 5.12.4. Linux requires special handling, see this Csound mailing list thread for details.

read more

Let’s start with what’s really important: Chris McCormick’s squeakyshoecore tunes may well make you tap your All Stars and smile. The words “algorithmically-generated acid” and mention of the multimedia patching environment Pd might not suggest feel-goody, cheery, geeky-sounding electronic grooves, but that’s exactly what’s come out. These robots know what they’re doing.

And yes, even a tune named after Chris’ favorite fractal can be good summer fun.

Behind the scenes, Chris’ music is produced generatively using algorithms created in the free and open source visual patching and programming environment Pure Data. The patches actually began as a scene for the iPhone/iPod touch interactive music environment RjDj, but you can now grab all the patches, try them out, and learn them, all with an explicit GPLv3 open source license.

GarageAcidLab

It’s not just about sitting back and letting the robots do the work, either; you can control the results live with a MIDI controller.

Check out the tunes, which are themselves available under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA):
http://sciencegirlrecords.com/chr15m/squeakyshoecore/
On Archive.org / CC-licensed download page

And read the blog:
http://mccormick.cx/news/tags/squeakyshoecore

And great work, Chris. I hope that soon we can work with Chris and others to get some more information for newcomers to Pd on making their own musical creation and performance tools.

Finally! Saturday concert schedule confirmed, Notstandskomitee play 21:00. The exact schedule is:
16:00-18:00 Steffi
18:00-20:00 Evapori & Jetzmann
20:00-21:00 Ditterich v. Euler-Donnersperg
21:00-22:00 Notstandskomitee
22:00-24:00 Max
24:00-X DJs Evapori/Jetzmann & Steffi & Max

I created a webpage with some infos: http://block4.com/index.php?id=122

Pakistan flood victim count is higher than Haiti, so where are the 'donate', 'lets make music for', 'lets put banner on our websites' thingis and stuff like that?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100809/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan_floods

http://sciencegirlrecords.com/chr15m/squeakyshoecore

I have uploaded a new squeakyshoecore tune called Hilbert Curve, named after my favorite fractal. Czech it here.

Also, here are the Pure Data patches which are used to make this music. You can control them with a midi controller.

6 new screencasts on Csound frontend QuteCsound available:

Presets tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKlCTxmzcS0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aES-ZfanF3c

Live Events tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9WU7DzdUmE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs3eO7o349k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUMzp6556Kw

New editing features in 0.6.0:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk1qPlnyv88

Are FOSS gurus out of this world?

Hi all,

Since I haven't got around to making proper documentation of some recent features in QuteCsound, I decided to do a couple of screencasts.

Presets tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKlCTxmzcS0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aES-ZfanF3c

Live Events tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9WU7DzdUmE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs3eO7o349k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUMzp6556Kw

New editing features in 0.6.0:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk1qPlnyv88

I hope they are useful.

Cheers,
Andrés

Better Than Lahar ventured out of town for the first time ever. We worked a bar in Sacramento. It went well; there’s a small but thriving music scene out there. The trip was long, hot, and sweaty, but otherwise uneventful. We’re not working at all for the rest of the month, as everyone pretty much goes on vacation. I was going to use the time to catch up on some woodshedding and solo material, but the reality is I’ll probably end up spending most of it trying to get back on my feet financially after having been smacked upside the head with a lot of unexpected medical and maintenance expenses. Poverty is challenging.

But, coming September, Better Than Lahar starts back up with a few shows working with bands who are passing through the Bay Area, which may mean some more touring work for us as well to go and visit their home cities later on.

We are launching a new section here at Linux Audio Blog, containing sound banks licensed under creative commons for different synth and samplers. First out is the Cat Synth v0.1 for Specimen. Soon neisynth will arrive and also neikit for Hydrogen.

Your browser does not support the audio tag.

demo.ogg

This blog post is going to be little different from others in my blog.

Normally, I like to discuss positive changes and how things are improving within Ubuntu Studio.  However, due to recent experiences and to address some issues I would like to share with you some of Ubuntu Studio's deficiencies.  And more importantly, ask for help to fix them.

All in less than 1100111110101 characters or less.

But first I would like to explain some history and clear up at least one misconception.  And if you don't want to read the wall-o-text below, just skip the the Summation below for bullet points.

Explaining Why I Ask
When I started helping the Ubuntu Studio developers I had no previous developer experience (this is an important point).  However, Ubuntu Studio was without active leadership and within a year I decided that I would provide that leadership.  Ubuntu Studio was too important to me to stand by idly as it decayed and slowly died.

The lack of leadership did not preclude others' involvement including some who have had long associations with the project.   Although Ubuntu Studio is not necessarily their priority they are still improving the systems and foundations upon which Ubuntu Studio is built.  Examples, oversimplified as they are, include crimsun and TheMuso working on the audio stack among other areas.

Recent contributions that have greatly helped including packaging of new multimedia applications for the archives (quadrispro) and invaluable ISO testing for quality assurance (rlameiro and holstein).  However, there are fewer new (not to mention inexperienced) contributers that are joining the project than the older (and more experienced) ones that have left the group recently.

Therefore, the current state of Ubuntu Studio could be described as losing momentum characterized by limited development in contrast to its substantial potential.

Lastly, I hope this brief explanation helps our users understand that when we receive user feedback (e.g. about wallpapers or Plymouth themes) we are not arrogantly deciding to ignore it.  On the contrary, we are struggling to adequately maintaining the functional necessities (e.g. bug reports and ISO testing) with the resources available at the current time.

Can You Help?
But you may be asking yourself, "How can I help?  I'm not a developer!"  Or you may say, "This all sounds WAY too complicated, involved, and time consuming!"

Or possibly, you may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful house?"

To answer the first question, of the ways I'll mention only a select subset require more than a modicum of experience and/or knowledge.  The threshold is really quite low since most will only require a few simple and easily taught additions to your existing skill set. Also, remember that I had no prior developer experience when I started.

In response to the statement, transitory assistance is quite welcome and appreciated; a full commitment to the team is not required.  Find something that interests you and fix it.  That's it.  Simple as that.

My answer to the second question would be to stop making sense.

When considering if you can help keep in mind that currently there are many tasks that are simply not being done. And as such, any help is an improvement and therefore most appreciated and welcome!

How You Can Help
Now that I've convinced you that it's ridiculously simple to help, let me count the ways (in no particular order).

Website - Ideally we would like a complete update of the website since it has not changed in years, other than the slight disrepair that has occurred.  If you have suggestions for a new layout we would love to see them and are extremely flexible in regards to design requirements.

Alternately, we would also simply appreciate anyone with Drupal experience that could fix a few things if nothing else.

Do you have audio, video, or graphics you would like to showcase? It's something we would like to incorporate into our new website.

Art - An art director with experience creating themes and a vision would be preferable. We are open to explore your vision and have but a few requirements.

We also readily welcome art submissions for GDM, wallpaper, Plymouth themes, et al from all artistic types. We highly encourage you to send it to us. How cool would it be to have your creation as the wallpaper for a Long Term Support release?

Emailed links to art created by others would be appreciated as well. See an image you like, send us the link!

Testing - Willing to download and test install ISO's? Then we have a job for you. Flexible hours!  Make your own schedule!

Also if you would like to help develop testing procedures we could probably find something for you as well. No one else is doing it, be the first.

Documentation - All the cool kids are a Documentation Lead, you should be one too! Help coordinate, develop, update, and review new and existing documentation.

But we would also really like it if you just updated or created one thing in the wiki. Find a great tutorial on YouTube? Post a link in our documentation.

Programming - This is done probably a lot less expansively than most would expect since the Ubuntu Studio team does not write the majority of the applications included.

However, we really could use someone with Python experience to tidy up a few bugs for us in a few of the applications we do maintain.

Tech and/or Bug Lead - This is one of those categories that requires a slight bit of experiences, but not necessarily. Someone of quick wit and perseverance could do quite well actually.

Like to track bugs and fix them? Or perhaps enjoy solving why a certain application does not build or install correctly?  Then inquire within!

Summation
Okay, if you skipped down from the top or you need a refresher about the points I made, here is the Cliff's Notes version:

• Several experienced people within the project have left recently and not enough new people have replaced them
• Many things are not accomplished because of limited resources (i.e. people)
• Even without prior developer experience you too can contribute to Ubuntu Studio
• Long term commitment is unnecessary, just fix one thing or a couple
• If you are not helping then it probably is not getting done

Hopefully I have great tidings the next time we discuss the State of Ubuntu Studio.

For this book review, we welcome guest writer Andy Farnell, who himself has a terrific book on interactive sound design and free modular patching environment Pure Data, entitled Designing Sound. It began as a review of a book on using free software – but it could be, more than that, a chance to fight procrastination. And while this runs the gamut, including graphics and design and not just sound, that could be even more relevant to those of us who need to delve into those other areas for our creative work. -Ed.

We all have a stack of things to get round to one day. Building a website. Making a video. Writing a book or recording an album. Allow me to share with you ten days that will transform your list of could do, would do, always going to do… into a list of exciting projects you’ve started.

That’s how long it took me to flick through Daniel James’ “Crafting Digital Media”, a light-reading compendium of software wisdom published by APress and weighing in at just under 400 pages.

It takes two of the major excuses for procrastination, “I don’t understand the interface, so I’m waiting for someone to show me.” and “I don’t have the money to buy the latest software”, and stomps them in the face with a giant boot.

There are roughly eight topics, or chunks of knowledge covered.

The first is about photography, with demonstrations in F-Spot, GThumb and GIMP — all the free tools you need to transfer, manipulate, and polish high-quality digital images.

Every software package in the book is a free, open source product that can be legally downloaded and used. These are not shareware or limited trial programs, but full versions of powerful, standards compatible applications — all modern free software with reliable, polished interfaces and powerful features. The book also comes with a CD containing Ubuntu 9.04.

The second chapter concerns illustration and font design. This is a whistle stop tour of modern scalable vector graphics tools and techniques, touching on Inkscape, FontForge, and GIMP again, showing you how to import, export, convert and edit high quality multi-layered scalable graphics.

Next comes 2D animation, where KToon and Synfig are demonstrated, showing the basic concepts of frame sequencing and tweening. And naturally, 3D modelling follows, with a look at Blender, the immensely-powerful 3D object design and rendering package with auxiliary game engine.

Although each section covers a complete production concept, it isn’t tiring or exhaustive. Just enough guidance is given to launch the program, explore the features, introduce the key concepts and leave you to play. If you actually follow along with the software examples, it’s a truly exciting journey, as you go to sleep each night with your head exploding with possibilities.

The art of publishing is the next adventure, with explorations of page layout, document structure, creating PDFs, posters, books and flyers. Subjects like fonts, typography, kerning and color processes are explained through examples with the Scribus application.

As a musician, you might be wondering where the audio tools are. The book doesn’t disappoint. There’s something for even experienced users in this compendium of tools spanning three chapters. Packages such as Mixx, Hydrogen, Jack, Seq24, Alsa Modular, Audacity, Ardour, and JAMin are explored in the context of all the common tasks like podcasting, recording, sequencing, effecting, compressing and mastering, EQ, CD production, and creating your own streaming server.

As an old fart who has just discovered YouTube, I found the next section on video editing to be very helpful since I’ve just started to explore making video tutorials. The now comical proliferation of incompatible video formats and codecs, a depressing indictment of the failure of standards, are cut through in short order. Daniel lays down the basics of formats and their conversion using AVIdemux, cropping and resizing while preserving high quality, and basic editing using Kino and the Open Movie Editor. A quick treatment of audio sync, titles and effects wraps up the section nicely.

Web development is the last chapter on software packages. Arguably there are so many choices for Web2.0 site design that it’s hard to justify any particular one. This book opts for solid and proven Drupal, along with a tour of the industry standard Apache web server, MySQL back-end, and Icecast media server to give a user-driven internet radio station as the chapter example.

Each of these topics is an entire profession in itself, about which shelves of books could be written, so don’t expect to become much of an an expert in any. What “Crafting Digital Media” does is open the door and get you started producing content very quickly. From there the opportunities are up to you.

As well as gently throwing in up-to-date anecdotal knowledge and asides from his encyclopaedic knowledge of modern media software, Daniel ties together the various threads into a whole that leaves you feeling empowered to start any new digital production project.

Let’s face it, the key to most pieces of software is a few simple steps, a few core commands, that seem so easy once you know them that you want to kick yourself for not trying sooner. Getting over that initial barrier is what this book offers.

The book would be a fantastic companion to new users of Ubuntu Studio, Pure:Dyne or 64Studio distributions, though several of the packages are multi-platform, so are available for Mac and Windows too. Ed.: Indeed, a large number of the tools are cross-platform – GIMP, FontForge, and Inkscape run on Mac and Windows, and Ardour on Mac. But then again, if you’ve got a Mac or PC, this is a great time to explore Linux a bit as a second OS, and all this software is available to you. Graphics software should even run acceptably virtualized. -PK

Title: Crafting Digital Media
Author: Daniel James
Publisher: Apress
Year: 2009
ISBN: 9781430218876
Price: $29 (RRP:$40)

After creating the previous mockups, I have been reminded of the need and value of taking a step back and asking the big questions of design, like: What are we trying to achieve exactly? What is the problem we are trying to solve? Who’s gonna use it in what for a context?

I would think everyone in the design team at Canonical knows about all that, but the specification for the sound menu does not reflect it.

The original reason for the existence of the sound indicator should be quick access to the master volume control. Sound preferences can be accessed by the same means as other system preferences, but it is so closely related to the master volume, that having it right next to it is reasonable. Especially as the speaker icon makes it likely that a user looking for sound related preferences will look there before they would open the System menu.

Having 2 user interfaces for the same things is something to be avoided due to the costs of design, implementation, testing, maintenance, documentation, learning and the decision a user has to make every time. It can be worth it, if there are differing needs that can’t be met as well, otherwise.

I really don’t see how I could define an audience in a useful way here. Everyone who listens to music played back from the same computer they are doing something else with it at the same time doesn’t help much. But the context I just described could.

To me it looks like the motivation for adding playback control and family to the menu is just getting rid of the per-player panel items. It is not a given that playback control in a panel menu is a good idea.

Why would you go through the menu, instead of using the player window? I think if you have your mind primarily on the music, it is a foreground task and the player window should be a much better interface than a menu could ever be. Playback control in the menu should then be about cases where you want to minimize the interruption from another task, where music is a background thing. You might have to listen to something else and want to mute the music, the entire computer, quickly. Or you go for a break and want the playback to stop. Now some will likely mention keyboard buttons for sound control on laptops or on special keyboards. Not everyone has one of those and some might find it more convenient to use the mouse.

Mute and pause all is based on the need to make the computer shut-up quickly. No reason to play on if muted. The user will likely prefer to continue to listen from the position where he muted the system (at least if it is for longer than a few seconds). I’m not quite sure what the label should change to. Unmute all if nothing was playing, Unmute and restart playback or even Unmute and restart playback for Rhythmbox?

The Show items are far from being necessary within my reasoning, as one would hope other means of window management are good enough. But they do show what will be affected by Mute and pause all.

Filed under: Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu, User Experience, Widgets, Windows

I perform another Notstandskomitee outdoor gig on 14. August in Hamburg. Its a small art and music festival at Bullerdeich, Hammerbrook. More details soon...

[Mathieu] spent three months developing this multimedia remote control. It connects to a PC via USB or Bluetooth and communicates with Winamp to pull down track information for display on a Nokia LCD screen. It can also be used as a wireless headset via the two on-board jacks. [Mettieu] thinks it’s just a small hop away from working as a Skype client if you take the time to write a plugin for that API.

Dear all,

There's simply so much going on in the Linux audio world. Not only new versions of numerous applications or completely new projects and specialized distros but also the growing amount of music made with Linux. I'd like this editorial initiative to provide an overview of what happened the past month in the Linux audio field, as far as possible of course.

The idea for an editorial actually comes from the LinuxMAO site, a French community site dedicated to making music with GNU/Linux. They've been publishing editorials for a few years now and are getting better and better at it, amalgamating and extracting all the necessary info in articles crammed with interesting stuff. Basically, they've done all the work already and as a Francophone I can loosely base this editorial, and hopefully the ones to come, on their great work. So thanks guys, pianolivier in particular!

I posted a topic on publishing an editorial a while ago and I'd like to thank everyone who provided feedback. Still, any help for possible future editorials is welcome, and hopefully now that there's something up on the web the enthusiasm to contribute might grow.

Best,

Jeremy aka AutoStatic

---

1. Linux audio news
2. Music made with Linux
3. New versions, new projects

---

Linux audio news

Louigi Verona gives an update on his Collaborative Ambient Project (CAP).
t-sys announces the upcoming release of Renoise 2.6 on the LinuxMusicians forum. The Create Digital Music blog also dedicates a full article on this upcoming release.
The devs from Rakarrack are just unstoppable and are already working hard on an upcoming 0.6.0 release.
Raboof has made a start on adding a GUI for his realtimequickconfigscan script.

---

Music made with Linux

A little selection of interesting tracks made entirely or partly with Linux.

Pneuman - Phase Transition

Great driving track that builds up steadily. Even though the chord progression and melody lines of this track are minimal it's pneuman aka lsd's ear for detail that constantly draws your attention.

James W. Morris - Approaching

Quiet, gentle track evolving around a repetitive pattern. Beautiful in its minimalism.

chr15m (Chris McCormick) - Cryptocerus

Squeakyshoecore aka algorhythmic acid aka idm with a tinge of electro. Cryptic description aye? Well, that should get you curious.

Louigi Verona - Sunset

Screencast of an uplifting track that should put a smile on your face.

---

New versions, new projects

Software updates and freshly started projects!

July 2: SpectMorph 0.0.3

• Added encoder algorithm to find attack envelope, this makes piano sound much more realistic
• Introduced smwavset tool, which allows managing instruments consisting of many samples
  - encoding/decoding a set of samples
  - delta operation for comparing errors of sets of samples
• smextract can now provide an overview of how many bytes in an .sm file can be attributed to which fields
• Documentation updates
• Refactoring, cleanups

July 5: gst123 0.1.2

• Added -a option to select audio driver (oss, alsa) and device (/dev/dsp1, hw:1)
• Fix crash triggered when closing the video window (thanks Siddhesh Poyarekar)
• Improved configure check (works now if ncurses headers are not in /usr/include)

July 6: Drumstick 0.4.0

• smfplayer renamed as guiplayer, with a new windows layout and supporting Cakewalk WRK files playback
• Subdirectory "tests" renamed as "utils"
• Visibility attribute for public classes

July 7: Ardour 2.8.11

• Do not prevent transport operations after an export (and potentially at other times)

July 7: StretchPlayer 0.502

• Reduced Xorg load (was typ. 20-30% CPU even when idle)
• Fix build errors on 64-bit systems (incompatible integer types)
• Add CMake USE_COMPOSITING option to explicitly disable compositing features

July 8: Denemo 0.8.18

• Default behavior is now non-modal
• You can choose one out of four Shortcut systems, including the "Classic" one.
• an easy to understand and very slick interface via keyboard
• seamless integration with MIDI controllers
• Better Paste command.
• Musical Snippets - store musical riffs/motifs to be pasted at will or as rhythmic templates for playing over.
• Maximize the space for the score (with/without user's choice of menus).
• Standard View - window size, zoom, number of systems etc
• No-Menu version of this view
• Page View - user chooses a window size, zoom and number of systems, which is stored with the movement for instant recall.
• Single keyboard shortcut for toggling between these views (Esc by default).
• MIDI transport work for JACK users.
• Fix Chord Symbols for music starting with triplets, grace notes etc.
• Fix display of dotted rests
• Arbitrary Tuplets built in: correct MIDI output as well as engraving, of course.
• Diatonic Transposition: Shift notes and chords up and down respecting the current key signature.
• Support for figured bass extenders, including those with no starting figure.
• Cursor can be highlighted, making it easier to locate
• Page turning is animated: as the last line starts to play, the page visibly turns at the top.
• Purely rhythmic notes playback using percussion - click tracks more easily generated.
• Split Notes and Chords to smaller notes while preserving the original duration (make a quarter note two 8th or tuplet of 8th or 7-tuplet)
• Duplicate a Note or Chord as command
• Command line interface for interactive scheme use
• Support for the "French" clef (G on bottom line)

July 8: Yoshimi 0.058.1

• Switch fftw planner flag from FFTW_MEASURE back to FFTW_ESTIMATE

July 8: KXStudio 10.04.2

• KDE 4.4.5 (from Kubuntu Updates PPA) has been enabled by default
• Added Jack2-Simple-Config, KMidiMon and KMetronome to default install
• Added "kxstudio-minimal-desktop" script
• Added more Audio Plugins (ls16, nekorgan, nekosynth, zynaddsubfx-dssi, pxu, naspro, etc)
• ALSA is now routed directly to Jack, instead of going through PulseAudio
• Wine patched with Realtime Scheduling (check the Tutorials page for details)
• FFMpeg 0.6 and Mplayer 1.0~rc3, added 'vlc-git' and 'vlc-110' optional packages
• ArdourVST now fully works on both 32bit and 64bit
• Jack-Mixer was unable to start
• QJackCtl was not able to stop Jack
• NVIDIA driver can now be installed on realtime kernels (using the "nvidia-current" package)
• Updated applications to their latest versions

July 11: Guitarix 0.10.0

• Add tonestack models
• Add 2nd amp model
• Add cabinet impulse response module
• Add Patch Info widget
• Add Preset File Load/Export option
• Add simple looper
• Add Oscilloscope and tuner state to main settings
• Selectable distortion model (multi/single line)
• Selectable EQ model (fixed/scalable freq)
• Free mem when not used (delay lines)
• Reworked GUI
• Fix various bugs

July 13: Drumstick 0.4.1

• Removed PCH build option
• Fixed bug in class SequencerInputThread: realtime priority must be applied in run() instead of start() to avoid changing the scheduling policy of the parent. This is a problem when running FluidSynth in systems affected by a glib-2.22 bug that has not yet been fixed. Reference: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=599079 

July 13: Spek 0.6

• Switch from GStreamer to FFmpeg libraries for audio decoding. This speeds up the overall analysis by a factor of 1.5 to 2
• Decode audio and perform the analysis in separate threads. This makes the analysis 1.3~1.8 times faster on multi-core systems (issue 11)
• Check for a new version once a week and notify when it becomes available (issue 27)

July 15: XJadeo 0.4.11

• New default parameters:
   - screen-update-fps = filefps (use '-f 10' for prev. default)
   - MTC-quarter-frame: on (use '-c' to disable it)
• Added JACK-MIDI port for MTC (./configure --enable-midi=jack )
• System-V IPC remote ctrl mode (OSX does not support POSIX-MQ)
• xjremote is now part of the OSX bundle
• Added '{' and '}' keyboard shortcuts to modify time-offset in larger steps
• Many small remote-ctl extensions for ardour3 integration
   - allow to disable some GUI interactions (close window, left-mouse-click)
   - added aliases for full-screen & position remote-ctrl commands (alphabetical order of commands now does the right thing: size, position, fullscreen -> size, xy, zoom)

July 18: StretchPlayer 0.503

• This release simply removes the Debian packaging from the official tarball. However, Debian packaging is still provided.

July 19: Cshellsynth 0.5 NEW!

• Cshellsynth is a library for synthesizing sound using the Jack Audio Connection Kit on
  Linux.  It optionally includes a module for ruby suitable for livecoding.

July 21: Klactoveedsedstene 2.1

• Bug fixes and minor enhancements
• Increased Album Art search timeout value. The old value had become to small, as the search algorithm is constantly being improved, thus taking longer time to find the optimal image

July 24: JACK Network Manager 0.2.3

• Name changed from jack-netsource-gui to jack-netmanager-gtk (humany name - JACK Network Manager), since jack_netsource is just a wrapper, controlling jack "netmanager" module
• Presets support, deprecating creation of script with tray support, due to ability to reuse ordinary scripts by JACK Network Manager itself. During of preset saving name is requested and approriate script is stored in presets directory
• Ability to start sources at LADISH rooms
• ladish_launch is deprecated. ladish_control snewapp and rnewapp commands used instead
• Improved desktop launcher
• New system tray icons; added application icon, unwantedly removed from 0.2.2
• Fixed help text
• Options for jack_netsource from various jack versions are stored in separated file now
• Internationalization of bash scripts through gettext
• Build system improvements: all text files are configured - e.g., instalation prefix now is working. Configured files are stored into separate build directory, which is autonomous and can be distributed. Also, uninstalation is available.
• Internationalization improvements: added update-locales script, which updates template with translations at once, and localization of bash scripts through gettext.

July 25: XJadeo 0.4.12

• Updated '--help' text to reflect new default values introduced in 0.4.11
• Allow to select midi-driver at runtime (JACK-MIDI, ALSA-sequencer, portmidi, ALSA-raw-midi).
• Fixed rounding error for non-integer framerates in the Remote-ctrl SMPTE-text parser (xjadeo+JACK or MTC is not affected; it's only relevant when using 'seek <integer>' instead of 'seek SMPTE' remote-ctl commands)
• Fixed unresponsive Alert messages (OSX)
• Added JACK-Midi to menu (OSX)
• Dropped releasing Debian packages on sf.net since xjadeo is now officially available in Debian

July 26: QuteCsound 0.6.0

• New XML Widget format for storing widgets. If file only contains the old widget format a backup file is saved just in case
• The new format allows many new funtionality like:
  - Font, Font size, Font Color and background in a larger number of widgets.
  - Rounded borders and border width in various widgets.
  - Font sizes are now approximate pixel values, which provides better cross-platform font cmpatibility and a broader selection of sizes
  - x and y zoom for scope and graph widget
  - If only old widget format is present in the file, a backup copy is saved with extension .old-format
  - Minimum and maximum values for spinbox, controller and scroll number
  - Adjustable ranges for controller widgets
• Presets for Widgets are now available, and they will be stored as XML text in the csd file. They can be used from the right click menu in the widget panel. Reserved channels "_GetPresetName", "_GetPresetNumber", "_SetPreset" and "_SetPresetIndex", which allows control of presets from Csound or other widgets
• New reserved channel "_MBrowse" for buttons, which allows selection of multiple files, which are separated by the "," character
• Font scaling and Font Offset configuration option for control over global font rendering size
• Added bookmarks in inspector (any comment starting by ";;" in a csd file or "##" in python file is treated as a bookmark)
• Added option to save using Windows or Unix Line Endings (only for saved files-text in editor still uses Unix line breaks...)
• Added option for specifying python executable
• New Live Event Controller, which simplifies usage of live event sheets
• Implemented looping and setting/saving loop points for live event sheets
• Added "append rows" and "appends columns" for event sheets
• Graph widget now sends values when an index is selected
• Added second channel to Graph widget which sends/receives f-table number instead of index
• New Filter Lab, Mixdown_Player, SF_Splitter, SF_Merger, Jukebox, Spatialization examples
• Auto indent when previous line is indented
• Added option to have widgets open the properties dialog automatically when they are created (enabled by default)
• Added center vertically and center horizontally widget layout options
• Added menu option to display file information
• Added menu option to set full screen view
• Added option to hide toolbar
• Added menu item for showing Opcode Quick Reference page from manual
• Added option to change shortcut for Utilities Dialog
• Default "New File" is now set in a text box in the config dialog, not a separate file
• Added filtering for some unnecessary console messages from Csound
• Added auto join option to minimize user interaction when opening orc/sco files
• Horrible memory leak from API graphs, QuteCsound consumed memory at a terrible pace
• -i flag is not added to options if it is empty. This is done to allow using only flags like: "-+rtaudio=alsa -odac" without forcing -i
• Fixed beeping when key is pressed in widget layout (OS X)
• About Dialog is now shorter for smaller screens
• Improved syntax popup menu (now distinguishes whether first word is a variable or an opcode to decide whether to pop up menu on next word). Don't show syntax completion if line previously has "opcode" or "instr" text
• If something has been typed, autocomplete does not add the output arguments, just the opcode name and input arguments
• Non csd files no longer parse the widget text, even if it is there
• Fixed addition of blank lines at end when saving
• Record button unlatches on stop
• Fixed inspector update when switching tabs
• Status bar syntax is now only shown for csd and orc files
• Non python and non csd files are now not syntax highlighted
• Fixed editor sluggishness by running the inspector update on a slow timer
• Added logic to avoid completion pop up menu if an opcode has already been used in the line or if there is a = operator in the line
• Auto complete now adds the correct rate text (previously the same text was added, no matter what rate was chosen)
• Widgets no longer disappear if dragged to be too small
• Reorganized configuration dialog to make it fit in smaller screens
• Inspector now maintains state (collapsed/expanded) of items
• Fixed browse button for SSDIR
• Removed option to remove scrollbars. They are always active now. This option was added when there was instability from scrollbars
• Tooltip showing channel name shows up in edit mode as well
• Fixed bug in qutecsound::runUtility ("free" was being called on argv which is allocated on stack, not heap)
• Truncate jack names if greater than 16 characters
• Graph widgets now paint curves, even if they are created after Csound has started
• Event sheet actions now register as a single event for undo purposes
• Added kill Line and kill to End of Line actions
• Fixed pasting of rich text in editor (paste from open office calc was resulting in extraneous text and formatting)
• New build system thanks to Andy Fillebrown, which keeps build products more organized and performs a "configure" style step in qmake which looks for the required dependencies
• New concurrency model. invalue now changes the channels for all widgets synchronously. Might also have a positive effect on performance, as widgets are only updated through a timer which will usually run slower than k-rate. Threading model is now clearer, and should be now crash proof (hopefully)

July 27: Loomer Aspect 1.6.1

• New built-in Preset Browser with support for xml, fxp, and fxb preset files
• Presets can now have meta-data, such as author name, notes, and tags. Use meta-data to search your preset library
• Hot-swap preset browsing: quickly step through and preview presets in context
• Various host compatibility fixes
• Audio-rate pitch modulation of Oscillator 1 from Oscillator 2 now works
• Sample & Hold module's latched value is now correctly reset when the the input source is removed
• Much faster GUI response
• Slight reduction in CPU usage on particularily complex presets
• Vastly reduced start-up time
• Clearer font rendering: a larger font is now used for menu items
• Additional and improved factory presets

July 28: PreHear NEW!

• A simple sample auditioning program, allows the playback of .wav,.au,.aiff files
• It uses JACK as its backend, and will *not* currently resample to JACK's audio rate, it
  will just pump out the sample. Just so you know

July 28: TalentedHack 1.81

• Made Midi ports optional thanks to Gabriel Beddingfield

July 28: TalentedHack 1.82

• Fixed linking issue with GCC 4.4. Fixed Makefile to include dependencies folder in tarballs

July 29: TalentedHack 1.83

• Cleaned up the branding so it won't be confused with Autotalent any more

July 31: Connie 0.4.3

• Removed freeverb and added a JCRev style reverb (less cpu usage) http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/pasp/Schroeder_Reverberator_called_JCRev.html
• DSP optimization, denormal handling
• Source code clean up
• Two binaries: connie_i386 and connie_sse (>= PIII with sse unit) called at runtime by a wrapper script
• Changed program options

---

2 Mockups in reaction to Mark’s post, this other mockup and also Troy’s interesting but wordy article.

I think the prioritization based on assumed frequency of use should be as follows:

• Mute All
• Volume
• Play/Pause
• Skip Forward
• Preferences
• Set Position (via slider)
• Skip Backward

I left out Choose Playlist, because bringing up the player window could well be  more convenient than using a sub-menu and the menu is rather crowded. I’m least sure about Set Position, it’s another candidate to be dropped.

There are 3 scopes in the menu:

• global,
• per player and
• per track.

While Preferences is of low priority (one could argue for leaving it out entirely), placing it at the bottom while all other global elements are at the top is problematic. So I chose top right to have one nice block with global controls.

The transport controls belong to the player, not the track, since playing on or Skip Forward will lead to the next track. This is a reason against putting them to the side of the track/album art. Note that my Skip buttons are in reverse of the usual order. That’s good regarding prioritization, but bad regarding breaking common patterns.

Placing track attributes to the right of the track/album art could look better, but the the menu should be much wider to avoid ellipsis or wrapping, then. Given how attention grabbing pictures can be, it should be considered to leave the art out, or to show it in something to a sub-menu.

There should be a clear differentiation between controls to interact with and static elements. One option would be a different background like above, another a different color like below.

This volume slider design allows to use the full width as active area for best control. There would be countless styling options, of course, this is just a rough one. I much prefer sliders that allow dragging on the entire area, instead of making you aim at some tiny button. Middle-click could be use to make the value jump to the pointer position.

Filed under: Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu, User Experience, Widgets, Windows