Episode: 3236
Title: HPR3236: The State of Linux Audio Apps in 2020
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3236/hpr3236.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:21:19

---

This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3236 for Monday 28th of December 2020.
Today's show is entitled The State of Linux Audio Apps in 2020.
It is the first show my new postpad from the Linux link tech show
and is about 52 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is Patrick Navila and Claudio Miranda discuss the current state of Linux audio application in 2020.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Welcome. This is Patrick Navila, the Linux link tech show. I'm with my good friend Claudio Miranda. Claudio, how are you doing?
Good. How are you doing, Pat? It's been a long time since we talked.
You know, I remember when we were viewing Chad, we used to do your show and it was very enjoyable.
I listened to it all the time and I miss you guys.
Yeah, that was a long time ago.
I know. Time flies, doesn't it? Indeed it does. Yeah.
Everybody's gotten older, less hair, kids are bigger, so you know, it is what it is.
It is what it is, it's right. But we've got good things to talk about today.
Today we're talking about the current state of Linux audio production in 2020, going into 2021.
And I have to say, I am happily surprised where everything is now.
It's much better than what it used to be in my opinion.
It's much more usable. A lot of the software is more mature. A lot of the new software is really
exciting and really usable. And that seems to be my impression right now.
Yeah, I have to agree. It definitely has come a long way. I think the last time, I mean,
I've been using it here and there within the past 10 years, but since I really was into it early on,
I would say about like 2010s or around that time. To today, it's come a long way, quite a long way.
And the development of a lot of the software has matured so much. Like you said,
it's very impressive. And we're starting to see a lot of people take notice of audio on Linux.
I mean, it's still, it's got a way to go. It's still not perfect, but it's gotten a lot better.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we still have the issues of having multiple sound servers and having to
connect all the pieces with Jack, what not, what in pulse and whatever sound services are running.
But it seems to be much more usable. Like, you know, when I first started getting into Linux,
the first application I got into it. So that's it, which is a fairly simple audio recording software.
You know, you could do multi-tracks. You can import files. A lot of podcasters use it. It's free.
It's fairly easy to use. When I was doing the mid TV cast with Dan Fry, I got into using our door.
And for podcasting, it was really good. The sound quality was excellent. It was fairly
the interface was fairly comparable to other digital audio workstation software. That was, you know,
commercial and also free. You know, they kind of had the same look here. They're mimicking, you know,
basically a mixing board in a digital sense. And it's, you know, but but it's been a few years since I
used that. I'm going to say maybe maybe five or six years ago is the last time I looked at it.
So the reason why I decided to check everything out again is I've got to get the playing guitar
a little more now than I used to. Yeah. And I want to start recording some ideas that I have.
So I started looking out there. And I looked at some of these commercial applications,
like Cubase, Logic, whatever. And it's really expensive. You're talking six, seven, eight
hundred, nine hundred dollars just for the software. And it seems to do the same thing that our door does.
And to me, I might as well just go with that, you know.
Yeah, pretty much. It's been a while since I've looked at a lot of commercial stuff.
On my end, it's been more, you know, not so much of the like the digital audio recording, but more of
the mini playback and sequencing kind of thing. Back in the day. You're a keyboard player.
Yeah, yeah, I play keys. So for me back in the day, I mean, we're talking about like 20 years.
I messed around with a lot of proprietary stuff, but because that's what was available at the time,
you know, either on a Mac, or Windows. Right. Use what I've worked at the time.
Right. And I would use like my go to application was master tracks pro, which was relatively cheap
back in the day. You know, it's just all it did was sequencing. And it was very good at it. It's
very, very easy to use. You know, and I had worked and done a lot of use. I used that for a very,
very long time until the point where they, well, the company, I think they got bought out passport
designs. I think it was the name of the company. They got bought out by another company and I think
another company. And you can still purchase a software. You know, in instances where you might
need to use that, but at this point, it's kind of not the same as what you would get with other
software that's, you know, that's available or even available within the last 20 years. So it's
started to show its age. But I did get interested in doing, because I was working a lot on the
Mac side, mainly working with, I used to use a lot of garage band after that, because it kind of gave
me that same feel that I had master tracks pro. And from there, once I left the Apple platform,
I was like, well, you know, I want to continue working on music. And I would love to do it in
Linux. And I would search, I mean, I remember by the time I was looking at that, a Ubuntu studio
kind of debuted. I had tried that actually, I installed a PowerPC version on a on a on the iMac
G5 I used to have. And it worked. It did what I needed it to do, but I would encounter a lot of
issues. And I don't know if it's just the software at the time or even the hardware. The Linux
kernel really wasn't focused on real time, you know, low latency kind of stuff. So you get a lot
of, you know, especially if you're using jack, you get a lot of what they call the X runs. And,
you know, it was just be dropouts in the data transfer. And it would just throw everything off
sync or it would crash the programs. And half the time I spent more time trying to troubleshoot
stuff than I did working on music. Yeah, that's kind of a side of the point. You want to be able
just to create, get into the workflow. So anyway, yeah, no, but I mean, as time passed, you know,
processors got a lot faster, add, throw more cores into the mix. And, and you know, I still,
like right now, I'm on a, I'm on a core i5 laptop. And it's got eight gigs of RAM. And I was
actually started to work on some stuff this past weekend. Actually, thanksgiving. I was like,
let me fire it up because it'd been a while. And I started, yeah, I went ahead and I loaded up
Q tractor, which has been my go to since for a while now, as a matter of fact, I had going back
to what I was saying earlier. Yeah, most of what I used, I was trying to find a good sequencer that
that would do pretty much what garage banded for me and what master tracks did for me. But the
nice thing about, you know, I wanted something that could also do audio in the event that I needed
to do audio. So I looked at, I looked at, was it Rose Garden and Muse Score, but I could never
get them to work correctly. And then I came across Q tractor. And I think it was Clot 2 from
a new world order who had mentioned Q tractor at some point. And that's where I started messing
with it. I know I found it that it was in the repositories for the Linux history I was using
at the time. And I gave it a try. And it was a lot better to use for me. I was able to get some
some music done. And you know, granted there were some issues here and there, but aside from that,
I did get actual music done and felt good. Finally, I could say I got music going on a Linux platform.
So, you know, it can work on some music creation stuff. And are you using drum machines and Q tractor
or just sense with the sequencing? Well, with Q tractor, I'm using, I was using, I was using the
soft synths that were in the repository. One that I was using was at the time, it was called
Zinad sub-effects. But then I started using a fork of that one called Yoshimi. I felt it worked
a little better and it was less crashy than Zinad sub-effects at the time. But I hear that it's actually
improved. I guess the development picked up on it again. It's usable. Now that the new
player on the block with the soft synths is Odin 2, which is fantastic. Yes, I agree with you totally.
I actually installed it on Thursday and Thanksgiving. I installed it on Thanksgiving night. Didn't
have anything to do. We're waiting for dinner and whatever. So I was like, let me try this out.
And it wasn't in the repositories. I did have to download the manual installer, but it worked.
I went ahead. I installed it. I installed the sound fonts everywhere we needed to be,
the presets. Because I think it comes with a VST and it comes with an LV2 plug-in.
Nope, it works. It installed both. Yeah, it works. And I was so impressed with that. I was messing
around. I actually did it with up a quick little acid track. I was messing around yesterday,
playing around with the filter and stuff. And because I was trying to see if I can get something to
to remap the mod wheel to control the filter on some of the synths. And I couldn't get it done with,
I was using fluid synth, but fluid synth is a sample playback. So it really wasn't going to work
there. But I haven't tried it on any of the others like Am synth or Yoshimi, like I mentioned.
But going back to your question, yes, I actually have used the drum machine. I've used Hydrogen
for drums. And I managed to find a couple of other sound, you know, drum patches for it.
Some electronics, a few other ones that are free that are online free. Where they are,
I have no idea. I got to look up the links and everything. I know we're kind of doing this on the fly,
but if anything, I'll go ahead and provide the links, depending on where this gets uploaded.
But yeah, it's what I'm looking to do as a guitar player and a bass player is I want to get some
song ideas down. I want to put some some drum machines on there for rhythm, maybe throwing some
keyboard pads or a pagiator or something like that, you know, just backgrounds, maybe some pipe,
you know, background stuff, a lot of sound. So from that perspective, the Odin, you know,
just going through the presets, there's a lot of usable stuff on their synths and
strings and just pads and stuff. It really, really good sounds.
Yes, I did play around with some of the presets and yes, the patches that they've got are like
professional quality patches, like not to knock on Yoshimi or any of the other ones.
But some of those patches are a little rough, if you know what I mean, they don't sound bad,
but they're not that great. So you kind of have to tweak them a little bit or you just create
your own, you know, but and that's the thing is I've messed around doing like, you know, sound
design and programming patches and stuff on synths and that can take up a lot of time. So
you really have to dedicate some time to that, but if you can get some good decent presets that
are ready to go that you can pick through and just get the, you know, just get the the creation
flowing. I mean, that's that's what matters. And I think Odin definitely has that because I started
messing around with some of the patches. They're really nice stuff. Yeah, I mean, I have to
honest, you know, Midi's been available since well at the mid 80s for keyboard players and
you guys have the ability to pull up all these, you know, sequences and samples and
use all these amazing sounds, you know, back in a day, back in the 60s and 70s, you know,
keyboard would either have like analog synthesizers like a mode or something like that. Yeah,
or they would do something like a melodrama where basically tape loops and the stupid,
each time you hit the keys, actually playing a tape loop. Yep, yep. And I remember reading about
those and how difficult it was actually to do maintenance on them because of the fact that they
had the tapes, actual tapes looped because I think that there were instances where similar to like
what would happen with the cassette tape, the tape gets caught in something or gets damaged and
you know, it's it's messy, but that that's all they had back then. So, you know, and it had an
interesting sound too. It had its own unique sound just like just like the like the Hammond organs,
you know, put it up, run them through a Leslie and it's unmistakable, you know, and mainly because
of the Leslie speaker. And that was all analog at the time. Yeah, so these guys would have these
incredible. You look at the keyboard players, you know, like Keith Emerson's or the John Lord,
you know, back in the day. And these guys would just have banks and banks of keyboards in a
Rick Wakeman. And that's what they had to deal with at the time. And then Midi came along and
everything's digitized and now you have libraries of sounds amazing, you know. Yeah, a funny thing.
And I could be wrong on this, but I remember reading that the original idea of Midi was to be able
to have synths connected together so that they could be layered because back in the day, back in
those days, with those analog synths and a lot of the other keyboards, I mean, you only have two
hands. So you can only play so many instruments at the same time and layer so many sounds to create,
you know, different textures and timbers and whatnot. But, you know, I know that with analog synths,
you know, they had the control voltage that would, you know, they'd be able to control certain
certain synths that way. I know that with like analog sequencers and stuff like that, they would use
that. But it was very primitive, very primitive from what I remember reading. And it took a lot,
sometimes they had to do multiple recordings in order to layer. Like if it was a studio project,
in order to layer those sounds together to get the desired sound. But then playing it live was
difficult to do because you only have two hands and you're trying to get all those instruments layered.
It's kind of hard. So Midi made that a lot easier because you could set each instrument to a specific
channel. And those instruments, they could be layered on the same channel, pick those patches and
you're ready to go and you got the sound you want. And then of course, they threw in sequences
to that and they realized, oh, we can control these instruments digitally and create patterns and
have those play granted. The sequences at the time didn't, they weren't like a digital audio
war station where you can record basically a performance. It would be just patterns similar to
the old analogs sequencers. But it really, really made life easier for musicians. And mainly
keyboardists because that's with the original intent of it being just to layer sounds. And just how
it evolved from there is incredible. Yeah, I have to say I've always been very jealous of
keyboard players having that ability to just, you know, instantly call up all these different sounds.
Now with the guitar and the bass, they they've had in the last 15 years effects pedals,
better digital where you can do presets and pull up sounds and whatnot. But the last couple of
years, it's really gone to the next level. You have like, you know, like you have what's called
impulse responses, which are basically samples of cabinet sounds, all different brands, cabinets
and Apple fires. And what they've done is they've taken different microphones at different locations
and distances and different rooms and whatnot. And they've digitally recorded what these
cabinets sound like. And what it is is they're able to create libraries of wave files. And
you have what's called an IR loader either inside of a pedal box or in your digital audio
workstation, where you're able to pull up these different amp sounds and in post production,
add those sounds to your guitar tracks that you recorded. And it sounds like you're playing
through that Apple fire. It's really amazing. That's pretty pretty pretty. That's pretty cool.
Yeah. And now there's different companies that do it like this one that's really well known
own hammer. They have some really nice ones, really high quality ones. But I found another one.
This is a company called AudioSault, the base in Mexico. And they actually, they have all that
stuff. They have like, you know, Apple fire simulations and whatnot. But, you know, they also
have libraries, drum sounds, these impulse responses. They have a couple of applications where you
can load them in either for guitar or bass. And they're relatively cheap. Like I purchased
the base suite. It was like $6. It has like the IR responses for the base,
all different cabinets and amps. And it also has a standalone application. If you want to just
kind of just practice and play around with the sounds, it was like, it was like six bucks.
I mean, you can't beat that. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a steal. So yeah, that's audioSault.mx.
And so they have the duality base studio for six dollars. They have the standalone
application also compiled as a VSD plugin, which works. I've tried both of them when they work
really well. Now they also have an IR loader for Linux that you can buy. That's a little more.
I think it was on sale for like 10 bucks. And then they have this, there's another application.
They have called Reamp. That also includes a fairly large suite of IR libraries for like 60 bucks.
But they offer Linux versions and they work. I don't think there's any other commercial
vendor that's doing this type of stuff besides them. If there is, I'd like to know. Please
send me an email. Yes, if anybody knows about it. But audioSault.mx has them. So you can go in there.
It's not, it's not the entire suite of software and libraries that are compiled for Linux. But
there's a bunch of them that are and they work and they're relatively affordable.
Right, right. Oh, that's really cool. That's very cool. I mean, I don't know of any other
because I haven't really looked like some of the commercial stuff and the support on Linux.
I've just mainly stuck to a lot of the open, the free and open source stuff that's been online.
You know, and that's like I said, that's rather hit or miss, depending on some patches. And I know
there have been some sound fonts that have been like donated. I want to say they've been donated
just kind of to the community for music production. Basically, samples of pianos and stuff like that.
And some of them are really good. Some of them are really good. Some of them are kind of,
they're a bit rough around the edges, but a few others are actually pretty good. I hadn't loaded up
and I've just played, you know, just stuff that I've composed. And it's very impressed with the sound.
And granted, I really don't have anything else to compare. Like, I know that there's a company
that has a lot of this stuff. Give me one second.
While you're looking for that, the website for Odin 2 is www.thewavewardin.com.
So it's www.thewaveward.com. You can go there. You can download packages. I think they have
Debian 1.2 or just a generic Linux 1. And it's really good. It's VST3. Now, I know back in a day,
VST didn't play really nice with the Linux stuff, but with VST3, it's much improved. And in our door,
you can put the VSTs in the right folder and they're completely accessible by our door for
your different instruments. Whether you're doing a MIDI track for our keys, vocals, guitar, bass,
you can pull up all these VST plugins and they work fairly well. I know our door also,
you can do some Windows-only plugins with wine. I haven't gotten a chance to play with that yet,
but I hear it is usable. Yeah, I tried to do a couple of things like that a few years ago,
because I did hear that the VST was starting to support Linux a little more. And I remember
the time with a few of them. I tried doing it with wine, but I didn't really dig too deep with that.
I couldn't get it working. It sounds like, okay, I'm just going to stick with what I have.
But yeah, the support with the VST has improved quite a bit in the last few years. I remember
there being a time, I look at some of these free downloadable VSTs and then to find out that I
couldn't use them on Linux. I was like, ah, goodness. So, you know, I mean, there's the LV2,
and that works pretty well. And I think that came up as an alternative to the VST, I believe.
But now that the support is there, I know that I remember hearing something about
some issues if you're using VST plugins. And I don't know if this is true. I just kind of saw it
and it kind of stuck with me. Certain VST plugins, if you use them and you produce, you know,
and you distribute your music for, you know, for monetary purposes or whatever, that I think you have to,
I don't remember something, you had to register, you had to, you had to sort of license it,
or I don't remember what it was. So, that kind of stuff kind of kept me away from it, just because
I'm not really distributing any for the thing for money, but I thought it was kind of weird,
but I don't know, I could be totally wrong on this. It's just something that I remember saying,
and it just kind of stuck with me. I don't know if you would know anything about that.
I have not gotten to that point right now. I am in getting my chops back up,
and figuring out some songs I want to write, and just doing some basic demos of my song ideas,
that's what I want to do. So, now when I get to a band situation, I could say,
here, here's six songs I wrote. What do you think? I mean, I have any, you know,
couple of metal parts and collaborate a little bit. That's where my head is right now.
Yeah, and I'm like you, I'm trying to get back my chops back and everything. It's been a while,
since I've actually sat down, just life getting in the way, being able to sit down, and even
sit down to just practice for a little while. It's been tough. But, you know, trying to do as much
as I can in that respect, and especially trying to see if I can actually sit down, record some stuff,
and start creating again, you know, just when life gets in the way, all that stuff kind of goes
in the back burner. Yep, you got to do what you got to do. Pay the bills, kids, keep everybody happy.
Yep, yep, yep. So, now, going to talk about our door, I remember years ago I had installed our door,
and I guess it was a bit over my head at the time, especially that was trying to familiarize myself
with Jack. And since that only, as far as I know, I think it only works with Jack. I could be wrong.
Yeah, so yeah, so it was, it was tough getting all that working for me. So I was like, well,
let me just think with you, tractor. And the other thing was that at the time, it didn't have
MIDI support. So it was only audio, it was only digital audio that it dealt with. I installed it
recently, after you had mentioned it to me, and I said, let me give it another world and see,
I think on, because I'm running for door right now, for door 33, so that in the repose there,
I believe it's our door 6.3. That's installed. 6 is the latest version.
Yeah, so that one, I basically mixed down to that, because I was using prior to upgrading to 33,
I was on 32 and previous, there was a little application called Jammin, J-A-M-I-N.
Yeah, so familiar.
Yes, it basically, it's a mixed down mastering for Jack, because I could never, for the life of me,
get Q-tractor to export the audio correctly. It would just freeze, and it would sit there,
and it would take forever, and it would always fail. Whenever it supposedly finished,
there was nothing there on the file. That's disappointing.
Yeah, it's very disappointing. So I had to find ways to get around that.
So what I would do is I would, before I used Jammin, I would actually loop the audio back into
another track on Q-tractor, and from what I've heard, that's a big no-no, but it was the only way I
can actually get the audio recorded. It worked. I just had to make sure I didn't have any of the
monitors on, because it would feedback like crazy and blow out my ears. I learned that the hard way.
But it worked for a time. The only thing I noticed is that I couldn't monitor the level, so sometimes
the levels would be a bit low. But with Jammin, I was able to output it, and super simple.
I just hit play on Q-tractor, and that just recorded everything into a file, and that file was
ready to go. It didn't have to do anything on the ordinary. I believe, I believe, no, no,
as a way file, as a way file. And I think you could tell it to save as mp3, but I preferred just the
lossless file, and then I would convert it using ffampag, or whatever. But with Fedora 33,
it's no longer in the repose. I wasn't aware that development had stopped a long time ago on that.
So yeah, it was no longer in the Fedora repose, and I have the RPM fusion repose as well.
So none of them had it in there. So I was like, well, let me see if I can do it with Ardor.
So I threw in Ardor, and I had Jack route the audio from Q-tractor into Ardor, and it went ahead,
and recorded just fine. So I had uploaded something there to, I'm on Macedon, so I had uploaded
what I did on Thursday. I uploaded it there, and I put it on my SoundCloud page as well.
And it worked really well. Now, I was impressed with it. It was a lot easier to use,
but it could also be that I'm a lot more familiar with Jack and routing, the Jack routing now
than I was before. So I want to play a little more with it, and if it works for MIDI,
I may go ahead and migrate from Q-tractor to that, but I'd have to play around with it some more
and see, because if the MIDI implementation on that for doing sequencing and stuff like that
has improved, if it's worth it, I'm definitely moving over, because Q-tractor, it's nice, it's simple,
but there's a few, there's a few roadblocks there that are a bit frustrating for me, and I wish,
I wish they would fix that, and maybe sending a bug report or something, I don't know,
or a feature request would help, but that all depends down the road when they actually
implement it. I just need something to work for me now, and our doors there, it's a little more
pro than Q-tractor, so I might as well give that one a shot if it works, that's where I'm going.
Listen, I've seen some of these doors, these commercial doors, and honestly, the interfaces
are so similar, it's not even funny. Yeah, it's pretty standard. You think about what you're doing,
you're just mimicking, it's a digital mixing board, basically, the baby enabled people
pulled in your effects, your compression, your EQ, whatever, now. Right, right.
Yeah, no, I did hear you mention Carla a few times during the TLLTS shows,
so I actually have that installed, I hadn't really used it, I kind of forgot about it,
but I fired it up the other day, and I was like, yes, and I remember that there's basically a
rack to just have all your softsons in, and then just kind of route everything there. It's basically
a front-end for jack, and you can, like when I've downloaded the Odin 2, that's what I fired
it up for initially through Carla, and it worked right away, it was pretty simple, you know.
Right, yeah, I'm going to try and see if I can rework everything and just use Carla for that,
because right now I'm loaded with Q-tractor, I go ahead and I load in the softsons through there,
so it loads them up and, you know, they're just kind of floating there, it gets a little cluttered
if there's too many of them, so, you know, if you're having them in basically a virtual rack
is a lot cleaner and inside one application, so I know which one I need to control, it's all there,
I don't have to go fumbling through different windows, trying to find which one is the correct
software synth that I need to, you know, kind of play with the filter on the fly, or whatever,
yeah, that can get a little frustrating, so I'm going to play with Carla and see if that can kind
of clean up that for me and make a little more seamless. Right, in our door, I was able to go in there,
hook up my little Kai MIDI keyboard, you know, little tiny thing with the USB connection,
and I was able to pull in the olden too as a VST plug-in, and I was able to record
some sounds, you know, tracks, I was able to do it, it's fairly straightforward, I was very impressed.
Yeah, I'm going to have to check it out, I have, I actually, I would like to get some of my actual
synths run through as well, but I'd have to invest in a mixer for that, I'll have to see down the
road if that's something I can do, and it's a matter of space as well. I have a Kauai K4,
which was my first synth that I got many years ago, and I still have it there, it's in storage
right now in the closet, but that one had some really good sounds that I liked messing with,
and if I can throw those also into my music creation process, that would be great. I have my Yamaha
S08, which is an ADA key-weighted synth, so this is really where I do most of my work,
because of the fact that it feels like an actual piano, but you know, and the sounds it has are
great, I haven't actually gone in and tried to mess around with any of the patches on this,
just basically just using it as a controller at this point, and working with all the soft synths,
but I would like to get back to having those hardware synths integrated, along with some of
the soft synths, because I've found a few of the K4 patches that you can use with, or basically
as sound fonts, they have them as sound fonts, and I don't like them at all, I don't like them at all.
They kind of remind me of what the sounds will like, but they're not exactly as I remember them
on the original K4, so I'd rather have the original being run through and controlled through
MIDI than using those sound fonts, because they just can't compare, they don't compare to the original
thing, but now possibly something like Odin 2 may be able to handle that, but yeah, I mean,
if I've got the real thing, I might as well use it. Exactly, and it's actually nice, the more the
better, you know, to be able to integrate whatever, you know, into your sound, it's great,
and that's what you want, you want to have options. Exactly, so, and yeah, I mean, I'm also looking
at a couple of hardware upgrades, like I said, I just got those two SSDs that I purchased.
One of them is going into my laptop, the other one's going into my desktop, so that should
improve performance as far as, you know, maybe less X runs when working, when doing some of the
MIDI stuff and the recording. More RAM helps, of course, of course, but having a solid state drive
definitely helps. The speeds of the process, it should make things a little more fluid.
My machine is an old machine here, this thing's got to be at least six years old. Now, it seems
to be holding up, doing the stuff in our door, okay? I noticed there's a little latency, like when I
plug it in a guitar base into my, my, my, my barringer USB, I have the UFORA UMC 404 HD,
external input, and that's pretty nice. The latency's really low, it works really well,
little Linux, so a lot of the barringer stuff in general works well with Linux. I was originally
going to get the two channel model, the 202, but they discontinued it, and I can only get the
four input one, which is okay, which is fine. You know, I can do stereo, I could do record the stereo,
guitar tracks, I can have another, a couple of mics plugged in and do vocals, I could have my,
my bass going in, direct line, bass, bass tends to actually sound fairly good direct with no
preamp or anything, but it's nice that if you got a preamp to beefen up the sound, and also these
IR libraries for bass is actually some really good ones. I was playing around with that duality
bass setup, and I was getting some great bass sounds. He had, he had, he had like some like
samples of like Marshall, like a, like, like a little grunchy sound and like a little heavy sound,
and I was using some amp egg and an SVT cabinet IR, and with sounded freaking awesome,
I was getting really good sound, and you know, with just, you know, my, my cheapy $350 PV bass,
and I was very impressed. I, you know, I tweaked that, I put a little compression on it,
put some chorus on it, and it sounded really good. I was very impressed. Nice, nice. Yeah,
you got to sample some of that. I will. So does that take a listen? So does I have, you know,
some songs completed? I'll share, definitely. Yeah, I have some stuff on, that I've done throughout
the years on SoundCloud. I could, what's your own? Read it out. Let's hear it. Let me go to the
profiles so I can get that actually. Okay, what you're looking, we're talking about hardware.
One of the companies that is really, really impressed right now is modthevices.com. Basically,
what it is, it's a German company. I think the guy who CEOs is a tying guy, and the bass
out of Berlin, and what they've done is they crowdsourced their devices. So far, they had two.
They had the mod duo, and then the mod duo X, and now the mod dwarf is coming out, and the way
they're marketing these things as guitar effects units, but they're not just that. They're way more
than that. They're basically embedded analytics computers, okay, on processors, okay, and it has a ton
of effects, cabinet simulations, amplifiers, different distortions, different delays, and reverbs,
but they also have since software since, you know, all the ones that we know, and they also have
sequencers built into the frickin' thing. So, these stop boxes, you can basically, you can use two
devices at the same time, say you can do like a guitar or a synth, or a guitar in a bass, or a bass
in a synth, or a vocal in a synth at the same time, and it's amazing to have all these different
plugins that have like, you can go into their store and download all these different patches and
plugins, and it's basically an open platform based on Linux, a commercial device, and there's
professional musicians using them, and they're really amazing. Go on YouTube if you get a chance,
and look up the mod duo, the mod duo X, and the mod dwarf, and just check out some of the things
that people are doing with these devices, and really, really, really frickin' impressive, that
they've basically built a commercial product based on Linux pretty much completely.
Yeah, I'm looking at the website right now. It's pretty impressive device.
I hear you talking about this, and this reminds me of a synth that came out. I think I want to say
early 2000s, or maybe mid 2000s, a synth that came out, I don't remember who the manufacturer was,
but it was a Linux synth. It ran Linux, and it was a full synth with the keys and everything.
I just cannot remember the name. I was trying to do, I was trying to do a search for it right now,
but of course, I do Linux synths, and I got a bunch of the software synths, as a matter of fact,
I ended up coming onto this site, while I was searching for Linux synths, and it's called
LinuxSense.com, and it's got, basically, shows a bunch of software synths that you can use on Linux,
or any other, I guess these would work on any other platform as well, if they support them as a
plugin. Yeah, I mean, there's one called, for OSC, there's the awesome modular synth, AMSynth,
BeatZill, Borderlands, a bunch, and that's just in the A's, I mean, it's a whole list, so that one's
LinuxSense.com, all one word, so yeah, LinuxSenseOneWord.com. Yeah, so that my device, you know,
it's an on-park process-based device, everything has to be compiled for the platform.
Now, I was going in, looking in their store, they have a bunch of pretty stuff in their store,
for plugins, and different things, and all the stuff that we know that we've been talking about,
you know, Zynness, you know, ZynSense, and they're all in there. You, you know, Racker,
guitar X, plugins, Racker, Racker X, whatever, they're all in there, but they also have some
commercial vendors supporting them. This is one company called Fair, F-A-I-R, and they have a
bunch of stuff that you can purchase when you have those devices that are like professional
level stuff. Now, there are other vendors that do this kind of thing. For instance,
there's the Line 6 Helix. I was looking at that, and that's a pretty expensive device. It's like
$12, $1300, $1400 in average, and it kind of does the same kind of stuff, you know, they have,
it's their own proprietary setup, but you can pull in like third-party IR libraries for the
guitar stuff, but they don't have any synthesizer stuff that the mod stuff has. And the mod,
you can also use that for vocals, bass. I mean, it's really, really freaking impressive.
Yeah, no, just the way things have developed, not just for supporting Linux, but hardware
running Linux under the hood for music production is just been impressive. And this,
other ones, just one more of those. I mean, for all we know, you know, Line 6, or one of these
other companies, Torpedo, whatever, two notes, all that stuff could be Linux under the hood,
and we just don't know about it. Well, we know. Right. Yeah, no, I'm sure, like you said,
we don't know, we're not aware. And yeah, they could be using some form of Linux under the hood.
Yeah, our library is whatever, you know, different layers, you know. But the mod people are very open,
they're their Linux guys, they're Linux company. You know, but if you go on and look at the people
that are using their devices, Guy from King Crimson's using it, a couple other real big bands.
If you look on their website and look at the artist list, you'll see who's using their stuff. It's
it's professional people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, very impressive. So I'm looking to get my hands on
on the dwarf box when it comes out, supposedly coming out in February. We did an indie go for it.
That's what I want to try next. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, I'm still trying to find out what that
synth was. And it was it was it was it was a synth that was open source. And it ran Linux under
the hood if I'm not mistaken. But I can't even went to Google. I was doing duck that go. But I remember
this. I definitely remember what you're talking about.
I'm still trying to find it. But I'm I'm giving up. I'm giving up.
Here it's okay. So yeah, so you know, a lot of this stuff is progressed so much.
It's it's pretty usable at this point. I mean, you know, people tend to use what works for them
and they stick with it. You know, they don't jump around too much. But why not? I mean, if it if it works,
use it. You know, like I absolutely. But but all this is it's it's it's mature to the point where
it's actually usable. Now going forward, I know Linux are looking to get rid of like a jack and
you know, all the different old sound services. We're talking about this new version called pipes.
I think they're calling it. Yeah, I was actually going to bring that up. It's called pipe wire.
It's a I'm on the page right now. And it says pipe wire is a project that aims to greatly improve
handling of audio and video underlinks. It's basically going to give it the the idea of this is
to finally give Linux audio the the you know, the love that it needs the the the importance that
it definitely needs because I mean, for the past, I don't know how many years audio on Linux has
been a disaster. And even to this day, it can be disaster. So like for example, if you want to let's
say you run jack the minute you run jack, you lose sound on every other application that does. I know, I know.
So like I'll have Firefox running and I'll fire up jack. That's it. No sound from anything on Firefox
until I quit jack. And then it starts routing through a through Pulse Audio. Pulse audio was
supposed to be the savior for audio on Linux. And while it has done it has improved things on
on the Linux side for audio, it's it's mainly just for general usage. I haven't seen anything where
it's used for any musical creation or music, you know, sound routing or anything like like jack
would do. And pipe where it seems to aim for kind of both because it says here, it provides a low
latency graph based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support
use cases currently handled by both Pulse Audio and jack. So I know that it's in Fedora right now
because that by chance came to notice that's in there. How it's being used? I don't know. I'm still
bouncing between jack and and Pulse Audio. So I don't know how pipe wire fits in all that. I think
what it's supposed to do is replace everything and just be one layer because right now we've basically
got three layers going. And it looks to simplify it so that's a single layer. And by doing that,
it'll make things much simpler and maybe even cut down on on a latency of it too because you
don't have to go through three layers. You're only going to be going through one directly.
Right. Yeah, because right now we've got what? We have Pulse Audio,
also jack and you know some applications is G streamer and yeah.
So if they can simplify the process to where the other platforms are at, I'm all for that.
Oh, most definitely, most definitely. Now I know with our door, there is one primary developer
to skypole Davis. We interviewed him on TLLTS and he asked that people, if you use it regularly,
do a subscription model with them where you pay them either a yearly subscription or a monthly
subscription. So I've done that in the past and I plan on doing that soon too. So I'm paying them
because that's all he does, you know, dedicated and I'm pretty sure he's open for people to
suggest, you know, request tickets, donate money to get things, certain things implemented,
you know, improve MIDI. I know if you watch on fall, UNFA, do it on, I don't know if he's Italian
or German or whatever, he's on YouTube, he's a Linux guy and he's a musician and he does a lot
of tutorials with our door and other Linux related and free and open source applications for audio
production. Yes, I've seen him. I've seen him a few times. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, he talks about
what are the weaknesses, what needs to improve. So if this is something you want, you know,
shoot Paul Davis from our door, an email, ask him if you want to kick in some money, I'm sure he'll
take it and work to get that implemented. Yeah, I'm going to look into that too. I'm going to
try and see if I can play some more with our door to just to get familiar with it and if I can
use it for both audio and MIDI, then for sure, I'll definitely be looking at throwing some money
his way for the support. I mean, that's all he's working. He's doing all this, it's an open source
project. I mean, it's free, but he's got to pay bills too and all this stuff, the more you
can give to donate to help these projects, the better and it keeps him going. Right. I mean,
I prefer open, you know, but there are closed vendors like that audio sold company Mexico.
At least they're providing a commercial option. Right. No, and that's great. I think that's great.
I personally don't have a problem with that. If they provide support, I think there's another
application that is actually a closed source that I'm trying to remember the name. I don't know
if it's a sequencer or something, but it's it's it's not reactor. It's the reactor is the native
instruments one. And that's what I was looking at earlier for soft for like soft synths and stuff
like that to compare the commercial ones. That's one of the commercial ones. Reaper. That's the
name. Reaper. Reaper. That one, it's a closed source application, but it's available for Linux.
And I personally don't have any problems with that. They're providing support for Linux. I
think that's great. Stuff that you wouldn't have seen not even in the last five years.
And it's great to see that. You know, some people may have issue with it being a closed source
application, you know, that is what it is. They don't, you know, they don't have to use it, but
it's there. It's there. And it's good. It's good that they're supporting the Linux community
that way. I agree. 100%. Openment free is better, but close commercial. Backing exists too. And
that's fine. Yeah. And sometimes if it's if it's an option that works for you and it's better,
then yeah, I mean, I would say use it. Hopefully that, you know, it would push some of the
the open source options to kind of push a little more, you know, to kind of bring in certain
features like that and kind of improve their end. You know, but, you know, it depends. It depends.
It depends on the developer depends on on the people, you know, on whether anybody's using it.
Like, for example, jamming. I thought it was great, but, you know, if it's not being developed,
it's what good is it? You know what I mean? Exactly. It's gotta be used. Okay. And people have to use it.
Correct. Well, we're coming up around 45 minutes. Claudio. I've really enjoyed talking to you.
It's great, great scene where Linux audio is currently. Same here, man. It's same here. This is fun.
Good place. It's heading in the right direction. And perhaps we can do this again in the future after
we have a little more experience, you know, getting more recordings done, working with our door,
working with the different scents. And now, you know, you can circle back and talk about different
topics. Again, I appreciate it. Thanks. Sounds good to me. Yeah. Yeah. No, thanks for making this
happen. This was a lot of fun. I'm glad we can kind of discuss what we've been doing and how we've
been using these tools and how they've progressed and developed and matured and evolved
to how they are today. So definitely look forward to the next one.
Absolutely. Thank you, Claudio. Appreciate it. Take care. I don't speak for Christmas. Merry Christmas.
Not really. Oh, it's same to you, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thank you.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org. We are a community
podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all
our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a
podcast and click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was
founded by the Digital Dove Pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club and it's part of the
binary revolution at binrev.com. If you have comments on today's show, please email the host
directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise
status, today's show is released on the creative comments, attribution, share a like,
video show license.
