Recent blog entries for phonomongrel

Rebuilding laptop again. I did something stupid with partitioning because I wanted to test out QNX. QNX was nice but I got tired of it and I didn't feel like coding anything to really try it out and I needed the space it was taking up. Plus I made a mess of my Debian installation trying to meet the various requirements of our (the Linux community's) audio software.

So now I'm running:

ecasound/ecawave/tkeca
GDAM
MuSE
iiwusynth
swami and smurf
tons of LADSPA plugins like vocoder, cmt, sooperlooper, etc.
ardour

I'm still trying to perfect calculating the sound that I am creating during synthesis. I'll post mixes from GDAM this week hopefully.

Thus far I can say that I have enjoyed making beats under Linux.

Got vkeybd working amSynth. Nice sounds! Very big from a PI 300Mhz MMX! I'm enjoying sequencing in GDAM. Just installed Muse. Have not yet figured out how it works. The sequencer in GDAM is the first one I've dealt with ever. In previous days I sequenced on a Yamaha PSS-680 but it's interface was really weak and could hardly be called a sequencer. tk707 will not compile. It won't recognize alsa drivers. I dove into configure for the second time. Tried to force feed it and it still wouldn't take. I believe it's written for 0.5 anyway as it was looking for sys/asoundlib.h.

My biggest problem right now it I've got tracks that I want to record. Several nice tech house and IDM beats from GDAM's sequencer but I'd ideally like to record directly to ardour but it's looking like it's not going to happen. The reason being is I'd like to get the tempo showing up in ardour so I can see how that works out. But there appears to be two problems: opening /dev/midi from GDAM doesn't show using oss emulation and aconnect; GDAM hogs the sound card interface and has no interface to jackd. Ideally it be great if it did interface to jackd. I'll mention it on the list and see what happens. It's probably already been mentioned. I'll check the archives.

In the meantime I'll probably open a port using inetd per the examples in the GDAM docs and record using ecasound. The quality should be good enough to post some rudimentary examples.

Maybe next week I'll join the mailing lists for all of these pieces of software. I've got to find an account with enough space for the high volume.

Got 2.4.18 kernel with latency patch running smoov on Debian 3.0r0. ALSA's going as well. Had compile errors with 0.9.0rc3 however, and had to downgrade to rc2, which compiled fine. GDAM is running. amSynth is compiled but I haven't run it yet.

Have not tested latency yet.

Here's how this is going to work. I'm a linux dj. Well not really. I'm a dj. I started out messing with turntables when I was twelve. Did a little djing up until the end of my first semester in college. I then transferred schools and brought my decks with me. But do to lack of space in my room any money in my pocket, I sold my mixer and moved my decks back to my parents house.

Now, I'm getting back in to djing/producing but I can't afford new decks (I was using SL-1200's not MKII, but just regular 1200's; most people have never seen these before) and a new mixer. So Linux and open source audio software are going to help me do this. Here's the hardware that I'm dealing with right now:

Toshiba 2535CDS Pentium (I) 300Mhz MMX 96mb RAM 4.3G HD
-Yamaha opl3sa2 sound card (ALSA drivers used)

white case Celeron 700Mhz 128mb RAM 20G & 10G HD
-Sound Blaster 16 sound card

two (2) Technics SL-1200's
-Shure cartridges (forgot the model number)

I've been using gdam for about two weeks now. Love it. I anticipate creating some LADSPA plugins in the near future. However, right now I'm getting prepared to do a small set at a party thrown by Chris from four09 next saturday, 2002/09/14. I've just reinstalled Debian 3.0r0 on my laptop, and as a Redhat convert, I'm trying to get a grasp on how to administer it. From there I'm going to recompile the 2.4.18 kernel using Andrew Morton's low latency patch. I'm not sure how much of a performance boost this will give a Pentium I, but I'm hoping that every little bit helps. Right now, I'm consistenly missing the first beat of any song started in gdam but the amount of time between when I hit play and I hear the rest of the music varies. I'm just looking for consistent latency. We'll see how it goes.