Linux...anybody using it?

[StudioDave]

Hey Jeff,

I built PyDAW2 from the git sources today. Nice additions, the GUI envelope editor is very welcome, as is the piano-roll. Have these been folded into the public source tarball yet ?

Anyway, nice work on some desirable features. Pumps up the review a bit more too, makes for some cooler screenshots.

Continuez, continuez...

Best,

dp

[jeffh]

Have these been folded into the public source tarball yet ?

Not yet, probably tonight... "Quality Assurance" is my middle name, after all, got to make sure the new features aren't going to ruin anybody's day

Anyway, nice work on some desirable features. Pumps up the review a bit more too, makes for some cooler screenshots.

Continuez, continuez...

Best,

dp

Thank you very much... This is the pay-off from having the discipline to start by building a simple system that worked. Many people scoffed at the initial tracker-like interface that displayed musical data and accepted input in a very raw format, but once that was completely stable and free of bugs, it made it possible to pile on "big boy" features like this stuff quickly, and have it work flawlessly almost from day one... 2 weeks ago we hadn't even started these features yet, now they're mature and stable...

Had I started out with this level of GUI complexity, it would've always had bugs... but now the progress of just the past 2 weeks should make it abundantly clear to everyone that PyDAW is out for world DAWmination.

[jeffh]

Hey Dave,

The latest piano-roll and automation-envelope goodness is now up on my SourceForge...

The next batch of changes are going to be getting the audio sequencing up to par with MIDI, and also some more MIDI goodness like editing multiple items simultaneously in the piano roll and automation envelopes, and a few other special surprises...

But, if you wanted to do a review, you might as well do it with this version, as there will probably always be some hott new feature just around the corner, considering that I'm averaging a release every 3-4 days...

[StudioDave]

Thanks for the note, Jeff, I will go ahead with the review. I'll be in touch if I hit any snags. I'll also let you know when the review is finished, you can look it over before publication if you like.

Best,

dp

[jeffh]

Hey Dave, not to delay your review any further, but...

You may want to check my latest Git for the feature I just merged... The current concept of regions/items has advantages for many workflows, but it was somewhat cumbersome and counter-intuitive for longer musical phrases and especially ones with longer notes...

The latest Git now has a feature where when you shift/ctrl + click to select multiple items in the region editor, then right-click and "Edit Selected Items as Group", it actually expands the piano roll and CC automation envelopes to the aggregate width of all the items you selected, therefore allowing them to be edited as a single logical item. The list editors and/or double-clicking on notes are still there for non-linear editing tasks like having a note that is longer than the item, etc...

The GUI has also been re-arranged and cleaned up quite a bit... I think I'll be releasing the latest feature set this weekend unless I find a catastrophic bug in it somewhere(I do still need to fix some of the MIDI tool buttons)...

[StudioDave]

Hey Dave, not to delay your review any further, but...

No problem, Jeff, I'm not on a deadline but I'll probably turn it in some time early next week.

Worked with it for quite a while this morning, it's shaping up very nicely. I'll check out the new git stuff when I get back from a gig tonight.

Best,

dp

[jeffh]

The latest features are now released, you don't have to speak of them in a "coming soon..." or "available exclusively through Git" manner

[pc999]

Hi,

I have tested a bit more it seems to be shaping quite fast, probably it will be feasible to do full tunes very soon

BTW I got a chrash, in the auto bug things I get this

pydaw.py chrased with Attributeerror in mouseMove event():iano_roll_note_item'object has no attribute esize_pos'

Hope it helps!

[jeffh]

Thanks pc999... I just got back from some weekend travel, I'll look into this ASAP...

I gave the full-on detailed reply in the thread on my forum, but I think that's enough information to track this bug down...

[ATIM]

I just wanted to say that I'm looking forward to giving this a try in the next couple of weeks. This old laptop is about to be reborn with Linux, and it's nice to know that someone out there is trying to get Linux audio production done right.

[jeffh]

Thanks ATIM, I'm glad to hear it

[phoenixofstorm]

Linux is a good choice, no matter what you want to do - even audio. And I should know, since I'm a full-time movie composer and I work exclusively on Linux - it's just faster and more stable. Though I have to admit - configuring and finding all the necessary stuff to make your audio editing/recording/etc. is a real pain. One more thing - if you want to completely migrate to Linux - better forget the Windows software - some of the programs will work under wine, but they'll be highly unstable and very slow, depending on how well they are supported - for example - forget about Sibelius 6 and 7. The same applies to Reason.
Oh - and if you want to go Linux - check if your sound card is fully supported - few years ago I had to settle for Windows on my main working machine because my audio card wasn't supported - it was Creative X-fi Platimum with external panel. Now it works, but the panel still doesn't (which really bugs me) - thanks to Creative, who don't want to provide the schematics to the community, thus making writing the needed driver next to impossible.

[StudioDave]

Hi Jeff,

Quick note to let you know I've been having some fun with the program now on my Arch box and Ubuntu system. Both machines are low-end wrt your test iron - the Arch box is a uniprocessor, the Ubuntu laptop is dual-core but in i386 mode - but I've got acceptable performance, especially from the laptop. I also tested the ISO on a USB stick, got good performance there too when running on the laptop CPU.

JACK's in non-rt mode with high buffer periods and high latency, but those settings get rid of most xruns on the laptop. The desktop is also running at high latency and still gets a lot of xruns (that's on a uniprocessor machine though). The laptop's audio device is the on-board Intel HDA chipset, I don't expect much from it. The desktop machines here are equipped with M-Audio Delta 66 interfaces.

The offline rendering is great, works as advertised. I'll post some test files soon.

Plenty of nice features for the workflow, I'm getting faster at using it. Lots of stuff I haven't even touched yet, like the control automation, but I'll get to it. I'm rewriting the review as I get more familiar with the program, it'll be a few more days before it gets sent to my editors.

Best,

dp

[jeffh]

Hi Dave,

Cool, feel free to ask any questions you may have, I know that the user manual I wrote a month ago is already obsolete

Regarding performance... I definitely aimed it at modern multi-core processors with modern cache sizes, mostly by making extensive use of memory alignment, which makes objects bigger, but allows the maximum floating-point-grunt that can be extracted from a CPU... That would tend to thrash smaller CPU caches pretty hard though... If either machine has hyperthreading, you'll probably gain some performance from turning hyperthreading off....

However, I have a change in the pipes that will make the situation much better on lower-end or older hardware... Basically I'm going to allow the worker threads to work constantly without waiting on being polled, so that they can aggressively buffer more than one sample-period worth of audio(obviously the record-armed tracks will still be processed in real-time). Reaper has something similar called "anticipative buffering", and I'm pretty sure Cubase does something similar...

Also, I'm probably going to do another release tonight if I don't find any last minute bugs. It's mostly some fixes to the piano roll editor, and also some nice improvements to the audio sequencer... Then the next release should bring dramatic improvements to the audio sequencer, like drawing a pretty sample graph on the audio items, vertical zoom settings, click->drag to change length, and perhaps others... I already have a prototype of the sample graphs on the items, and it's looking pretty shweeeet.

[jeffh]

Heeeeeey Dave...

In the interest of creating extra work for you and delaying your review as much as possible, I just released another really cool new upgrade

It can be seen in my screenshot carousel here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/libmodsynth/

It's number 6, you have to scroll the carousel to the right (sorry, Sourceforge doesn't let you re-order them), but there's a nice screenshot of me sequencing some multitrack audio recordings I found on the interwebz... I think you'll agree that it's a huge step up for PyDAW's audio sequencing from any other version you've tested... I thought I should give you the heads-up just because it justifies updated screenshots and addresses some of the more obvious criticisms you were probably making of the previous versions.

Actually, the only remaining 2 features I have planned for PyDAW v2.0 is another round of functional improvements to audio sequencing, and actual GUI envelope editors for song-level automation(of which I already have a working-ish prototype). Then I'm going to attempt to write an entire album in PyDAWv2(only touching the source code if I find a bug), then based on my own experiences doing real work with it, I'm going to define the roadmap for PyDAW v3.0 and start working on that(with plans of a mid/late-2013 release)...

EDIT: I also have properly updated my KVR screenshots, you can see all of the new stuff here:
http://www.kvraudio.com/product/pydaw-by-pydaw