Linux...anybody using it?

[jeffh]

But I suspect jeffh probably would have included Mint in his comments, but just forgot to qualify that, because, obviously for the most part, Mint IS 90 percent Ubuntu at heart. Their desktop environments being the most fundamental place where they diverge.

cheers.

Yeah, Mint falls under the Ubuntu umbrella... Just like Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Whobuntu? and so on...

[codec_spurt]

Nobody from the Linux community can ever say to me: Oh we really help people, we are a really great community that helps people out. I've never had help.

There are pockets of helpfulness... but yeah, the minute you tell somebody that something sucks compared to Windows, they take it so personally

Ok, I was being a bit brutal there myself. I have had lots of help actually, here and there, then again I give quite a bit back myself with doing artwork for certain distros. It's just when I really really needed it, I was met with indifference. I manage to escape the outright hostility by doing my homework and showing that I have tried this and that. I'm polite and don't personally attack their pet god.

I was alluding more to the general concept of the average user getting help for their average problems, such as getting audio to work. I posted lots of questions and asked for help to get audio to work on Kubuntu. Nothing. After a whole week and finally cracking it, the buzz was immense. Type of feeling you get when you write 'Hello World' and it compiles.

I was damned, if after a whole week, I wasn't going to take a few more hours to document my experience and go through my notes and write an essay, as one big holy F*** You very much to the Kubuntu community. Cheers. Their attitude towards me was the typyical RTFM dude, you're just dumb, go back to windows if you don't like it stuff. I know that Kubuntu is an excellent distro, but it is based on KDE after all which is notoriously buggy even though many want to like it, citing it as the most Windows like desktop to use on Linux. I personally think LXDE is, but that is another matter.

The best part about the Kubuntu debacle for me was actually taking about three hours to register on their website. I kid you not! Get this - they ask you general knowledge questions. Not captcha are you a robot type stuff, but really hard questions like, what is the deepest lake in North America? WTF? Talk about sweet talk and trying to pull the punters in off the street. And several general knowledge questions I might add. Then they get back to you in three or four hours to let you know if you can play. After all that. Holy flying f******'
****cakes!

Anyway, it's all good. I learned a lot and even use KDE now for my LTS Maya. Incredibly stable. But, audio is totally totally knackered. Everything else works a dream. I'll fix it when I get the time. It runs up to 2017 I think.

Then again, I've had pretty good success with LMDE (Debian edition) working well for me so far, and that's good coz it is faster again than the Ubuntu versions. But Cinnamon and Mate are great too. It's my personal challenge to get them all up and running on a stick and an sd card.

I've no hard feelings toward Kubuntu btw, I know it is used on the server and for render farms and stuff - high end stuff. I just couldn't play an mp3 that's all.




As for Mark Shuttleworth, there is no doubting he is one clever shrewd cookie. He is responsible for dragging Linux kicking and screaming into the 21st century. And made it possible for dumbos like me to have a taste. Some questionable decisions over some things - Gnome3, Unity, the search and aggregating fiasco. But I don't feel as if my personal holy cow has been sacrificed. The one thing you do have with Linux is choice. I just use Mint which is just Ubuntu with a different desktop.

I really must sort out the audio on Maya, it's actually stopped me from using it.
Then again, I've been back into the writing and production quite heavily recently so it's been windows all the way so far this year. At least I have a new project and incentive to get up and running with the Linux stuff again. It's good fun.


cheers.

[pc999]

Ubuntu forums are quite nice for help IMO, I havent run in problems lately, but I could usually get a answer there and I got the info on how to do many things I wanted to do a few times there (most of them I didn't even needed to ask, as someone already did).

[jeffh]

I just did another release, I think this one might even make Dave a little wet

It pretty much addresses what I found to be the biggest shortcomings whenever I wrote a little mini-tune last week:

1. You can now copy-n-paste notes in the piano roll by selecting notes with CTRL+click-and-drag on the piano roll itself, and then by CTRL+click-and-drag on an actual selected note.
2. The MIDI tool buttons/dialogs on the piano roll editor will now only operate on the selected notes if any notes are selected...
3. Audio items now have handles you click-n-drag to resize the item in the audio sequencer

I try not to use this thread for release announcements, but some of this stuff you wouldn't know was there if I didn't tell you, and this is the only place that all 3 of my users read

[jeffh]

...also, since I've been promised user-created audio 100 times now, and still haven't heard a single tune **evil glare at half the posters in this thread**:D, I just hacked out a 3 minute demo mini-song in a couple hours and uploaded it to the new official PyDAW soundcloud here:

https://soundcloud.com/pydaw/classic-trance-v1-192

The mixdown isn't the greatest, which I'm going to blame on the fact that I live in a elitist luxury douchebag apartment complex, so with my monitor speakers and PA speakers sitting in the closet, I had to do the entire mix in headphones...

...and yes, I'm well aware that it's a very cheesy and dated style of trance, I mostly wanted to show off the ability of the built-in synths to do those classic JP-8080 and TB-303 sounds...

Enjoy

[glokraw]

Just picked up a dusty old JV-1080 for 2 digits
so I also like the (superior) JP8080, which are running $600 BIN on ebay
Nice thump, squelch, and E-strings in your demo!

I think creating a linux DAW, and posting release 'announcements',
(and now tunes also!) well qualifies under the topic 'Is anyone using linux'.

[jeffh]

Thanks glokraw

I keep meaning to pick up some hardware, I don't have any at the moment, but I keep thinking I'd like to A/B against it when I'm writing DSP code, because my current knowledge of DSP runs of off ancient memories of what hardware sounded like in the good old days

[glokraw]

I know that Kubuntu is an excellent distro

They must have your address
Websters definition of excellence eludes them.
Too many others where audio works straight away,
and is then simple to build on. E17 is my favorite gui manager,
to which I add konqueror, konsole, and k3b, and
the dependant horde. lxde is also fast, useful, and attractive.
Cheers

[jeffh]

I don't know about that glokraw... Since KDE4 was first released many years ago, KDE has been a big joke, but 10 minor releases later, it's actually somewhat stable.

Those early KDE4 releases were also competing against the most stable desktop ever, Gnome2. Now that Gnome3 has made Gnome so completely irrelevant and crashy that even RedHat is considering dumping them from RHEL, KDE is actually the stable/good one, and I NEVER thought I would say that

Let's hope there is never a KDE5

[pc999]

Error report for pyDAw, is this what you want?

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid= ... =1&theater

Nice new features, I must say I am low on inspiration lately but when make more than a few measures I will post.

[jeffh]

Error report for pyDAw, is this what you want?

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid= ... =1&theater

Yeah, that's it... Thanks, I added some better checks for whether the item name is unique before trying to add it, it'll be in the next release.

I must say I am low on inspiration lately but when make more than a few measures I will post.

Sounds good, it took me this long to finally post some audio, I'm not really in a position to fault anybody else for not posting audio

[glokraw]

Some important things to consider before jumping into a linux DAW:

1. Use an maudio pci soundcard. Well supported by ice_1712 kernel module
2. Use a second or third generation nVidia video card. (not a chip)
3. Use Reaper for vsts, in wine 1.4x or earlier.
4. Use Fender Mustang usb amps for guitar. Bulletproof.

Yeah, life is tough. The linux ticket isn't free.

There just arent any huge issues with such a setup.
It's been that way for 5 years now, or Reaper 2.0x, whichever was first
I have 300+ windows vsts that work. All the U-he, most Native Instruments,
most IK, most Wusik, most magazine-ware, and most freeware. Not that
days are long enough to use them all regularly.

The three top linux synths, Yoshimi/zynaddsubfx, Hexter, and Whysynth
are all bristling with presets. Hexters simple access to sysex
offers an enormous multi-decade collection of sounds, throw in the
excellent Calf Plugins, Rakarrack, and Guitarix, and you won't
be lacking anything but Melodyne and lip-syncing.

As a rule, quoting an error message in google, will lead to
solutions, or people who can help. You are rarely the first
one to see a message. (I'm sure the unlucky guy that always saw them first,
either lept off a bridge, or went up to the Himalayas for good.

[StudioDave]

...also, since I've been promised user-created audio 100 times now, and still haven't heard a single tune...

A hacky demo made with r13.03-5 :

http://linux-sound.org/audio/fizz-pluck-bang.mp3

And you thought you knew your cheese.

Best,

dp

[codec_spurt]

Ok, I got the latest version today and made a bootable usb on an old 4Gig stick I had lying around. Used startup disk creator to make it after using disk utility first of course to format it and make sure there is a MBR on it. No problems.

Please take the following, not as criticism of your efforts jeffh, but as a typical reaction that a typical user would have, after trying your program for the first time. If I say that something is not possible, it means that I haven't been able to figure out how to do it after 3 hours, not that it is actually impossible, so take it with a grain of salt.

I made a persistent file as standard when creating the usb stick because I wanted to gauge the difference in speed to what you recommend. Also this is a very slow stick. I am saving the project files to my D:/Audio/Linux/PyDaw folder that I have created on my laptop hd.

The distro seems to work absolutely fine. Internet is automatic with ethernet plugged in, and I installed lm-sensors by the 'sudo apt-get install lm-sensors' command and typing 'sensors' in the terminal tells me my hardware is at a typical temperature for an Ubuntu install. Just checking to be on the safe side.

Ok, now the fun and games:

After a few hours of playing about and not able to create a 2 bar loop, I am ready to give up. In fact I have given up. The interface is very nice and there seems to be lots of options to do things, but the most simple of tasks eludes me. No problem creating a 1 bar loop and assigning a virtual instrument to it. I am surprised at how well and out of the box this works. I haven't had to do anything other than start the program.

One annoyance with Ubuntu straight off the bat though, is the launcher bar being visible even when programs are started. I have to get rid of this:

Dash Home>System Settings>Appearance>Behaviour>Auto Hide Launcher.

Back to the program. So I have my one bar loop and a pattern playing nicely, try changing the region lengths. Ubuntu crashes, recovers. Try again, PyDaw crashes, recovers, sends error report, but I restart just to be sure.



These are the things that I have found frustrating:

1/ Can not save song incrementally. Have to create a new folder every time. Am I missing something here? Why can't I create a file called 'test-2' in the same folder called 'test', where I already have 'test-1'?

2/ Program disappears when changing region length. But sound keeps playing.

3/ Can not change region length to values lower than 4

4/ Can not delete notes in midi editor by right clicking or double clicking as it is done in practically every other daw. You have to ctrl select and then use the delete key on the keyboard. At least I can find no other way to delete notes here. Extremely frustrating. You have to lose your work before you work this out.

5/ Can not delete region once created.

6/ Sound keeps playing when program disappears and have to open system monitor and kill the process from there. A noob would have to re-start and might not know how to do this.

7/ Can not find a way to copy a pattern and then edit it making a new pattern, without it editing the original pattern. So you have to start from scratch every time.

Ok, I found out how to do it, by unlinking. This is very unintuitive and people might have given up in frustration by this point. When a copy is made it should be unlinked by default and then explicitly linked as if to create a 'ghost part', if that is what is wanted.

8/ Regions and patterns should not start at 0, this is not an array and your users won't be programmers - They should start at 1 so as to save confusion.

9/ After saving, follow cursor is deselected and has to be selected again.

10/ Song is saved automatically without explicitly saving, so if one made a change to a song and closed the program, even saying 'No I don't want to save', it is saved anyway and you have lost your work. This is totally unexpected and there is no option to turn off this 'auto-save' that I can find.


Ok, that is my initial impression. I am impressed by many things. The things I thought I would have to set up to work, are done automatically, but the workflow that I take for granted is not there in any shape or usable form imho. I realise that all hosts do things a bit differently and it is early days yet, but there should be some kind of loop indicator and you should be able to create a loop of 2 bars if you want, not being forced to use 1, or 4 or more.

I haven't tried audio yet. As it stands, I can't see me persevering with this DAW in its current incarnation. The workflow is just too frustrating, for the reasons I have mentioned. Any one coming to this host would be very frustrated I think, but I realise that there is a long way to go yet, and the general idea and concept is sound.

Very simple things like creating a loop and basic copying of patterns and deleting of notes and saving of projects, is where, in a nut shell this version disappoints me.

To leave on a brighter note, I am very impressed by the distro in general, and the fact that midi works right out of the box with absolutely no configuration necessary and the included synths seem decent enough to me on first listen. They might even be great, I didn't get that far. If you can get your head around the strange workflow and save often to new files so you don't lose what you are doing, then I suppose this DAW could be a lot of fun. It's definitely going in the right direction, but I must admit, I am struggling to see the paradigm at play here from my current perspective and experience with other hosts.



Feel free to ask if you need any of my points clarified jeffh.


I want to like it, and I think with a bit of work it could be a great DAW. I think an awful lot of work has gone into the construction of this, but somehow there seems to be lots of options to do many things, but the simplest of things are painful. These imho need the greatest amount of work if this project is to be a success. The hard work has been done, but there needs to be a major re-think about how new users are going to be approaching this software for the first time. An experienced user will be looking for some kind of familiar paradigm to latch onto, a new user might very well be just too far into the deep end to start with.

Anyway, that is my initial off the cuff response. Maybe others would take to it like a duck to water, and no previous experience of other DAWs might be an advantage.

Cheers.

[robogone]

Been thinking of resizing my Windows partition and putting a Linux partition on there so I can do everything other than music on the Linux partition. Don't have anything non-music related on the Windows partition and don't want anything on there.

I was thinking Ubuntu to keep things simple, but does anyone have any thoughts on a good distro for general use? Haven't used Linux much in recent years so just wondering what was good/bad/indifferent in various flavors.