Linux...anybody using it?

[jeffh]

Ah... How did I miss that? I don't even see where that post was other than glokraw's quote, I'm starting to think that you are both a shape-shifter and a time-traveller, who went back in time to plant that post 12 pages back and lay a guilt trip on me....

I like it, it reminds me of that stuff they used to play late night on MTV back in the 90s

If you'd like, it can even go on the official PyDAW soundcloud... We can even give you a jazz-like nickname, like:

Dave "Scooter" Phillips: Fizz-Pluck-Bang

[StudioDave]

... I'm starting to think that you are both a shape-shifter and a time-traveller, who went back in time to plant that post 12 pages back and lay a guilt trip on me....

Busted.

I like it, it reminds me of that stuff they used to play late night on MTV back in the 90s

Yep. Beavis & Butthead would have hated it, bless 'em.

If you'd like, it can even go on the official PyDAW soundcloud... We can even give you a jazz-like nickname, like:

Dave "Scooter" Phillips: Fizz-Pluck-Bang

Sure, haul it up. You can call me anything but late for dinner, but "Punter" might be more appropriate.

Best,

dp

[urlwolf]

Just a quick note... I got my latency down by just playing with buffer settings. I'm throwing away the midi cable with stuck notes, and buying a proper interface.

I installed reaper, and it works.


All is not lost!
I'm sticking to linux! I eat my words

[codec_spurt]

This morning I ran Update Manager in Ubuntu and it failed because of dependencies or something. Rebooted and my install was totally wiped out. I reinstalled again from the LiveCD and started over. This took me over 3 hours to do. Isn't Linux wonderful.

Then I installed the Catalyst drivers. All working well and tested. No problems.
Ran sensors and my temps were down. All good.

Started up PyDaw2 and my old project. Fine. Let's make some music today. Bit more stable but still problems. Does not like having the length changed of the loop at all when it is playing. Crashed and disappeared as before. Had to kill the process to get rid of it.

Lots of other niggles. The audio arrange page was showing stuff differently and a reboot of the program was always necessary for it to update. Crashed a couple of times more, but not too bad considering I gave it a pretty thorough work out. Whenever it would start misbehaving I would just re-start the program.

I should have written stuff down, but I wanted to crack on and make a bit of music.

Here is a little 2 minute demo done entirely from scratch this afternoon. All the sounds are the internal synths and effects. There is one drum loop that I imported to work out how the arrange page works. You can download the project file and load it up yourself and see:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8602770/PYDAWPHILE.zip


Here is the track I did:

PyDawPhile


It's identical apart from a touch of normalisation. Feel free to use these however you want. You can do what you like with them, I don't care.



If I had had something like this as a sample or template project file, it really would have helped me immensely to get my head around how this program works. It is quite logical when you figure it out, but figuring it out was a nightmare for me personally. Ymmv. This program really needs a demo like this to help people understand the paradigm. You are free to use it as you wish jeffh, should you so choose.


cheers.

[codec_spurt]

But first I need to get everything backed up and organised. Which is easier said than done!

What I've done to make things easy, is backup C:
and then copy all data to a terabyte drive, uninstall unused windows apps,
use a live linux to remove the now protected data,
then defrag the drive, then resize it, then image it.
Then image again, after the linux sides are set up happily.

On the linux sides, I copy the whole .wine and /usr/share folders
to a few safe places, and because I stick to one time tested wine version,
after any new install, I just copy the .wine folder back, and pertinent
parts of /usr/share (Hydrogen kits, zynaddsubfx sounds etc

Prevents any Native Instrument/IK installer drama, and tracking down
stray plugin zips, magazine dvds etc

If your final setup mounts all partitions at boot, you may be able
to link a large Steinberg/VstPlugins folder to the other linuxi,
to save time and space. Put extra backups of irrepacables,
in someone elses home, in case fate strikes a hard blow at yours
Cheers

There's some good advice there. I'll bear it in mind when I get organised.

Thanks.

[codec_spurt]

@codec: I'm glad someone else gave PyDAW a serious spin, though it seems we've had quite different experiences. I know Jeff squared away some of your plaints, but I think you hit on a few remaining problem areas he'll no doubt get around to improving asap. The file management is kind of weird, as is the Undo. I got used to it quickly enough, though I agree that it could be simpler.

I really tested it out today, after having to re-install everything again. Of course the problems I was still having could be because I didn't update the kernel, just the catalyst drivers. Earlier when I ran update manager and it had about half a dozen kernel upgrades, it totally borked my install. So the instability I was experiencing could well be because of this.

As for different experiences, well that's to be expected. It sounds like you had a lot of fun doing that demo - I like it a lot - very bouncy and happy!
Well done.


I've got my head around how things work now a lot more, enough to have finished a little demo of my own. I'm tired of messing around with usb stick installs. I need to install this to a partition to really test it properly. 750GB Scorpio came today. Yay!


cheers.

[urlwolf]

Jeff, just to understand what you are aiming for with pydaw... You mention you wanted to get away from reaper et al.

Could you list the points you hate, and how you want to solve them?

I'm asking because now I need to decide if I want to make an investment in reaper (it works well)...

[jeffh]

Nice ambient action there codec_spurt

I'll try to get yours and Dave's tunes up on the PyDAW soundcloud tonight, thank you both for sharing...

[jeffh]

Could you list the points you hate, and how you want to solve them?

IMHO, IMHO, IMHO...

1. It's terribly inconsistent under WINE
2. They are not serious about a native Linux port
3. It has traditionally been more for people recording bands than electronic music (something I don't like, but that doesn't apply to everyone)
4. Reaper v4.0 pretty much jumped the shark for me, I bought a license, downloaded, and then realized it didn't add a single thing I cared about to Reaper 3, and it was considerably less stable for me.
5. They bloated out Reaper with a bunch of dumb features and way too much configurability by "letting the inmates run the prison", ie: feature requests were pretty much democratically elected no matter how silly or useless they were, and nobody was willing to be the adult in the room and say "no" to any feature request that was popular on the forums... I guess it came down to "listening to one's customers" vs. "having vision and leadership", but I think Reaper is pretty much past it's prime, and the much slower development since v4.0 seems to back that up.
6. Not open source

But the vision for PyDAW is something that doesn't take the "MIDI capabilities overlayed on multitrack recording software" paradigm that pretty much every DAW stole from Cubase... but something that goes the reverse route and shoehorns audio support into something that was engineered specifically for people that use mostly or all MIDI and little or no audio...

ie: a better tool for electronic music, and a relatively mediocre tool for everything else...

I'm asking because now I need to decide if I want to make an investment in reaper (it works well)...

In Linux? Under WINE? Are you sure about that, or was that a first impression?

EDIT: I think the Reaper forums explain it well:

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=117332

[jeffh]

Does not like having the length changed of the loop at all when it is playing. Crashed and disappeared as before. Had to kill the process to get rid of it.

You mean like going from loop_mode::region to loop_mode::bar ? That's really odd if that's what you meant, I do that all the time and have never seen a crash...

If you don't mind, could you please try launching PyDAW from the terminal by typing "pydaw2" (without quotes) and hitting enter to launch it instead of clicking the launcher button? If there is a crash, it should print something to the terminal that can help me figure out what's going wrong...

Lots of other niggles. The audio arrange page was showing stuff differently and a reboot of the program was always necessary for it to update. Crashed a couple of times more, but not too bad considering I gave it a pretty thorough work out. Whenever it would start misbehaving I would just re-start the program.

I should mention that if something is changed on the "audio edit" tab, you have to click the "save changes" button for it to take effect... (not optimal, I know, I'll eventually get a better way to do it, young software, etc... blah, blah, blah...)... If that's not what you meant, is there a simple way to reproduce the problem? It had an issue with that once, but I thought it was fixed, or at least I can no longer reproduce it...

Here is a little 2 minute demo done entirely from scratch this afternoon.

As stated 2 posts ago... Nice

If I had had something like this as a sample or template project file, it really would have helped me immensely to get my head around how this program works.

The reason there isn't is because projects aren't 100% portable between 2 PCs... The sequencing and synth patches transfer fine, but audio samples in the sequencer or in Euphoria won't be found unless they exist on the destination PC in the same location...

Most DAWs have this same shortcoming, but I actually do intend to make projects completely portable sometime soon by caching all of the files in the project dir... One of the many advantages of having complete control over my ecosystem...

[urlwolf]

I bought an alesis io2, which is supposed to be well supported. No more noname cable. And updated pydaw.

Still, midi does not work. At all. Mind you, neither does it work on reaper or radium...

What's the opposite of plug and play? This is what happens here

[urlwolf]

Now Pydaw just doesn't launch.

It shows the GUI, then crashes.

Takes lethal force to kill it too, leaves behind a bunch of worker threads even if the GUI died.

Why am I still pushing uphill?

[jeffh]

Eh... One of my cards is an Alesis IO2, but my MIDI devices are all USB-only so I've never tried MIDI with the IO2...

I'm not sure what might be going on with PyDAW, but you could try running it from the terminal with the command "pydaw2" (without quotes), and see what prints to the terminal right when things start going wrong...

If that's not fruitful, you could try renaming/moving/deleting the /home/your_user_name/pydaw2 folder... Something may be wrong with your default project preventing it from opening...

[urlwolf]

ok. Now it launches...
Well, we even have the same interface.

I have selected io|2 MIDI 1. I have ray V on a track, and it's armed. What else could be wrong?

A litle 'led' showing that midi is getting in wouldn't hurt.

What is the easiest way to test midi on linux? Equiv. of midiox?

[urlwolf]

Ok, something that could be trouble...
On the io|2, Midi out light is never blinking, the manual says it should blink.
The midi in light is red.
Jeff, could you check yours?