KVR Audio

xNiMiNx · Post by **xNiMiNx** » Fri Aug 30, 2013 5:10 pm

Nice additions, thanks for the heads up. Hopefully ill have some time this weekend to mess around with it.

bachmaninoff · Post by **bachmaninoff** » Fri Aug 30, 2013 5:43 pm

Awesome - I think my permanent shift to Linux is just around the corner. Thanks for providing a self-contained alternative to the thousands of 'audio' apps (aka utilities) on linux... Not everyone wants to run 10+ programs just to make a song.

Hey what happened to pydaw.org?

jeffh · Post by **jeffh** » Fri Aug 30, 2013 7:28 pm

xNiMiNx wrote:Nice additions, thanks for the heads up. Hopefully ill have some time this weekend to mess around with it.

NP, I hope you enjoy it

bachmaninoff wrote:Awesome - I think my permanent shift to Linux is just around the corner. Thanks for providing a self-contained alternative to the thousands of 'audio' apps (aka utilities) on linux... Not everyone wants to run 10+ programs just to make a song.

Finally, somebody who understands and doesn't accept the "this is how we do things in Linux" answer

bachmaninoff wrote:Hey what happened to pydaw.org?

A couple of things:

a) I wasn't updating it much, so I didn't want people to see a lack of recent news and think the project was abandoned.
b) I'm collaborating with somebody on a new website with possibly some (joint?) crowd-funding, cross-promotion, etc... so being that the other person is more skilled at web-design than me, there's not much incentive for me to spend time renovating the site I had already built.

So for those reasons, I decided just to make PyDAW.org redirect to my SourceForge page for now, which at least gets updated regularly... In theory I should be launching a new site some time relatively soon, but I don't have an exact ETA because we haven't even started working on it yet...

bachmaninoff · Post by **bachmaninoff** » Fri Aug 30, 2013 10:25 pm

jeffh wrote:Finally, somebody who understands and doesn't accept the "this is how we do things in Linux" answer

Heck yes! It's really a downer to the creative process to have to do much more than fire up the DAW/whatever... I get a neat little riff in my head, fire up Ubuntu, start QJackCTL, start a2jmidid, start SEQ24, Qtractor/Ardour, Hydrogen, Zynaddsubfx, AMS, hook everything up in qjackctl, load all presets/banks... Start playing/clicking between windows, get a decent sound in TAL NoiseMaker or something... Wait, why isn't the system responding... Something crashed something else - and hard(!), XRUNS all over the place. At that point, I'd give up and boot back into Windows. Wait, what was that riff again?

bachmaninoff · Post by **bachmaninoff** » Sat Aug 31, 2013 1:23 am

Ok quick question... I'm running Fedora, so I followed the build instructions listed in the Fedora Users doc, and the dependencies installed with no issues. Got the following message during make clean:

Makefile:32: *** missing separator (did you mean TAB instead of 8 spaces?). Stop.

Should I edit this or comment out line 32? Thanks for your help!

jeffh · Post by **jeffh** » Sat Aug 31, 2013 1:57 am

bachmaninoff wrote:Ok quick question... I'm running Fedora, so I followed the build instructions listed in the Fedora Users doc, and the dependencies installed with no issues. Got the following message during make clean:

Makefile:32: *** missing separator (did you mean TAB instead of 8 spaces?). Stop.
Should I edit this or comment out line 32? Thanks for your help!

Ah... Good catch...

You could just delete lines 32 (and 33 also has the same problem). I guess the upstream Make in Fedora got more strict about using tabs vs. whitespace for indentation, my Ubuntu 12.04.2 install doesn't complain about it...

or, you can pull my latest Git which has that fixed already:

Code: Select all

git clone https://github.com/j3ffhubb/audiocode.git

HOWEVER, if you're using Fedora 18 or 19 (I think), you're probably in for a bad time, ALSA has been completely fux0red for about a year now, and it's almost guaranteed that you'll get an absurd number of XRuns no matter what you're doing... IIRC, Fedora 17 is OK, as are Ubuntu 12.04.x and AFAIK Ubuntu 12.10 is OK (13.04 and 13.10alpha are not OK).

I've personally found that Ubuntu 12.04.2 and 12.04.3 were both fantastic for audio, IIRC Debian 7 is also OK if you don't want Ubuntu...

bachmaninoff · Post by **bachmaninoff** » Sat Aug 31, 2013 2:53 am

Thanks for the info!

Gonna give 12.04 a go...

jeffh · Post by **jeffh** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 4:38 am

jeffh wrote: ...
HOWEVER, if you're using Fedora 18 or 19 (I think), you're probably in for a bad time, ALSA has been completely fux0red for about a year now, and it's almost guaranteed that you'll get an absurd number of XRuns no matter what you're doing... IIRC, Fedora 17 is OK, as are Ubuntu 12.04.x and AFAIK Ubuntu 12.10 is OK (13.04 and 13.10alpha are not OK).

I've personally found that Ubuntu 12.04.2 and 12.04.3 were both fantastic for audio, IIRC Debian 7 is also OK if you don't want Ubuntu...
...

Forget what I said... Like a good gravy, the plot thickens...

So, the conventional wisdom (mostly from the Jack fan-club) was that the crappy state of Linux audio in 2013 was all ALSA's fault; Dead f**king wrong.

So assuming that ALSA was indeed at fault, I decided that I should stop putting all of my eggs in one basket; I dropped Jack as my back-end(long overdue) and replaced it with Portaudio so that I could make Mac and Windows ports of PyDAW. Immediately PyDAW had better performance and could easily achieve much lower latency than when it had Jack, but that wasn't all I discovered...

Are you ready for this? I created a Ubuntu 13.04 test box (a known bad OS for audio), and installed the latest PyDAW3-13.09-2(Portaudio) on it, and you know what? Smooth, artifact-free playback, as good or better than Ubuntu12.04 even.

So I thought to myself "Could this have been fixed by a Ubuntu update?", so I did a git checkout of pydaw3-13.08-6 (with Jack, it's last week's build with few differences other than swapping out Jack for Portaudio), and built it. Guess what happened??? 100-xruns-a-second audio playback with many audible artifacts, same problems that have plagued all things Jack for any new distro in the past year.

I'm not going to bother reporting this to the Jack community (both because they hate me, and because I don't actually give a shit), but I can only wonder how long they'll let this stay broken and keep blaming ALSA.

The moral of the story: PyDAW is now completely viable on even bleeding-edge Linuces thanks to Portaudio/ALSA, but if you want to use Jack-based apps, you should still follow my previous advice about sticking with Ubuntu 12.04.

xNiMiNx · Post by **xNiMiNx** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 10:14 am

jeffh wrote:...so that I could make Mac and Windows ports of PyDAW.

This caught my attention. Is this something youre planning? Any idea which Win would be minimum req?

jeffh · Post by **jeffh** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 12:19 pm

xNiMiNx wrote: This caught my attention. Is this something youre planning?

The entire reason that PyDAW now uses Portaudio (instead of ALSA) was to create Windows/Mac ports, for which efforts have only been going on for about 2-3 weeks now...

I'm still planning on following through on those efforts, but for the moment I'm still learning how to do it(Cygwin and MinGW are both unfamiliar to me, I have no idea how to compile Linux C applications in Visual Studio, and I still need to replace ALSA MIDI with PortMIDI to be fully cross-platform).

xNiMiNx wrote: Any idea which Win would be minimum req?

Windows XP most likely...

xNiMiNx · Post by **xNiMiNx** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 2:03 pm

jeffh wrote:Windows XP most likely...

Music to my ears

glokraw · Post by **glokraw** » Wed Sep 11, 2013 7:15 am

jeffh wrote: The entire reason that PyDAW now uses Portaudio (instead of ALSA) was to create Windows/Mac ports, for which efforts have only been going on for about 2-3 weeks now...

Good to see success and progress! Audacity uses portaudio,
and when you use audacity with qjackctl, it is listed as
portaudio, so perhaps there is an easy way, for pydaw to
do the same thing? (not that you care

and I also
recognize that 'easy', is a terrible word for a non-coder
to bandy about in this type of discussion

)
Cheers

jeffh · Post by **jeffh** » Wed Sep 11, 2013 2:58 pm

glokraw wrote: Good to see success and progress!

Thanks. Last night I finally made the install fully relocatable by setting PREFIX when building/installing, which was a critical step towards a viable Windows port; It's still kind of a WIP though because I still need to figure out if any of my dependencies are going to be problematic(at which point I may have to replace them with other libraries).

glokraw wrote:Audacity uses portaudio,
and when you use audacity with qjackctl, it is listed as
portaudio, so perhaps there is an easy way, for pydaw to
do the same thing?

I deliberately prevented users from doing that... Why you ask? Because as I already mentioned, Jack is totally busted in Ubuntu 13.04 and Ubuntu 13.10(with presumably little chance of getting fixed since they're blaming ALSA's USB driver and apparently not trying to fix it on their end), so there's no reason to enable that as an option and have users think PyDAW is buggy when in reality it's Jack causing the xruns... Maybe if Jack miraculously gets fixed in Ubuntu 14.04 I'll consider re-enabling the option to use it.

Hell, with Portaudio, PyDAW even performs decently in a Virtualbox VM now. Back when it used Jack it was completely unusable in Virtualbox and could even hard-crash the VM and make the entire window go poof! If that's not a fragile, unstable system, I don't know what is...

glokraw · Post by **glokraw** » Wed Sep 11, 2013 11:12 pm

jeffh wrote: Maybe if Jack miraculously gets fixed in Ubuntu 14.04 I'll consider re-enabling the option to use it.

Ubuntu, daft users, and daft hardware, are more a problem than
either alsa or jackd. I type this from Bodhi linux,
booting from an external usb drive, a lightweight distro based on
ubuntu 13.04, kernel 3.08x, running firefox, a few gnome terminals,
yoshimi synth, and a pair of rakarracks, and not an xrun in sight or earshot.

Now I don't flounder about with the 'update just because you can' crowd,
and know well the sometimes vast difference between update and upGrade.
But a properly established and working jackd system is not rocket science.
My walls have more holes than certificates of achievement, yet I have
had no problem recording music, even on a creeky old linux dinosaur setup,
by kvr standards.

I do look forward to your PyDAW progress, but I doubt you help your cause
by always posting the cup half empty (or fully broken) portrayal of
linux audio.
Cheers

jeffh · Post by **jeffh** » Thu Sep 12, 2013 9:02 pm

glokraw wrote: Ubuntu, daft users, and daft hardware, are more a problem than
either alsa or jackd.

Actually, Ubuntu is the one that "just works", it's Arch, Bodhi, Mint, Fedora, Debian, etc... that don't always "just work". I believe that RedHat could make Fedora "just work", but they mostly use it for excessively bleeding edge testing, not an actual distro for real people to use. All of the others feel like somebody's hobby more than a professional product.

glokraw wrote:I type this from Bodhi linux,
booting from an external usb drive, a lightweight distro based on
ubuntu 13.04, kernel 3.08x, running firefox, a few gnome terminals,
yoshimi synth, and a pair of rakarracks, and not an xrun in sight or earshot.

Now I don't flounder about with the 'update just because you can' crowd,
and know well the sometimes vast difference between update and upGrade.
But a properly established and working jackd system is not rocket science.
My walls have more holes than certificates of achievement, yet I have
had no problem recording music, even on a creeky old linux dinosaur setup,
by kvr standards.

OK, but you're probably using either a built-in soundcard or a PCI soundcard, the problem is believed to specifically affect USB cards, which are by far the most common now that PCI is dying and PCIe soundcards never really took off. The problems with Jack in Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10 are very real, just because you claim not to be affected by them does not mean they don't exist. All 4 of my PCs (An AMD Piledriver desktop, an AMD Trinity laptop, and AMD Llano laptop and an Intel Ivy Bridge laptop) were all unusable with Jack and Ubuntu13.04+.

...and I think that establishing a working jackd is often equivalent to rocket science, ask anybody on KVR who tried Linux and promptly gave up...

glokraw wrote:I doubt you help your cause by always posting the cup half empty (or fully broken) portrayal of linux audio.

I am-not/was-never aiming to to make something for the 5 non-developer users in the entire world who are totally satisfied with Jack+Linux. I was aiming to make something for the other 99.999999% of people who don't like the Jack/Linux audio workflow, people like this:

bachmaninoff wrote: Heck yes! It's really a downer to the creative process to have to do much more than fire up the DAW/whatever... I get a neat little riff in my head, fire up Ubuntu, start QJackCTL, start a2jmidid, start SEQ24, Qtractor/Ardour, Hydrogen, Zynaddsubfx, AMS, hook everything up in qjackctl, load all presets/banks... Start playing/clicking between windows, get a decent sound in TAL NoiseMaker or something... Wait, why isn't the system responding... Something crashed something else - and hard(!), XRUNS all over the place. At that point, I'd give up and boot back into Windows. Wait, what was that riff again?

...everybody in this thread:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5353562

, and especially this guy:

chk071 wrote: Sounds like the linux guys who always complain about bad drivers support for hardware like graphics cards and stuff like that. I'm happy that someone who develops for linux brings this up btw. Hopefully some change of mind occurs one day, and the linux guys get their shit right, seriously. I know, harsh words, but i experienced much shit in the linux world...

The PyDAW thread!