planet.linuxaudio.org

Today, I’m in London doing a hands-on workshop on visual metaphors for music, and covering various topics filed under “synesthesia” at Music Tech Fest. It seems appropriate, with the subject matter on the brain, to revisit the topic of visuals and music in a series of posts.

When you make hardware, with knobs and faders, you’re constrained by physical space – the amount of room on a circuit board, the radius of a knob cap, the size of your fingers. But before you get there, the first step is to sketch an idea. Imagine if you could do that with a marker and paper and ink.

SketchSynth is the latest attempt at a drawable set of controls, letting you turn an illustration on paper into something you can actually use to make music. It’s not the first – this dream of being able to make things come alive with nothing more than a magical pen is an old one – but the execution looks superb. There are two basic approaches to the idea: one is to use some sort of conductive ink to turn the drawing itself into a sensor, and the other is to point a camera at the drawing and calculate where a user makes contact with the drawing. SketchSynth opts for the computer vision approach, by way of OpenFrameworks and the old standby of free and open source vision, OpenCV. (Kyle McDonald’s ofxCV does the heavy lifting.)

Conventional vision fits the task well: faders and knobs respond as expected, even though they’re only ink on paper. While it’s a drawn interface, and could look like anything, the behavioral metaphors all come from hardware: there are sliders, momentary buttons, and pots. Place the tool in “edit” mode, and the computer analyzes what you’re drawing; in “play” mode, the camera tracks your finger as you manipulate what you’ve drawn. The project goes one step further than many that have come before, by overlaying a projection calibrated with your drawing for interactive visual feedback as well as sonic. Sound in this case is provided by Pd, but OpenSoundControl (OSC) messages let you connect to other musical (or visual) tools. See more in the making-of vid, at bottom.

Creator Billy Keyes is working with the right mentor, too, completing this as research for Golan Levin, who has long explored the relationship of drawing and musical gesture. His Sonic Wire Sculptor was a seminal creation in connecting drawings to sound, using a tablet to produce three-dimensional “wire” structures and corresponding sound synthesis. His Messe di Voce performance piece neatly reversed the relationship, using the voice as the input to animate drawings and illustrations. More of Levin’s work at flong.com. See also: composer Xenakis’ UPIC, which lives on today as IanniX, a tool getting a lot of development attention.

Keyes’ project, already getting lots of blog buzz, is notable for its practicality and immediacy; it seems a tool many others might use and build upon rather than a single piece of art.

It’s lovely to see projects, particularly academic projects, come to some form of completion and clarity. Speaking of completion and clarity, at some point a proper survey of drawn musical interfaces seems a must, but that will have to come another day. Where can I get a nice full English breakfast?

I’m late to the party, but hat tip in particular to Creative Applications

Project Page at golancourses.net; Linux source is promised soon

I’ve covered a number of these sorts of projects over recent years.

Paper, Drawing as Musical Controller: A Round-Up (including a number of paper examples)

Drawing Sound: Crazy Touch Interface Sound Experiments with Usine, PC (using only a screen – and thus producing a very different experience of drawing

Imaginary Instruments: Marker and Paper as Controller (this 2009 project is almost a direct analog to SketchSynth, minus the projection)

iPhones, Pencils: Hand-Drawn Music Interactions, Tokyo Subway Mobile Jam (this one isn’t quite the same as the others, using pencil and paper to design an interface for a screen – but it’s nice to recall that you can do that, as well)

Pen and Paper as Graphical, Digital Music Score (from earlier this year, a more open-ended design)

Video: Sonic Wire Sculptor, 2003:

From: Robin Gareus <robin@...>
Subject: [LAA] [ANN] gjacktransport/gjackclock update - v0.5.3
Date: May 16, 12:56 pm 2012

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

gjacktransport is a gtk application that allows to control
JACK-transport. It includes a stand-alone /big-jack-clock/ application
called gjackclock.

Version 0.5.3 released last night is a maintenance update that allows
the apps to run on the GNU Hurd.

Thanks for the bug-report and patch by Cyril Roelandt.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=671586

The sourcecode and more information can be found at
http://gjacktransport.sf.net/

Cheers!
robin
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From: hermann <brummer-@...>
Subject: [LAA] bugfix release guitarix 0.22.3
Date: May 16, 12:56 pm 2012

In behave of the guitarix development team I'm happy to announce a new
bugfix release: guitarix 0.22.3.
This is the 3. bugfix release after we reach version 0.22.0 as you can
properly see on the version number.
Below is a list of the squashed bugs, thanks goes to all users witch
report them to us.

version 0.22.3
fix: denormals generated under special circumstances
fix: switch off auto_startup_notification for splash window (unity)
convolver bugfix: use correct channel count
Convolver bugfix: delay and maxsize must be based on system samplerate
fix: preset_button in config mode
version 0.22.2
fix: save scratch preset before switching to a newly created one
version 0.22.1
fix: changed "requires" tag for gtk+ to 2.20 in gx_distortion_ui.glade
ladspa_guitarix: fix preset loading
ladspa_guitarix: fix module loading
ladspa_guitarix: fix loading (undefined symbols)
bugfix: wrong variable in crybaby UI

get it here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/guitarix/

greets
hermann

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Summary: If you have performance problems using the JACK Audio-Connection-Kit and the fglrx ATI grpahics card driver, switching to radeon may solve them. Unity 3D and radeon can work, but leftovers of other drivers might get in the way. Also: Proprietary, binary blobs smell bad and Ubuntu’s infrastructure around those drivers is dodgey.

On Ubuntu 11.10, I switched graphics cards and thus drivers from nvidia to fglrx without much of a problem.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 and was quite pleased by how smooth that went and glad for not having to reconfigure and reinstall a bunch of stuff. As with every release so far, some issues might have disappeared, but a very noticable new one arrived: focus-follows mouse combined with auto-raise does no longer work reliably. So far I failed to identify the pattern for the cases where windows are not raised, when they should be.

After a while, I wanted to get back to music production with JACK and Ardour. My system was still configured for JACK to run in realtime mode, but I got many disconnects, often right when Ardour brought up its main window. I found out this only happened with Unity 3D, not with 2D. So it seemed like either one or the combination of Unity 3D and the fglrx driver interfered with realtime mode. A fellow #lad inhabitant knowledgeable about this realtime kernel business suspects that the 3D accleration part of the fglrx driver is not preemptable.

Where does one even report bugs about that proprietary blob? And how would one diagnose what exactly goes wrong?

Now I could use Unity 2D, but I really miss window drop-shadows, dislike the look and different notification animations for the Launcher icons and hate the fact that the Dash doesn’t react to the same shortcut I configured while using the 3D version.

Initially, I thought I would need the fglrx driver for Unity 3D, but still wanted to try switching to radeon. The Additional Drivers dialog claimed that neiter of the 2 ATI options were active, but lsmod told me otherwise. I have some Wacom-related stuff in my xorg.conf, which had to be moved out of the way, to get that thing to work. After a reboot, radeon was in use, but Unity decided to drop back to 2D. The cause: Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0". The solution was purging any trace of fglrx and nividia(!) from my system. Also, for good measure, but I suspect it’s unnecessary: sudo apt-get install —reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core; sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.

Now I have a working Unity 3D, using radeon, no disconnects or xruns galore using JACK and Ardour. Only new problem so far: shaky mouse pointer on the login screen.

Filed under: Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu

From: Fred Gleason <fredg@...>
Subject: [LAA] Rivendell v2.1.4
Date: May 14, 8:14 am 2012

On behalf of the entire Rivendell development team, I'm pleased to announce the availability of Rivendell v2.1.4. Rivendell is a full-featured radio automation system targeted for use in professional broadcast environments. It is available under the GNU General Public License.

>From the NEWS file:
*** snip snip ***
Changes:
This is a maintenance release of Rivendell. Some of the issues
addressed include:

RDCatch XLoad Wildcards. Several new wildcards and meta-characters
have been added for specifying URLs in RDCatch, including:
$e -- Day of the month, space padded ( 1 - 12)
$E -- Day of the month, unpadded (1 - 12)
^ -- Convert value indicated by following format character to all
uppercase.
$ -- Convert the initial character of the value indicated by the
following format character to uppercase.
A complete list of wildcards can be found in 'docs/datetime_wildcards.txt'.

HPI Compatibility. Updated HPI subsystem to work with the latest
AudioScience driver versions (v4.10.x).

RDLibrary Reports. Fixed a problem where generated reports would
not accurately reflect the current cart filters.

A detailed list of all bugfixes can be found in the ChangeLog.

Database Update:
This version of Rivendell uses database schema version 205, and will
automatically upgrade any earlier versions. To see the current schema
version prior to upgrade, see RDAdmin->SystemInfo.

As always, be sure to run RDAdmin immediately after upgrading to allow
any necessary changes to the database schema to be applied.
*** snip snip ***

Further information, screenshots and download links are available at:

http://www.rivendellaudio.org/

Cheers!


|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer |
| | Paravel Systems |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| I love deadlines. I especially like the whoosing sound they make as |
| they go flying by. |
| -- Douglas Adams |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|

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The GStreamer team announces a new release of the GStreamer core, Base/Good/Bad/Ugly/libav modules for the 0.11 GStreamer unstable release series.

This is the second release candidate of the upcoming 1.0 release. It is intended for developers and people wanting to port their plugins and applications to the new series. Only minor or absolutely necessary changes to the core/base API/ABI will happen between this release and the final 1.0.0 release.

Check out release notes for gstreamer core or gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-bad, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-libav, or download tarballs for gstreamer or gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-bad, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-libav,

The last week has seen the announcement of two new LV2 synths, both from Qtractor and QJackCtl developer and all ’round good-guy Rui Nuno Capela: synthv1 and samplv1. Both are in the early stages of development, but they’re already looking very promising.

You can never have enough good analogue-style soft-synths, and synthv1 is a welcome addition to the list. The basic synth design is pretty straightforward — two oscillators (with saw, pulse, sine, and noise waves), a multi-mode filter with its own envelope, and an LFO with various routing options. However, each patch actually has two instances of this synth engine, which are mixed and then processed through an effects section.

This layered design is particularly handy for adding sub-octaves to create strong bass sounds, or adding some high-end sizzle to pads, especially when combined with the filter’s high-pass mode and the LFO’s panning control. It can also create very wide stereo sounds, by building subtly different sounds on each layer and then panning the layers in opposite directions.

There are some other unique touches, too. For instance, the saw wave is actually continually variable between saw and triangle modes, which gives you more basic oscillator timbres to work with; hopefully later versions will allow the LFO to be routed to this wave shape control, both for saw/triangle variation and for pulse width variation. Also, the LFO has its own envelope, which can be used to adding vibrato or filter cutoff variation to a sound after the initial attack, for instance.

samplv1 is the more interesting for me, though, because it fills what I feel is a major gap in Linux audio: a simple plugin sampler. LinuxSampler is great, and it’s available as a plugin, but sometimes you just want to take a single sample and do something creative with it, especially when making percussion parts, and LinuxSampler doesn’t make that easy. Specimen (for which I recorded a video tutorial) is a better option for this, but as a standalone JACK app, it’s cumbersome to use, especially if you’re using multiple instances to host multiple sounds.

In a lot of ways, samplv1 is like a plugin version of Specimen — it lets you load a sample and map it to your keyboard within seconds, and then optionally use other synth components to process that sound. samplv1 uses the same envelope-controlled multi-mode filter and LFO as synthv1, which gives you a lot of scope for creative sound design; Specimen has a bit more modulation flexibility, but it’s not as immediately accessible as samplv1 is. samplev1 also shares synthv1′s stereo effects section.

It’s still early days for both of these, so don’t be too surprised if you run in to problems (I’ve had a few crashes with Ardour 3, for instance, but I haven’t narrowed down their cause yet), but they’re definitely worth checking out!

following in the same vein, like "look mamma, I've made this!", here goes yet another proto-toy called samplv1--an(other) old-school all-digital (of course) polyphonic sampler synthesizer with stereo fx.

have a sample:

http://www.rncbc.org/snapshots/#samplv1
http://www.rncbc.org/snapshots/samplv1-svn656.tar.gz

upstream svn trunk (and LV2 URI):

https://www.rncbc.org/svn/test/samplv1

still rough in the edges but pretty functional; as the previous one, it comes in both forms of a JACK stand-alone client and a LV2 instrument plug-in.

have fun.

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From: Stefano D'Angelo <zanga.mail@...>
Subject: [LAA] NASPRO 0.4.1 released
Date: May 10, 8:46 am 2012

Hi all,

I am glad to announce the release of NASPRO 0.4.1.

NASPRO (http://naspro.atheme.org/) is meant to be a cross-platform
sound processing software architecture built around the LV2 plugin
standard (http://lv2plug.in/).

The goal of the project is to develop a series of tools to make it
easy and convenient to use LV2 for sound processing on any (relevant)
platform and for everybody: end users, host developers, plugin
developers, distributors and scientists/researchers.

This is just a small update to NASPRO Bridge it and NASPRO bridges that:

* makes use of LV2 Atom for MIDI events;
* enables LRDF-equivalent bundle installation and automatic
translation of DSSI programs to LV2 presets by default;
* aligns with the unified LV2 distribution.

Enjoy!
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Homecut – CNC Cutting Directory

So you have a CNC machine that you use as a hobby, but would like to do some actual work on the side? Or maybe you have an idea you’d like made. Homecut is a map directory where you can maybe hook up with the right person.

The Curta Mechanical Calculator

As [leehart] mentioned in our comments section, the Curta mechanical calculator is a truly ingenious piece of engineering. A quick Google search should find all kinds of information on it, but this article could be a good place to start for some mechanical hacking inspiration!

Luxman Amplifier DAC Upgrade

[R. Barrios] wasn’t happy with using the sound card for his HTPC setup, so decided to add a DAC module onto his reciever. The resulting audio quality was very good, and the build came out quite clean.  Check it out if you’re thinking of a hack-upgrade to your stereo equipment.

3D Printable Tilt-Shift Adapter

A tilt-shift lens a neat piece of equipment that is used to make a large scene look like they were miniatures. It’s a cool effect, but professional lenses to do this can cost thousands of dollars. This Instructable tells you how to go about printing your own. For more info on the technique itself, check out this Wikipedia article.

New 3D Printer on the Block

If you would like to take the plunge into 3D printing, but are looking for somewhere to get a parts kit, the [ORD Bot Hadron 3D Printer] may be worth a look.  The build quality looks great, and the price for the mechanical components is quite reasonable at $399. You’ll need to provide the electronics and extruder. Thanks [comptechgeek]!

Filed under: classic hacks, cnc hacks, digital audio hacks, digital cameras hacks, Hackaday links

aka. synthv1--as announced last week on IRC (#lad, #qtractor and #opensourcemusicians)--an old-school all-digital 4-oscillator subtractive polyphonic synthesizer with stereo fx.

take no prisoners:

http://www.rncbc.org/snapshots/#synthv1
http://www.rncbc.org/snapshots/synthv1-svn656.tar.gz

upstream svn trunk (also LV2 URI):

https://www.rncbc.org/svn/test/synthv1

nb. licensed under the GPLv2 or later (see LICENSE)

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[Mesoiam] managed to pick up a Viscount hammer weighted keyboard for pretty cheap. For those who are unfamiliar, Viscount makes keyboards that feel like you’re playing a piano, hammers and all. The only problem with this, as [Mesoiam] discovered, is that even when he’s jamming with headphones in, his friends down stairs can still hear the keyboard banging due to the vibration going through the stand to the floor. His resolution to this problem was to build some custom dampers to reduce the vibration. He built two brackets that fit over the stand and suspend the keyboard on two strips of flexible rubber. Quite a simple solution to a possibly annoying problem.

Filed under: digital audio hacks, musical hacks

Hi all,

I am glad to announce the release of NASPRO 0.4.1.

This is just a small update to NASPRO Bridge it and NASPRO bridges that:

• makes use of LV2 Atom for MIDI events;
• enables LRDF-equivalent bundle installation and automatic translation of DSSI programs to LV2 presets by default;
• aligns with the unified LV2 distribution.

Enjoy!

Back in 2009, [Evi1wombat] pulled of this interesting hack, and it has slowly made its way through the internet to find us today. He obtained the computer from a recently deceased treadmill and decided to hack into it. Finding himself unable to flash the existing chip, he yanked it out and replaced it with something he was more familiar with, a dsPIC30F4011. Unfortunately we don’t have any pics of the inside, but he says that he had some fun with wire because the pin mapping wasn’t exactly the same. [Evi1wombat] also gained some respect for the original designer judging by  this quote from the source code:

* Damn, the dude who designed that board pulled
* some pretty nifty tricks… took a while to
* get all the drivers working.

Of course, once you have control over some nifty new hardware, the first logical thing to do on it is play “Still Alive” from the game Portal.

Enjoy the video after the break.

Filed under: digital audio hacks

I freshly installed Ubuntu 12.04 and the ubuntustudio meta package. To get the m-audio transit card working I followed my older post (m-audio transit and ubuntu linux), i.e. installing madfuload which comes in the repository and adjust the udev-rules. They do not work the way they come installed.

So I used the content from corrected-madfu-rules and saved it as /etc/udev/rules.d/41-madfuload.rules. The according file in /lib/udev/rules.d I left untouched. The “41″ instead of “42″ is there because it reads “…Pick a number higher than the rules you want to override, and yours will be used. …” in /etc/udev/rules.d/README.

Something hang on my machine when trying the outcome so I rebooted the machine, although this might not be necessary for everybody. After that the sound card works as it used to.

rtirq has been hacked, yet again. Thanks to Fernando Lopez-Lezcano on LAU, with especial regards on current/latest kernel-rt 3.2.16-rt27, a new rtirq release has just bumped in:

http://www.rncbc.org/jack/#rtirq

packages available:

http://www.rncbc.org/jack/rtirq-20120505.tar.gz
http://www.rncbc.org/jack/rtirq-20120505-29.src.rpm
http://www.rncbc.org/jack/rtirq-20120505-29.noarch.rpm

upstream svn trunk:

https://www.rncbc.org/svn/rtirq/trunk

DISCLAIMER: rtirq makes sense on PREEMPT_RT or threadirqs enabled kernels (>= 2.6.39) only.

cheers && enjoy
--
rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela

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From: Fernando Lopez-Lezcano <nando@...>
Subject: [LAA] LAC 2012 @ CCRMA wrap up
Date: May 4, 9:11 am 2012

Hi all,

A bit more than two weeks ago LAC 2012 was closing its doors and The
Knoll felt suddenly empty. In the meantime part of the amazing team that
helped us host this year's Linux Audio Conference has been working in
the background, uploading, encoding, compressing, editing and posting
pictures, videos, slides and papers. All the goodness that happened in
those very intense four days is now there, ready and available for download:

http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2012/

Thanks to everyone that helped make it a reality, and to all those that
participated both here and through Ethernet packets. A substantial
subset of all the local lac'ers was captured in a picture which Robin[*]
promptly transformed into a great who's who...

Great papers, very good music and very good memories! So let's start
preparing new stuff for next year's LAC2013 @ Graz! Passing the baton on
to the next host... go go GO!!

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano
Bruno Ruviaro
LAC 2012 organizers
CCRMA, Stanford University

[*] special thanks to Robin and Jörn for a killer web site and
organization, amazing dvswitch hacks, super professional streaming,
sound and video, the best that could be done with limited resources. And
to Carr Wilkerson, Sasha Leitman and many others for their tireless
support work. Thanks!
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We are working on putting together a miniconf on the topic of Boot & Base OS for the Linux Plumbers Conference 2012 in San Diego (Aug 29-31). And we need your submission!

Are you working on some exciting project related to Boot and Base OS and would like to present your work? Then please submit something following these guidelines, but please CC Kay Sievers and Lennart Poettering.

I hope that at this point the Linux Plumbers Conference needs little introduction, so I will spare any further prose on how great and useful and the best conference ever it is for everybody who works on the plumbing layer of Linux. However, there's one conference that will be co-located with LPC that is still little known, because it happens for the first time: The C Conference, organized by Brandon Philips and friends. It covers all things C, and they are still looking for more topics, in a reverse CFP. Please consider submitting a proposal and registering to the conference!

So I’ve just gotten home from a few weeks on the road. Edmonton and Montreal were great. I got to hear many good players while I was out, but I’m very happy to be home again. The next thing that I’m getting ready for is another concert playing the great Steve Reich piece 2×5….time to dust off the strat again

[Neoxy] always wanted surround sound for his computer, and one day he managed to get a hold of a dead 5.1 system. Why buy one when you can repair someone’s rubbish, right? That turned out to be easier said than done, but after several false-starts he managed to resurrect the audio system by replacing the microcontroller.

We find his trouble-shooting technique interesting. The amp would power up without a hitch but no sound would come out of it. So he took a headphone cable and used the L and R conductors as probes. That cable was fed from an MP3 player, and by touching the probes to the audio inputs for the pre-amp and amplifier circuits he could get great sound out of the speakers. Reasonably certain that those boards were working fine he narrowed down the troubles to three chips that mix, select inputs, and control the system.

A lot of prototyping with an ATmega328 and an Arduino led him to the functionality you see in the video after the break. Not only did he get the system working, but he’s using the Arduino to add Internet control for the device.

Filed under: digital audio hacks, home entertainment hacks

The popular GStreamer user and developers Conference is back for the third year, this year going to San Diego in the USA. The conference will take place on August 27th and August 28th. Check out our conference page for details and the Call for Papers and mark the dates in your calendar. See you in San Diego!

Although its been a relatively quite period for development (due to lots of deadlines) today one of Luppp's long term goals has been reached: on-the-fly time stretching per track.

For the non-techie: This means that you can play a melody loop, and slow it down or speed it up, and the audio will remain in the same key! (No turntable RPM effect? Nope :)

Mandatory examples:

Although I'd call the quality "passable" is obviously not fantastic but there's some parameters in the algorithm that are available to tweak, so I hope to be able to improve it a bit a least :)

So when is a beta release?? Don't hold your breath, sorry. There's still some work to be done before Luppp will be ready for prime-time, but until then feel free to test it if you're interested!

Will keep you posted, -Harry

There's one feature In the upcoming Fedora 17 release that is immensly useful but very little known, since its feature page 'ckremoval' does not explicitly refer to it in its name: true automatic multi-seat support for Linux.

A multi-seat computer is a system that offers not only one local seat for a user, but multiple, at the same time. A seat refers to a combination of a screen, a set of input devices (such as mice and keyboards), and maybe an audio card or webcam, as individual local workplace for a user. A multi-seat computer can drive an entire class room of seats with only a fraction of the cost in hardware, energy, administration and space: you only have one PC, which usually has way enough CPU power to drive 10 or more workplaces. (In fact, even a Netbook has fast enough to drive a couple of seats!) Automatic multi-seat refers to an entirely automatically managed seat setup: whenever a new seat is plugged in a new login screen immediately appears -- without any manual configuration --, and when the seat is unplugged all user sessions on it are removed without delay.

In Fedora 17 we added this functionality to the low-level user and device tracking of systemd, replacing the previous ConsoleKit logic that lacked support for automatic multi-seat. With all the ground work done in systemd, udev and the other components of our plumbing layer the last remaining bits were surprisingly easy to add.

Currently, the automatic multi-seat logic works best with the USB multi-seat hardware from Plugable you can buy cheaply on Amazon (US). These devices require exactly zero configuration with the new scheme implemented in Fedora 17: just plug them in at any time, login screens pop up on them, and you have your additional seats. Alternatively you can also assemble your seat manually with a few easy loginctl attach commands, from any kind of hardware you might have lying around. To get a full seat you need multiple graphics cards, keyboards and mice: one set for each seat. (Later on we'll probably have a graphical setup utility for additional seats, but that's not a pressing issue we believe, as the plug-n-play multi-seat support with the Plugable devices is so awesomely nice.)

Plugable provided us for free with hardware for testing multi-seat. They are also involved with the upstream development of the USB DisplayLink driver for Linux. Due to their positive involvement with Linux we can only recommend to buy their hardware. They are good guys, and support Free Software the way all hardware vendors should! (And besides that, their hardware is also nicely put together. For example, in contrast to most similar vendors they actually assign proper vendor/product IDs to their USB hardware so that we can easily recognize their hardware when plugged in to set up automatic seats.)

Currently, all this magic is only implemented in the GNOME stack with the biggest component getting updated being the GNOME Display Manager. On the Plugable USB hardware you get a full GNOME Shell session with all the usual graphical gimmicks, the same way as on any other hardware. (Yes, GNOME 3 works perfectly fine on simpler graphics cards such as these USB devices!) If you are hacking on a different desktop environment, or on a different display manager, please have a look at the multi-seat documentation we put together, and particularly at our short piece about writing display managers which are multi-seat capable.

If you work on a major desktop environment or display manager and would like to implement multi-seat support for it, but lack the aforementioned Plugable hardware, we might be able to provide you with the hardware for free. Please contact us directly, and we might be able to send you a device. Note that we don't have unlimited devices available, hence we'll probably not be able to pass hardware to everybody who asks, and we will pass the hardware preferably to people who work on well-known software or otherwise have contributed good code to the community already. Anyway, if in doubt, ping us, and explain to us why you should get the hardware, and we'll consider you! (Oh, and this not only applies to display managers, if you hack on some other software where multi-seat awareness would be truly useful, then don't hesitate and ping us!)

Phoronix has this story about this new multi-seat support which is quite interesting and full of pictures. Please have a look.

Plugable started a Pledge drive to lower the price of the Plugable USB multi-seat terminals further. It's full of pictures (and a video showing all this in action!), and uses the code we now make available in Fedora 17 as base. Please consider pledging a few bucks.

Recently David Zeuthen added multi-seat support to udisks as well. With this in place, a user logged in on a specific seat can only see the USB storage plugged into his individual seat, but does not see any USB storage plugged into any other local seat. With this in place we closed the last missing bit of multi-seat support in our desktop stack.

With this code in Fedora 17 we cover the big use cases of multi-seat already: internet cafes, class rooms and similar installations can provide PC workplaces cheaply and easily without any manual configuration. Later on we want to build on this and make this useful for different uses too: for example, the ability to get a login screen as easily as plugging in a USB connector makes this not useful only for saving money in setups for many people, but also in embedded environments (consider monitoring/debugging screens made available via this hotplug logic) or servers (get trivially quick local access to your otherwise head-less server). To be truly useful in these areas we need one more thing though: the ability to run a simply getty (i.e. text login) on the seat, without necessarily involving a graphical UI.

The well-known X successor Wayland already comes out of the box with multi-seat support based on this logic.

Oh, and BTW, as Ubuntu appears to be "focussing" on "clarity" in the "cloud" now ;-), and chose Upstart instead of systemd, this feature won't be available in Ubuntu any time soon. That's (one detail of) the price Ubuntu has to pay for choosing to maintain it's own (largely legacy, such as ConsoleKit) plumbing stack.

Multi-seat has a long history on Unix. Since the earliest days Unix systems could be accessed by multiple local terminals at the same time. Since then local terminal support (and hence multi-seat) gradually moved out of view in computing. The fewest machines these days have more than one seat, the concept of terminals survived almost exclusively in the context of PTYs (i.e. fully virtualized API objects, disconnected from any real hardware seat) and VCs (i.e. a single virtualized local seat), but almost not in any other way (well, server setups still use serial terminals for emergency remote access, but they almost never have more than one serial terminal). All what we do in systemd is based on the ideas originally brought forward in Unix; with systemd we now try to bring back a number of the good ideas of Unix that since the old times were lost on the roadside. For example, in true Unix style we already started to expose the concept of a service in the file system (in /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/system/), something where on Linux the (often misunderstood) "everything is a file" mantra previously fell short. With automatic multi-seat support we bring back support for terminals, but updated with all the features of today's desktops: plug and play, zero configuration, full graphics, and not limited to input devices and screens, but extending to all kinds of devices, such as audio, webcams or USB memory sticks.

Anyway, this is all for now; I'd like to thank everybody who was involved with making multi-seat work so nicely and natively on the Linux platform. You know who you are! Thanks a ton!

Mobile computing has already had an enormous impact on music making. A modern phone or tablet (and yes, most often, these come from Apple) is capable of out-performing a lot of dedicated hardware and easily runs the synths and workstations that required state-of-the-art desktops just a decade or so ago.

But what if this same computing power – low-energy, low-cost chips – could be in other music gear, too? They could offer significant advantages. Bare boards, while on their own not quite road-ready, can wind up in music-friendly housings. (Think stompboxes – without stomping on your phone, or buying a big, silly dock.) You’ll never have to sign a contract with a phone company to get one, or stop your latest song sketch to take a call. And they could be significantly cheaper: the Raspberry Pi isn’t quite ready for mass consumption yet, but it has already begun shipping at US$25, meaning the entire computer costs what a phone car charger might.

In fact, much as the original personal computing revolution took computing to masses of new audiences, this could extend music computational power worldwide. We’re not just talking strange DIY software, either – these boards run Linux, meaning a lot of off-the-shelf music software will “just work,” including even some fine commercial entries.

If you’re ready to stop dreaming and start making music, now’s a great time. CCRMA at Stanford in the United States and STEIM in Amsterdam, NL have each been working on development. STEIM even has a workshop scheduled for June, taught by Edgar Berdahl (CCRMA) and Florian Goltz (DE):
Satellite CCRMA: Interactive design with open embedded computers

The instructors offer some great inspiration about what this is all about in their description:

These small computers combine the connectivity of a laptop with the computational power of a high-end smartphone; however they are less expensive than either and fit inside a cigar box. We will dedicate much of the workshop to prototyping new functional artworks, for example: musical instruments, effects processors, interactive installation works, and anything else you can imagine that requires high computational power in a small, inexpensive footprint.

In the broader sense this workshop deals with interaction design: What happens when human behaviours meet those of machines?

But even if you’re not able to get to California or Holland, you can give the software a try. The BeagleBoard is now supported by a custom distro; the Raspberry Pi seems a logical next frontier once it starts shipping. With Pd (Pure Data) included, you can even copy-and-paste instruments and effects like synthesizers, step sequencers and drum machines, and granulators built by a broad community – even without necessarily being a master patcher yourself. (And then, when you do want to modify the way it functions or sounds or gets controller, you can.)
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~eberdahl/Satellite/

It’s not all beginner-friendly yet, but these hacklabs seem the perfect way to begin to move in that direction, as more people test the solutions, gather data on how different patches perform, and make tweaks and write documentation.

From: Ivica Ico Bukvic <ico@...>
Subject: [LAA] Upcoming DISIS/L2Ork Spring Event
Date: May 1, 8:57 am 2012

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Apologies for cross-posting as well as for the 10-minute notice...

DISIS presents "A New Beginning" Digital iD Spring Event - 7:30 pm, =
Monday, April 30, 2012 - Virginia Tech Squires Studio Theatre

As part of the Arts Fusion festival, VT Institute for Creativity, Arts =
and Technology ( ICAT) and Digital Interactive =
Sound and Intermedia Studio ( DISIS) =
presents the "A New Beginning " Spring Showcase, a part of the "Digital =
iD" performance series featuring an evening of multisensory performances =
that fit no preexisting form or template. Sponsored by the Institute for =
Creativity, Arts and Technology and School of Performing Arts & Cinema, =
and in collaboration with Kids' Tech University, the event will feature =
performances by guest artists Jillian Harris, Benjamin Knapp, and Gascia =
Ouzounian, Virginia Tech's Linux Laptop =
Orchestra (L2Ork) and DISIS students. "Digital iD" offers an exploration =
of synergies among music, technology, arts, gesture, collaboration, =
interactivity, and ultimately community.

Facebook Page
=
Official Poster (~500KB 11x17 JPG)
Contact

=20

Ivica Ico Bukvic, D.M.A.

Composition, Music Technology

Director, DISIS Interactive Sound & Intermedia Studio

Director, L2Ork Linux Laptop Orchestra

Assistant Director, CCTAD

Virginia Tech

Dept. of Music - 0240

Blacksburg, VA 24061

(540) 231-6139

(540) 231-5034 (fax)

ico@vt.edu

http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/bukvic/

=20


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From: Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings@...>
Subject: [LAA] Linux Audio Conference 2012 at CCRMA - proceedings and videos now available
Date: May 1, 8:57 am 2012

On 04/11/2012 07:55 PM, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
> Hi *!
>
>
> On behalf of the conference organizers, we would like to invite you to
> join the Linux Audio Conference 2012, kindly hosted by the Center for
> Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.
>
> The conference will start tomorrow, Thursday April 12, at 10:00 PST
> (that's UTC - 0700). Please refer to the schedule at
>
> http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2012/program
>
> for detailed information.

thanks to robin gareus, who not only designed and implemented the most
kick-ass video workflow we ever had and integrated it with the sweetest
conference database system we ever had, but also ran his machines day
and nite to re-encode our video dumps, you can now surf to

http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2012/program

and enjoy the results of a very intense four days at ccrma: slides,
papers, and videos of all talks and workshops.

best,


jörn



--
Jörn Nettingsmeier
Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487

Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio)
Tonmeister VDT

http://stackingdwarves.net

_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-announce mailing list
Linux-audio-announce@lists.linuxaudio.org
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-announce

read more

LV2 allows plugins to implement UIs in any toolkit. This has led to UIs being implemented in several (which is a Good Thing, and works fine in all hosts via Suil), but mostly Gtk.

Unfortunately, Gtk is not really suitable for use in plugins on platforms where a “system Gtk” can’t be relied on. Some toolkits are suitable for static linking, but personally, I am somewhat disillusioned with “toolkits” lately, and massive libraries in general. Sometimes all you want or need is a straightforward standard graphics API and some keyboard/mouse events.

When it comes to standard cross-platform graphics APIs, the undisputed heavyweight king is OpenGL. While not perfect (what is?), no other API is already there on almost any platform you’d care about (heck, most modern phones have hardware accelerated OpenGL). Unfortunately, OpenGL deals only with rendering, and not user input or windowing issues. What is needed is a minimal framework to get an OpenGL view to draw to, and receive keyboard and mouse events. Enter Jalv.

Jalv handles all the platform specific business behind an API very similar to GLUT, but much smaller and appropriate for plugins (which GLUT unfortunately is not). In terms of size, this is a few hundred lines of C per platform (on a personal note, this fits in well with my ever-increasing distaste in dealing with bloated junk with tons of dependencies… give me a Couple Hundred Lines of C™ any day). The breakdown on Jalv is on its homepage, but suffice to say after a few days’ work it does the job it was designed to do on X11, Mac OS X, and Windows. Since embedding X11 works in LV2 land, that means an OpenGL plugin UI can be embedded in the host, and I have the pretty pictures to prove it:

This is a simple test plugin (complete with gratuitous use of 3D) embedded in Ingen and Ardour. Both are Gtk based programs, but this works in Qt as well. Testing so far on other platforms has only been top-level since I have no programs to embed in, but the bulk of the work is done. This includes full keyboard and mouse support, with significantly more complete keyboard support than GLUT.

Naturally I can’t predict the future, so it remains to be seen how much OpenGL UI action we’ll see for plugins. Being just a low level drawing API and not a set of boxed widgets, it’s a bit open ended with a bit of a learning curve, but on the other hand there is lots of existing OpenGL code out there. Perhaps someone will throw together a library of audio appropriate widgets, if one doesn’t already exist. Either way, I think an easy to use API for writing truly portable LV2 plugin UIs is a very good thing, which hopefully eliminates a barrier for some plugin developers and helps LV2 invade the territory of its proprietary adversaries… or, at the very least, makes for a really cool 3D panner GUI :)

Things have been decidedly quiet here after the flurry of activity across March and April, but thankfully, in the real world, things haven’t been quite so quiet. I’ve been working on a new project with a couple of really talented guys, and while I can’t say too much about it yet, I can at least reveal that it’s a game!

Unsurprisingly, I’m taking care of the audio. I was initially brought on to write some music, but as we discussed the game’s design and setting, it became clear that the soundtrack would be much more sparse and ambient than my usual video game ditties. I do have a lot of ideas for the music that will fit the mood of the game, but for now, I’m focusing on the sound effects.

Designing those sound effects has definitely been a challenge. I’ve been creating sounds from scratch on the Blofeld, and using Ardour and Audacity to process recorded sounds from my Zoom H1 recorder, and while those tools are all quite familiar, these sounds are unlike anything I’ve created before. Part of the challenge is just getting an understanding of what sounds I need to make, so I’ve been playing a few different games and even watching bits of movies to get ideas on what different things should sound like.

A new prototype of the game should be ready soon; hopefully then I can real a bit more about what the game is and who I’ve been working with!

From: Olivier Rouits <olivier.rouits@...>
Subject: [LAA] QJackRcd 1.0.6 released
Date: Apr 27, 8:28 am 2012

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Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

HI,

QJackRcd 1.0.6 released with german translation from Michael Dahms

https://sourceforge.net/projects/qjackrcd/

QJackRcd is a simple QT application to record JACK server outputs with
native "turnkey" features as automatic pause/split on silence and
background sound file processing.

// or

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http-equiv="Content-Type">


HI,



QJackRcd 1.0.6 released with german translation from Michael Dahms



https://sourceforge.net/projects/qjackrcd/




charset=ISO-8859-1" />
charset=ISO-8859-1">
QJackRcd is a simple QT application to record JACK server outputs
with native "turnkey" features
as automatic pause/split on silence and background sound file
processing.



charset=ISO-8859-1" />
charset=ISO-8859-1">


// or




--------------030400060101030808090901--

read more

The “Tube” – Open movie project is starting to pick up some steam. With a kickstarter campaign running to help them generate enough funds to pay a meagre contribution to the artists involved in the production and development of the film. Linux Audio tools are being used heavily in the sound track production with Thomas Vecchione at the helm.

Show your support by pledging a donation to the kickstarter fund for tube open movie project.

From: Thierry Coduys <Thierry.Coduys@...>
Subject: [LAA] LoMus 2012
Date: Apr 25, 9:40 am 2012


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D=E9sol=E9 en cas d=92envois multiples / sorry for possible crossposting

The dead line for software submission was extended to the April 29th
_______________

LoMus 2012

=C0 la recherche des logiciels libres pour la cr=E9ation sonore et =
intermedia

Pour sa quatri=E8me =E9dition, LoMus 2012 s=92adresse =E0 tous ceux qui =
s=92aventurent dans le d=E9veloppement de logiciels libres musicaux ou =
de logiciels libres qui peuvent contribuer au processus de la cr=E9ation =
musicale.

Un prix sera remis aux logiciels qui font preuve non seulement =
d=92innovation, mais notamment d=92inventivit=E9 face aux enjeux actuels =
de la cr=E9ation musicale.

Calendrier
6 avril 2012 - Appel =E0 soumissions
29 avril 2012 - Date limite de soumission des logiciels
5 mai 2012 - Notification d'acceptation
11 mai 2012 - Remise du prix lors des JIM 2012

Info : http://concours.afim-asso.org/
JIM2012 : http://www.jim2012.be


LoMus 2012

In search of open-source software for musical and intermedia creation

For its fourth edition, LoMus 2012 invites music and audio open-source =
software creators to submit original projects that either directly or =
indirectly contribute to musical creation.

A prize will be awarded to open-source sofware that proves to be not =
only innovatory but also inventive in the present context of music and =
audio creation.

Calendar
April 6, 2012 - Call for submissions=20
April 29, 2012 - Submission deadline=20
May 5, 2012 - Admission notification=20
May 11, 2012 - JIM Awards Ceremony

Info: http://concours.afim-asso.org/
JIM2012 : http://www.jim2012.be
http://www.le-hub.org/


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-webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">
style=3D"font-size: 12px; ">D=E9sol=E9 en cas d=92envois multiples / =
sorry for possible crossposting

The second release of the Csound FLOSS Manual is finally out at www.flossmanuals.net/csound. These are some news to the first version: new chapters. chapters now completed etc. See more details in http://en.flossmanuals.net/csound/on-this-release.
Thanks to all the contributors and supporters!
Joachim Heintz & Iain McCurdy

An improved version of the original script is ready.

What's new:
- some small bugfixes
- more options
- espeak sample generator

Read more »

The Cat reads about Bach.

This is the most matching picture to this blogs topic until now.

A group of students at the University of Dundee have created this interesting prototype called Sound Sculpted. The goal was to sculpt clay using sound files drive the sculpting arms. Ideally, you would end up with pieces of art that were unique to each piece of music. As you can see in the video (after the break), they did a pretty good job of building this thing and getting the arms to respond to the music. It is almost hypnotizing to watch.

We can’t help but notice that there is a bit of a design issue. Since the 4 arms are fixed vertically, and the clay spins on the same axis they are able to move on, your variation will be very limited. We think this doesn’t detract from the project, but does offer a large area for improvement.

How would you change the sculpting arms or their motion to make each piece more unique?

Filed under: digital audio hacks, musical hacks

Pure Data is a wonder: a free and open source environment for creating your own musical and multimedia creations with graphical programming, from Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max. You can produce everything from interactive sequencers and drum machines to synths to video performance tools by connecting patch cables visually, and you can run on virtually any platform, from BeagleBoards and Rasberry Pi to Mac, Windows, and Linux desktop. Via libpd, you can target other development languages and environments, embed engines in games, or work with Android and iOS.

What hasn’t been so wonderful, of course, is Pd’s graphical editing environment, which can be charitably described as “bare-bones.” That is, until now. Pd-extended 0.43 massively improves performance and usability of the GUI in a ground-up rewrite and new plug-in architecture, and it’s just about ready for prime time. That gives you new patching and debugging tools, many familiar to users of Pd’s proprietary cousin, Max/MSP, but which are finally available to Pd, too.

It’s so important, in fact, that CDM invites Hans-Christoph Steiner, one of the key developers of Pd-extended, to give us a tour of what’s new. (Note: because Pd-extended includes various additional objects or “externals” that Pd Vanilla lacks, you should be careful when building patches for libpd. What I like to do is use Pd-extended as my editing environment, then double-check patches by opening them in Vanilla to make sure I haven’t accidentally used an object that’s not part of the bare-bones version. I can then substitute an object, copy an abstraction, or if necessary build that external.) -Ed.

The Pd-extended 0.43 release has been brewing an extra long time, about 18 months now, mostly because there are lots of big improvements. We wanted to make sure we got it right, so your patches all work, but the improvements all shine, so its taken a while. It’s now solidly beta, so we’re looking for testers. Download a beta build to try here:

http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended/releases/0.43.1

First off, the pd-gui side of Pd has been rewritten from scratch. The focus for most of the recent work has been on the editing experience, making your patching experience as productive and flexible as possible. To give some background, Pd has always been made up of two programs: pd is the core engine and pd-gui is the GUI. Since basically all computers now come with multiple CPU cores, this means that pd-gui will usually run on a separate CPU core than pd, so they don’t step on each other’s toes. pd can entirely take over its own core. If you want to make your patch use more CPU cores, then check out the [pd~] object introduced in the last release, but fine-tuned in this one.

There are so many ideas for making a better editing experience in Pd; this release makes big strides to address the editing experience. There are new features like Magic Glass, Autotips, Autopatch and Perf Mode, all available on the Edit menu.

• Magic Glass lets you magically see the messages as they pass through the cords. Just turn it on and hover above a cord, and you’ll see the messages as they go by. You can even look at signal/audio cords.
• Autotips gives you tips about what an object does, what its inlet expects, and what comes out of the outlets.
• Autopatch mode automatically connects objects as you create them.
• Perf Mode, is a mode for performance that makes it harder to accidentally close windows that are part of your performance.

A whole new Pd Window

The Pd Window is also majorly overhauled. First of all, it’s fast. Much much faster than the old one. You can now print thousands of messages per second to the Pd Window and still edit your patch. No more will an accidental dump of info cause the GUI to freeze up (well, okay, maybe if you send 10,000 messages/second, but that is way too many). There are also five levels of printing messages to the Pd Window: fatal, error, normal, debug, all. If you are only interested in fatal errors, switch the Pd Window to 0 – fatal, and you’ll only see the worst problems. You want to see every single message to debug? Switch to 4 – all, and you’ll drink from the firehose.

There is also the new log library, which lets you easily send messages for those different levels. And all messages logged with the objects from the log library are clickable: when you Ctrl-Click or Cmd-click (Mac OS X) on the line in the Pd Window, it’ll pop up the patch where the message came from, and highlight the specific object that printed it. That even works for many messages from other objects, as well.

The Pd Window also includes very basic level meters for monitoring the input and output levels. And for those who want to play with the GUI in realtime, you can type Tcl code in the Tcl entry field, and directly modify and probe the running GUI.

Customize the GUI with Plugins

One thing that you can do now is customize the GUI using GUI plugins. You can change all sorts of colors, some fonts, and many behaviors. Want to create a new object when you triple-click? Try the tripleclick example plugin Want to make the patch cords disappear when you leave Edit Mode? Check out the “only show cords in edit mode” example. Those are the simple ones. There is also Tab Completion, a search engine for the docs, a category browser for the right-click menu, a buttonbar for creating objects, and more.

You can find many GUI plugins in the new section of the downloads page as well as documentation for making your own. (What kind of GUI plugin will you write?)

Write Pd objects in more languages

Traditionally, Pd objects are written in Pd (abstractions), C and some in C++. This new release includes two “loaders”, Lua and Tcl, which allow you to write regular Pd objects in either Lua or Tcl. Pd is not the best for processing strings, so if you need to do that, you can now easily use Lua or Tcl, both very easy scripting languages for working with strings. Lua is often used for OpenGL work, so you can also run Lua objects to work in conjunction with Gem. Also, the Tcl loader lets you write GUI objects in pure Tcl, no C needed.

Multi-processing, Pd-style!

The [pd~] object now works out of box. In case you missed the introduction of the [pd~] object in the last release, we’ll introduce you now. [pd~] is Pd itself incapsulated into an object. You can run any patch inside that instance of Pd, the difference is that the Pd in the [pd~] object runs in a totally separate process. So if your computer has multiple CPU cores, which basically all computers do these days, then the Pd process inside the [pd~] object will run on a separate core. This means you can have a heavy Pd patch spread across multiple cores or CPUs. Or for people who work with video and audio together, you can have one instance for video running at a normal priority, then another instance for audio running at a high priority to make sure there aren’t clicks in the audio caused by heavy video processing.

Autotips, generated from help patches

This release also provides a new “autotips” feature to provide instant information about objects and their inlets and outlets. It is one of the first new developments to showcase all of the meta data that is now included in all of the help patches. (Check out the [pd META] subpatches.) When you hover above an inlet or the object itself in Edit Mode, you’ll see a short text description pop up on the lower left corner. But, of course, using a GUI plugin, you could customize how they are displayed to make it how you want to see it. If you want to add autotips to your object, then just add a [pd META] subpatch to your objects’ help patches, and fill out the description, etc. Voila! They’ll have instant information.

What’s next?

The core pd process still handles a lot of the GUI stuff, but we are working on splitting that out for the 0.44 release. That is a big chunk of work, but it will also bring big gains. In particular, it means that it will be possible for people to write their own GUIs for Pd, covering not just the display of the patch, but also the editing, and everything else. You like OpenFrameworks, Python, iOS, JUCE, Qt, etc.? Write your own pd-gui using the toolkit of your choice. That’s the idea at least. That will take a solid chunk of work, so we are looking for people to join that effort.

Try it yourself:

http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended/releases/0.43.1
http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended

Where to learn Pd:

Resources to start learning

-Hans-Christoph Steiner for CDM

From: Stefan Westerfeld <stefan@...>
Subject: [LAA] gst123-0.3.1
Date: Apr 23, 10:12 am 2012

gst123-0.3.1 has been released.

Overview of changes in gst123-0.3.1:
------------------------------------
* Added quiet mode (Issue 9).
* Ignore image files during playback (Issue 1).
* Added keybinding 'n' for 'play next file'.

What is gst123?
---------------
The program gst123 is designed to be a more flexible command line player in the
spirit of ogg123 and mpg123, based on gstreamer. It plays all file formats
gstreamer understands, so if you have a music collection which contains
different file formats, like flac, ogg and mp3, you can use gst123 to play all
your music files.

Since gst123-0.1.0 support for watching videos has been added; however gst123
should run fine in situations where no X11 display is available; videos can be
played without X11 display, too (-x, --novideo); in this case, only the audio
stream will be played.

It is implemented in C++ and licensed under the GNU LGPL version 2

Links:
------
Website: http://space.twc.de/~stefan/gst123.php
Download: http://space.twc.de/~stefan/gst123/gst123-0.3.1.tar.bz2
--
Stefan Westerfeld, Hamburg/Germany, http://space.twc.de/~stefan
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From: David Robillard <d@...>
Subject: [LAA] MDA-LV2 1.0.0 Released
Date: Apr 23, 10:12 am 2012

MDA-LV2 1.0.0 is out. MDA-LV2 is an LV2 port of the MDA plugins by Paul
Kellett.

Download: http://download.drobilla.net/mda-lv2-1.0.0.tar.bz2
More information about MDA-LV2: http://drobilla.net/software/mda-lv2

Enjoy,

-dr

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Some people complain about the death of the Album format. The single-track mentality is called a loss of culture and a listening strategy for the poorly educated. I think that is far away from the truth.

The technical spectrum of audio playback

We can create a whole spectrum here from full control over the order of pieces to no control: On the one end there is the single track which you can access directly. In our days that would be a digital (compressed) wave file and some player device.

On the other hand there is the (live) concert. You have no choice except leaving.

In between are: The CD, with a fixed order but very easy access to a single track and the (in)famous random feature. Then the Vinyl-LP which is the low-quality, analogue version of the CD. And the cassette, still in use for children audio-drama and hipster mixtapes, where it is very inconvenient to even skip tracks. And maybe FM radio, where the only choice is switching the channel. And for the sake of completeness movie soundtracks are on the concert side, too. Even if you listen to a single track on a soundtrack CD it is a miniature concert format which resembles the matching scenes on the screen, in order.

So from now on we can forget the CD album and talk about

Single pieces versus concerts

A single piece is the maximum choice and a concert is the minimum choice for an individual. I have nothing against concert situations (which include recordings or situations like the mentioned FM radio) but I see them as the rare exception where you give away your control for a manageable amount of time.

Control? What does that mean? I think humans want to control their own emotions. You want to be in charge and decide what mood you are in or at least decide how you react to the mood you just have. Typical concert music, like that of the 18th and 19th century, "Classical" and "Romantic", does not allow that. It is an emotional rollercoaster: Emotions develop and change over the whole time.

That does not match todays listening-style. Some people call it a loss of culture that you have so many music to choose from and can listen to it in any order, I call it autonomous and a sign for educated listeners.

You are the DJ of your own life. And now it is technically possible. With earphones it is even possible to be stronger than the surrounding music and noises, which is sometimes the same thing. I remember my music teachers in school in the 90s. For them one of the biggest enemy (besides cover versions) was background music in stores. I agree that I find this annoying as well, but it doesn't matter anymore, because you can carry your own music with you.

The power of choice is now yours.

Individuals with self-reflection and rational thinking abilities have most likely constructed playlists to match their common moods with pieces that don't have a broad emotional spectrum. Internet radio stations are on this side of the spectrum as well. If you want to chill out and listen to music you don't switch to your local "Ethno, World music and Classical Music" FM radio, you listen to an internet "chill out" stream.

Back to your very own playlists. If you didn't live behind a rock the last 20 years there is probably game music in your list. The majority of games has a non-linear time flow. That means the player decides when to move on, to a different scene. Can you imagine emotionally unstable music here? Of course not. One or more pieces loop and the mood stays the same until the scene changes, triggered by the player. In other words: It fits perfectly for the self-reliant listener. Take 10 very similar games (cough J-RPG) and you get a several 10-track-playlists for a variety of moods. Mix in a few 17th century ("baroque") pieces and you are there.

So if you see someone with headphones the next time try to imagine that this person wants to have the power over his or her own emotions and temper.

P.S - The Rant.

Naturally game composers know all that and compose emotionally stable music. So whenever you hear somebody saying "Game music is the ugly little brother of film soundtracks, which are the real deal. Game music should be like film music" then you know now that they don't know a shit what they are talking about. Other than combining visual media and a story with audio there is no connection.

Sadly some game publishers and developers believed those musicians and we got low-quality, uninspired "atmospheric" soundtracks which are "just like in a movie!". The Japanese composers maintained the old tradition to compose real music for games and did not just mix drum loops with SFX and a few boring chords like their American counterparts (or the few German composers that there are). In the "West" you have the famous famous Main Theme and that's it. No wonder there are so many Japanese Game Music Concerts (all over the world) and there a next to zero "West" concerts. Yes, I know, Blizzard... but they play the Warcraft and Starcraft music there, which is still somewhat melody based AND you can't produce more famous and AAA grade games. From Diablo you get the Tristram Theme (the one with the guitar in the beginning) and a medley. Because Diablo uses atmospheric music. High quality, very good, nothing at all like a movie soundtrack, but still atmospheric.

I got lost. I began with "concert music is evil for the modern human" and now I say you can't play certain music in a concert, which is bad as well. But there is no contradiction. A concert is still good and it consist of pieces which can be listened to without the game. That means a quality composition which is art. Without its game compound.

It has been way too long since my last status update on systemd. Here's another short, incomprehensive status update on what we worked on for systemd since then.

We have been working hard to turn systemd into the most viable set of components to build operating systems, appliances and devices from, and make it the best choice for servers, for desktops and for embedded environments alike. I think we have a really convincing set of features now, but we are actively working on making it even better.

Here's a list of some more and some less interesting features, in no particular order:

1. We added an automatic pager to systemctl (and related tools), similar to how git has it.
2. systemctl learnt a new switch --failed, to show only failed services.
3. You may now start services immediately, overrding all dependency logic by passing --ignore-dependencies to systemctl. This is mostly a debugging tool and nothing people should use in real life.
4. Sending SIGKILL as final part of the implicit shutdown logic of services is now optional and may be configured with the SendSIGKILL= option individually for each service.
5. We split off the Vala/Gtk tools into its own project systemd-ui.
6. systemd-tmpfiles learnt file globbing and creating FIFO special files as well as character and block device nodes, and symlinks. It also is capable of relabelling certain directories at boot now (in the SELinux sense).
7. Immediately before shuttding dow we will now invoke all binaries found in /lib/systemd/system-shutdown/, which is useful for debugging late shutdown.
8. You may now globally control where STDOUT/STDERR of services goes (unless individual service configuration overrides it).
9. There's a new ConditionVirtualization= option, that makes systemd skip a specific service if a certain virtualization technology is found or not found. Similar, we now have a new option to detect whether a certain security technology (such as SELinux) is available, called ConditionSecurity=. There's also ConditionCapability= to check whether a certain process capability is in the capability bounding set of the system. There's also a new ConditionFileIsExecutable=, ConditionPathIsMountPoint=, ConditionPathIsReadWrite=, ConditionPathIsSymbolicLink=.
10. The file system condition directives now support globbing.
11. Service conditions may now be "triggering" and "mandatory", meaning that they can be a necessary requirement to hold for a service to start, or simply one trigger among many.
12. At boot time we now print warnings if: /usr is on a split-off partition but not already mounted by an initrd; if /etc/mtab is not a symlink to /proc/mounts; CONFIG_CGROUPS is not enabled in the kernel. We'll also expose this as tainted flag on the bus.
13. You may now boot the same OS image on a bare metal machine and in Linux namespace containers and will get a clean boot in both cases. This is more complicated than it sounds since device management with udev or write access to /sys, /proc/sys or things like /dev/kmsg is not available in a container. This makes systemd a first-class choice for managing thin container setups. This is all tested with systemd's own systemd-nspawn tool but should work fine in LXC setups, too. Basically this means that you do not have to adjust your OS manually to make it work in a container environment, but will just work out of the box. It also makes it easier to convert real systems into containers.
14. We now automatically spawn gettys on HVC ttys when booting in VMs.
15. We introduced /etc/machine-id as a generalization of D-Bus machine ID logic. See this blog story for more information. On stateless/read-only systems the machine ID is initialized randomly at boot. In virtualized environments it may be passed in from the machine manager (with qemu's -uuid switch, or via the container interface).
16. All of the systemd-specific /etc/fstab mount options are now in the x-systemd-xyz format.
17. To make it easy to find non-converted services we will now implicitly prefix all LSB and SysV init script descriptions with the strings "LSB:" resp. "SYSV:".
18. We introduced /run and made it a hard dependency of systemd. This directory is now widely accepted and implemented on all relevant Linux distributions.
19. systemctl can now execute all its operations remotely too (-H switch).
20. We now ship systemd-nspawn, a really powerful tool that can be used to start containers for debugging, building and testing, much like chroot(1). It is useful to just get a shell inside a build tree, but is good enough to boot up a full system in it, too.
21. If we query the user for a hard disk password at boot he may hit TAB to hide the asterisks we normally show for each key that is entered, for extra paranoia.
22. We don't enable udev-settle.service anymore, which is only required for certain legacy software that still hasn't been updated to follow devices coming and going cleanly.
23. We now include a tool that can plot boot speed graphs, similar to bootchartd, called systemd-analyze.
24. At boot, we now initialize the kernel's binfmt_misc logic with the data from /etc/binfmt.d.
25. systemctl now recognizes if it is run in a chroot() environment and will work accordingly (i.e. apply changes to the tree it is run in, instead of talking to the actual PID 1 for this). It also has a new --root= switch to work on an OS tree from outside of it.
26. There's a new unit dependency type OnFailureIsolate= that allows entering a different target whenever a certain unit fails. For example, this is interesting to enter emergency mode if file system checks of crucial file systems failed.
27. Socket units may now listen on Netlink sockets, special files from /proc and POSIX message queues, too.
28. There's a new IgnoreOnIsolate= flag which may be used to ensure certain units are left untouched by isolation requests. There's a new IgnoreOnSnapshot= flag which may be used to exclude certain units from snapshot units when they are created.
29. There's now small mechanism services for changing the local hostname and other host meta data, changing the system locale and console settings and the system clock.
30. We now limit the capability bounding set for a number of our internal services by default.
31. Plymouth may now be disabled globally with plymouth.enable=0 on the kernel command line.
32. We now disallocate VTs when a getty finished running (and optionally other tools run on VTs). This adds extra security since it clears up the scrollback buffer so that subsequent users cannot get access to a user's session output.
33. In socket units there are now options to control the IP_TRANSPARENT, SO_BROADCAST, SO_PASSCRED, SO_PASSSEC socket options.
34. The receive and send buffers of socket units may now be set larger than the default system settings if needed by using SO_{RCV,SND}BUFFORCE.
35. We now set the hardware timezone as one of the first things in PID 1, in order to avoid time jumps during normal userspace operation, and to guarantee sensible times on all generated logs. We also no longer save the system clock to the RTC on shutdown, assuming that this is done by the clock control tool when the user modifies the time, or automatically by the kernel if NTP is enabled.
36. The SELinux directory got moved from /selinux to /sys/fs/selinux.
37. We added a small service systemd-logind that keeps tracks of logged in users and their sessions. It creates control groups for them, implements the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR specification for them, maintains seats and device node ACLs and implements shutdown/idle inhibiting for clients. It auto-spawns gettys on all local VTs when the user switches to them (instead of starting six of them unconditionally), thus reducing the resource foot print by default. It has a D-Bus interface as well as a simple synchronous library interface. This mechanism obsoletes ConsoleKit which is now deprecated and should no longer be used.
38. There's now full, automatic multi-seat support, and this is enabled in GNOME 3.4. Just by pluging in new seat hardware you get a new login screen on your seat's screen.
39. There is now an option ControlGroupModify= to allow services to change the properties of their control groups dynamically, and one to make control groups persistent in the tree (ControlGroupPersistent=) so that they can be created and maintained by external tools.
40. We now jump back into the initrd in shutdown, so that it can detach the root file system and the storage devices backing it. This allows (for the first time!) to reliably undo complex storage setups on shutdown and leave them in a clean state.
41. systemctl now supports presets, a way for distributions and administrators to define their own policies on whether services should be enabled or disabled by default on package installation.
42. systemctl now has high-level verbs for masking/unmasking units. There's also a new command (systemctl list-unit-files) for determining the list of all installed unit file files and whether they are enabled or not.
43. We now apply sysctl variables to each new network device, as it appears. This makes /etc/sysctl.d compatible with hot-plug network devices.
44. There's limited profiling for SELinux start-up perfomance built into PID 1.
45. There's a new switch PrivateNetwork= to turn of any network access for a specific service.
46. Service units may now include configuration for control group parameters. A few (such as MemoryLimit=) are exposed with high-level options, and all others are available via the generic ControlGroupAttribute= setting.
47. There's now the option to mount certain cgroup controllers jointly at boot. We do this now for cpu and cpuacct by default.
48. We added the journal and turned it on by default.
49. All service output is now written to the Journal by default, regardless whether it is sent via syslog or simply written to stdout/stderr. Both message streams end up in the same location and are interleaved the way they should. All log messages even from the kernel and from early boot end up in the journal. Now, no service output gets unnoticed and is saved and indexed at the same location.
50. systemctl status will now show the last 10 log lines for each service, directly from the journal.
51. We now show the progress of fsck at boot on the console, again. We also show the much loved colorful [ OK ] status messages at boot again, as known from most SysV implementations.
52. We merged udev into systemd.
53. We implemented and documented interfaces to container managers and initrds for passing execution data to systemd. We also implemented and documented an interface for storage daemons that are required to back the root file system.
54. There are two new options in service files to propagate reload requests between several units.
55. systemd-cgls won't show kernel threads by default anymore, or show empty control groups.
56. We added a new tool systemd-cgtop that shows resource usage of whole services in a top(1) like fasion.
57. systemd may now supervise services in watchdog style. If enabled for a service the daemon daemon has to ping PID 1 in regular intervals or is otherwise considered failed (which might then result in restarting it, or even rebooting the machine, as configured). Also, PID 1 is capable of pinging a hardware watchdog. Putting this together, the hardware watchdogs PID 1 and PID 1 then watchdogs specific services. This is highly useful for high-availability servers as well as embedded machines. Since watchdog hardware is noawadays built into all modern chipsets (including desktop chipsets), this should hopefully help to make this a more widely used functionality.
58. We added support for a new kernel command line option systemd.setenv= to set an environment variable system-wide.
59. By default services which are started by systemd will have SIGPIPE set to ignored. The Unix SIGPIPE logic is used to reliably implement shell pipelines and when left enabled in services is usually just a source of bugs and problems.
60. You may now configure the rate limiting that is applied to restarts of specific services. Previously the rate limiting parameters were hard-coded (similar to SysV).
61. There's now support for loading the IMA integrity policy into the kernel early in PID 1, similar to how we already did it with the SELinux policy.
62. There's now an official API to schedule and query scheduled shutdowns.
63. We changed the license from GPL2+ to LGPL2.1+.
64. We made systemd-detect-virt an official tool in the tool set. Since we already had code to detect certain VM and container environments we now added an official tool for administrators to make use of in shell scripts and suchlike.
65. We documented numerous interfaces systemd introduced.

Much of the stuff above is already available in Fedora 15 and 16, or will be made available in the upcoming Fedora 17.

And that's it for now. There's a lot of other stuff in the git commits, but most of it is smaller and I will it thus spare you.

I'd like to thank everybody who contributed to systemd over the past years.

Thanks for your interest!

I'm back! from this years journey to Linux Audio Conference 2012, held at the CCRMA Stanford, CA of course :) Good riddance of a +0800 jet lag, it took me almost 3 days do recover in full, sort of. Still speachless though. Well, I never was a good speacher nor writer anyhow, even on my own native mother's language (european portuguese for the clueless). The LAC journeys are mostly the single opportunity on each year when I get to exercise some spoken english, as awful as my own version of it may sound to tender ears. Move along.

Yes. Another year, another LAC, one can cynically say. And yet, this year marked an ephemeral 10th anniversary and it went all just so perfect and smooth as much of that kind numerology can go. It might be kind of lazy to say there were zero (0) incidents to rant about. It's amazing what so much can be done with so few good people (or so I think). Sure that we all missed some old faces and habitués, most notably Frank Neumann aka. AudioFranky. But the few who mastered the steering wheel have done a whole hell of a job. Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, Bruno Ruviaro, Robin Gareus, Julius O.Smith and Jörn Nettingsmeier at the backstage, as always.

The talks were great, the coffee was lousy but the latter got completely obscured by any sip of wine I could find from Napa Valley, which was just excellent, in fact exceeding all my best expectations. From this egg-head of yours, yet coming from a proud-and-traditional-wine-makers country like Portugal is... well, well... that was nice, really nice :)

Apart from all the frivolousness I had to pursuit just because it was my first chance laying my foot at the American continent, add to that that I was zombie-like compelled to touch with my own eyes and get my feet wet by what I call the Magellan effect ;) I had to stare and touch the Pacific ocean once in a life time :) Half Moon Bay was the place, home of the famous Mavericks surf spot. And speaking of it, well, it isn't that a big epiphany compared to what I have back home (Portugal). While stood in awe I did scratched my bald head and thought: -- Hell, this is no big deal, compared to what I have back there. In fact, you'll be amazed about how the west coast of Portugal is almost a copycat of this. Trade Atlantic by Pacific and you're done. Ah! Garret Mcnamara might just have a point in there :)

Back to reality. I am sorry not telling you the whole story and experience this time, compared to last years perhaps. Yeah, so much to tell, so short words to comply.

Nevertheless,

• all my lousy and unedited photos taken during the whole journey are here:
  http://www.rncbc.org/lac2012
• a couple of videos (actually 3) were shot during the Linux Sound Night, LSN2012@COHO-Stanford, are there too:
  http://www.youtube.com/user/rncbchannel

That's all folks!

See y'all next year on LAC2013@IEM-Graz :)

Cheers && Enjoy.

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From time to time we find ourselves in the mood for some Chiptunes. You know, the music that accompanied all of the best 8-bit console games? These days there are a lot of projects that use the audio chips of yore to recreate the sounds, but you’re always faced with the issue of sourcing those parts. [Jack Gassett] took some inspiration from one of those projects, but solved the rare hardware dilemma by building his own Chiptunes MIDI device in an FPGA.

He saw one of our features on an Arduino controlled YM2149 programmable sound generator. He realized that you can already find FPGA libraries out there that mimic this sound generation hardware, and he’s already done extensive work with an Arduino soft processor. Why not combine the two?

He’s using a Papilio FPGA with a wing that includes a MIDI connector and audio-out jack. As you can hear in the clip after the break this sounds just like the real thing. And he’s got plans to roll as many different types of sound generating chips into the mix as possible. You know, one FPGA synth to rule them all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbCybapnKTw

Filed under: digital audio hacks

From: David Robillard <d@...>
Subject: [LAA] Jalv 1.0.0
Date: Apr 20, 9:06 am 2012

Jalv 1.0.0 is out. Jalv is a simple but fully featured LV2 host for
Jack. It runs LV2 plugins and exposes their ports as Jack ports,
essentially making any LV2 plugin function as a Jack application. Jalv
is particularly useful for testing during plugin development, and as an
example of a Lilv-based LV2 host.

This is the initial release of Jalv. It is still a relatively immature
program, but supports most of the important new functionality in the LV2
1.0.0 release (e.g. saving plugin presets with state, atom-based event
ports, message-based plugin=>UI communication, etc.).

Download: http://download.drobilla.net/jalv-1.0.0.tar.bz2
Homepage: http://drobilla.net/software/jalv

Share and enjoy,

-dr

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From: David Robillard <d@...>
Subject: [LAA] Lilv 0.14.2 Released
Date: Apr 20, 9:06 am 2012

Oops! The Lilv 0.14.2 release fixes compilation with –dyn-manifest. If
you are not using dynmanifest support with Lilv, there is no reason to
upgrade.

Download: http://download.drobilla.net/lilv-0.14.2.tar.bz2

Enjoy, and be sure to report any problems... at least a week from now ;)

-dr

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What happens when you combine Espeak + Hydrogen + createH2kit_V2.py + 30min of spare time ?
Click the link below and find out :-)


Hydrogen Espeak Drumkit


In a next post i'll explain a bit more how i did this and also post the new python script that creates a drumkit starting from a txt file.
Stay tuned !

Jalv 1.0.0 is out. Jalv is a simple but fully featured LV2 host for Jack. It runs LV2 plugins and exposes their ports as Jack ports, essentially making any LV2 plugin function as a Jack application. Jalv is particularly useful for testing during plugin development, and as an example of a Lilv-based LV2 host.

This is the initial release of Jalv. It is still a relatively immature program, but supports most of the important new functionality in the LV2 1.0.0 release (e.g. saving plugin presets with state, atom-based event ports, message-based plugin=>UI communication, etc.).

Oops! The Lilv 0.14.2 release fixes compilation with –dyn-manifest. If you are not using dynmanifest support with Lilv, there is no reason to upgrade.

How do you visualize the invisible? How do expose a process with multiple parameters in a way that’s straightforward and musically intuitive? Can messing about with granular sound feel like touching that sound – something untouchable?

Music’s ephemeral, unseeable quality, and the ways we approach sound in computer music in similarly abstract ways, are part of the pleasure of making noise. But working out how to then design around that can be equally satisfying. That’s why it’s wonderful to see work like the upcoming Borderlands for iPad and desktop. It solves a problem familiar to computer users – designing an interface for a granular playback instrument – but does so in a way that’s uncommonly clear. And with free code and research sharing, it could help inspire other projects, too.

Its creator also reminds, us, though, that the impetus for all of this can be the quest for beautiful sound.

Creator Chris Carlson is publishing source code and a presentation for the NIME [New Interfaces for Musical Expression] conference. But this isn’t just an academic problem or a fun design exercise: he also uses this tool in performance, so the design is informed by those needs. (I’m especially attuned to this particular problem, as I was recently mucking about with a Pd patch of mine that did similar things, working out how to perform with it and what the interface should look like. I know I’m not alone, either.)

The basic function of the app: load up a selection of audio clips, and the software distributes them graphically in the interface. Next:

A “grain cloud” may be added to the screen under the current mouse position with the press of a key. This cloud has an internal timing system that triggers individual grain voices in sequence. The user has control over the number of grain voices in a cloud, the overlap of these grains, the duration, the pitch, the window/envelope, and the extent of random motion in the XY plane. By selecting a cloud and moving it over a rectangle, the sound contained in the rectangle will be sampled at the relative position of each grain voice as it is triggered. By moving the cloud in along the dimension of the rectangle that is orthogonal to the time dimension, the amplitude of the resulting grain bursts changes.

You can see how Chris is imagining this conceptually in a sketch he shares on his site:

An extended demo shows in greater detail how this all works:

Chris is a second-year Master’s student at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics [CCRMA] in California. The iPad version is coming soon, but you can get started with the Linux and Mac versions right away, and even join a SoundCloud group to share what you’re making. You’ll find all the details, and links to source code, on the CCRMA site. (And if someone feels like building this on Windows, you can save Chris the trouble.)

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~carlsonc/256a/Borderlands/index.html

I also love this Max Mathews quote Chris shares as inspiration:

Max Mathews, in a lecture delivered at Stanford in the fall of 2010
“Any sound that the human ear can hear can be made by a sequence of digits. And that’s a true theorem. Most of the sounds that you make, shall we say randomly are either uninteresting, or horrible, or downright dangerous to your hearing. There’s an awful lot to be learned on how to make sounds that are beautiful.”

Beyond the technology, beyond this design I admire, anything that sends you on the path to making beautiful sound seems to be a worthy exercise. It’s a challenge you can face every day and never grow tired.

http://modulationindex.com/ [Chris' site, with more information]

Thanks to Ingmar Koch (Dr. Walker) for the tip!

From: David Robillard <d@...>
Subject: [LAA] Lilv 0.14.0
Date: Apr 19, 8:43 am 2012

Lilv 0.14.0 is out. Lilv is a library to make the use of LV2 plugins as
simple as possible for applications.

This release includes many improvements, most notably built-in support
for saving/restoring plugin state (including powerful non-destructive
saving of plugin state which contains files), many bug and portability
fixes, and support for new LV2 concepts.

Changes:

* Add lilv_plugin_get_extension_data
* Use path variables in pkgconfig files
* Install man page to DATADIR (e.g. PREFIX/share/man, not PREFIX/man)
* Make Lilv::uri_to_path static inline (fix linking errors)
* Use correct URI for dcterms:replaces (for hiding old plugins):
"http://purl.org/dc/terms/replaces"
* Fix compilation on BSD
* Only load dynmanifest libraries once per bundle, not once per plugin
* Fix lilv_world_find_nodes to work with wildcard subjects
* Add lilv_plugin_get_related to get resources related to plugins that
are not directly rdfs:seeAlso linked (e.g. presets)
* Add lilv_world_load_resource for related resources (e.g. presets)
* Print presets in lv2info
* Remove locale smashing kludges and use new serd functions for
converting nodes to/from numbers.
* Add LilvState API for handling plugin state. This makes it simple to
save and restore plugin state both in memory and on disk, as well as
save presets in a host-sharable way since the disk format is
identical to the LV2 presets format.
* Update old references to lv2_list (now lv2ls)
* Support compilation as C++ under MSVC++.
* Remove use of wordexp.
* Add lilv_plugin_get_port_by_designation() and lilv_port_get_index()
as an improved generic alternative to
lilv_plugin_get_latency_port_index().
* Add lilv_plugin_get_project() and get author information from
project if it is not given directly on the plugin.

Enjoy,

-dr

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From: David Robillard <d@...>
Subject: [LAA] Suil 0.6.0 Released
Date: Apr 19, 8:43 am 2012

Suil 0.6.0 is out. Suil is a lightweight C library for loading and
wrapping LV2 plugin UIs. Suil transparently presents UIs written in any
toolkit as the desired widget type of host programs, so hosts do not
have to depend on foreign toolkits.

The biggest change with this release is support for wrapping X11 UIs,
which can be used to implement a UI in just about any toolkit or
graphics API on X11 based systems.

Changes:

* Use path variables in pkgconfig files
* Add support for embedding X11 UIs (ui:X11UI)
* Support new LV2 UI features automatically if provided by host

Download: http://download.drobilla.net/suil-0.6.0.tar.bz2
More information about Suil: http://drobilla.net/software/suil

Enjoy,

-dr

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Lilv 0.14.0 is out. Lilv is a library to make the use of LV2 plugins as simple as possible for applications.

This release includes many improvements, most notably built-in support for saving/restoring plugin state (including powerful non-destructive saving of plugin state which contains files), as well as many bug and portability fixes.

Changes:

• Add lilv_plugin_get_extension_data
• Use path variables in pkgconfig files
• Install man page to DATADIR (e.g. PREFIX/share/man, not PREFIX/man)
• Make Lilv::uri_to_path static inline (fix linking errors)
• Use correct URI for dcterms:replaces (for hiding old plugins): “http://purl.org/dc/terms/replaces”
• Fix compilation on BSD
• Only load dynmanifest libraries once per bundle, not once per plugin
• Fix lilv_world_find_nodes to work with wildcard subjects
• Add lilv_plugin_get_related to get resources related to plugins that are not directly rdfs:seeAlso linked (e.g. presets)
• Add lilv_world_load_resource for related resources (e.g. presets)
• Print presets in lv2info
• Remove locale smashing kludges and use new serd functions for converting nodes to/from numbers.
• Add LilvState API for handling plugin state. This makes it simple to save and restore plugin state both in memory and on disk, as well as save presets in a host-sharable way since the disk format is identical to the LV2 presets format.
• Update old references to lv2_list (now lv2ls)
• Support compilation as C++ under MSVC++.
• Remove use of wordexp.
• Add lilv_plugin_get_port_by_designation() and lilv_port_get_index() as an improved generic alternative to lilv_plugin_get_latency_port_index().
• Add lilv_plugin_get_project() and get author information from project if it is not given directly on the plugin.

Suil 0.6.0 is out. Suil is a lightweight C library for loading and wrapping LV2 plugin UIs. Suil transparently presents UIs written in any toolkit as the desired widget type of host programs, so hosts do not have to depend on foreign toolkits.

The biggest change with this release is support for wrapping X11 UIs, which can be used to implement a UI in just about any toolkit or graphics API on X11 based systems.

Changes:

• Use path variables in pkgconfig files
• Add support for embedding X11 UIs (ui:X11UI)
• Support new LV2 UI features automatically if provided by host

Sratom is a new C library for serialising LV2 atoms to/from Turtle. It is intended to be a full serialisation solution for LV2 atoms, allowing implementations to serialise binary atoms to strings and read them back again. This is particularly useful for saving plugin state, or implementing plugin control with network transparency. Sratom uses Serd and Sord to do the work, it is a small library implemented in a single source file, suitable for direct inclusion in projects if avoiding a dependency is desired.

Download Sratom 0.2.0

We’re rather impressed with the work [Aaron] did to add Bluetooth connectivity to his 2008 Honda. He used an aftermarket kit, but rolled in his own revisions to make it look and feel like an original feature.

After being disappointed by an expensive docking system he grabbed a Jensen BT360 kit for about $35. It comes with an external speaker which would look horrid mounted on the dash. That speaker is meant to play your telephone audio via Bluetooth, while music from the phone is sent to the car stereo using an FM transmitter. Since he planned on hiding the control unit under the dash anyway, it wasn’t too hard to add some wires which intercept the audio being fed to that FM transmitter. From there he added a couple of relays to automatically route the audio signals (when present) and patched the whole thing into the Aux input. This way he doesn’t need the extra speaker, and all sound is feed to the head unit via wire instead of radio transmissions.

The final setup works pretty well. If a phone call comes in it automatically mutes the volume, or pauses the iPod if that’s what’s currently playing through the Aux port. [Aaron] thinks the bass from music played via Bluetooth is not quite as rich as when using the Aux port, but if you don’t mind the cables that’s still an option too.

Filed under: digital audio hacks, transportation hacks

From: David Robillard <d@...>
Subject: [LAA] LV2 1.0.0 Released
Date: Apr 18, 9:07 am 2012

The first unified LV2 release, LV2 1.0.0, is out.

This release merges the previous lv2core package with all the official
extension packages, as well as example plugins, lv2specgen, and
additional data. From a developer point of view, the biggest change is
that all LV2 API headers can be used by simply checking for the single
pkg-config package "lv2" (for compatibility the previous "lv2core"
package is still installed). Implementations are encouraged to abandon
the "copy paste headers" practice and depend on this package instead.

With this release, several new extensions have become stable that
together greatly increase the power of LV2: atom, log, parameters,
patch, port-groups, port-props, resize-port, state, time, worker.

Download: http://lv2plug.in/spec/lv2-1.0.0.tar.bz2

Documentation and more detailed change logs: http://lv2plug.in/ns/

More information about LV2: http://lv2plug.in/

Enjoy,

-dr

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Recordings done using jack, qtractor, and a hacked binaural parabolic mic rigged together with salvaged satellite dishes.

The linux audio conference is being held at stanford this year; coincidentally linux audio is recording severe human rights violations in the bay area, of which Stanford plays a part, if peripheral through SRI, Sarnoff, and the quake catcher network.

For those who will be attending, the posted url is worth visiting first.

Beware the vipers drones and body scanners. Hope to see you all soon.

7og

The first unified LV2 release, LV2 1.0.0, is out.

This release merges the previous lv2core package with all the official extension packages, as well as example plugins, lv2specgen, and additional data. From a developer point of view, the biggest change is that all LV2 API headers can be used by simply checking for the single pkg-config package “lv2″ (for compatibility the previous “lv2core” package is still installed). Implementations are encouraged to abandon the “copy paste headers” practice and depend on this package instead.

With this release, several new extensions have become stable that together greatly increase the power of LV2: atom, log, parameters, patch, port-groups, port-props, resize-port, state, time, worker.

Documentation and more detailed change logs

Download LV2 1.0.0

After two beta releases, we are proud to announce the final release
“drag-on-fly” guitarix2-0.22.0.

Guitarix is a tube amplifier simulation for jack, with effect modules
and an additional stereo effect chain.

Download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/guitarix/

You can find some screenshots and explanations of the new version in

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/guitarix/index.php?title=EnhancedUI

Things that changed since the beta2 release:

* many small fixes and enhancements
* compile fixes for several environments
* convolver unit
* fixed crash
* presets like for other rack units (instead of the old “favourites”)
* for beta users: parameter scaling for Vibe unit changed.
if you stored a preset with Vibe settings you’ll have to
adjust the values (sorry).
* if you see corrupted graphics in screen animations: it is probably a
video driver bug. You can try to set Option “EXAPixmaps” “off” at the
end of the device section in xorg.conf (location depending on system,
e.g. /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ati.conf).

Announcement text from the beta releases:

Many things changed in the user interface. You can move rack units
by drag and drop (reflecting the signal flow), store individual
settings for each rack unit and use preset banks with several settings
for the whole rack. It’s easy to take our “factory presets” and make
your own customized bank, or make your own from scratch and share it
on the Guitarix forum.

There is a new “live play mode” with only the info you need on stage
(it’s fullscreen, no other penguins around), and a preset picking mode
with a foot switch (midi or usb, or if you don’t have one even the
space bar of your keyboard) and the strings of your guitar to switch
settings.

Rack units are now put into categories, and two new ones are a noise
gate for high noise levels and a univibe emulation. Thanks go to the
developer of abGate and the nice guys from Rakarrack who helped
porting their univibe code and made the inclusion of it possible.

This is already too long, please check it out and give feedback if you
find a problem, this version is still beta.

Please refer to our project page for more information:

http://guitarix.sourceforge.net/

download site:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guitarix/

please report bugs and suggestions in our forum:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/guitarix/

here you can find a couple of examples produced by guitarix users:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/guitarix/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=83

have fun

_________________________________________________________________________

For extra Impulse Responses, guitarix uses the zita-convolver library,
and, for resampling we use zita-resampler, both written by Fons
Adriaensen.

http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/index.html

We use the marvellous faust compiler to build the amp and most effects
and will say thanks to

: Julius Smith
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/realsimple/faust/

: Albert Graef
http://q-lang.sourceforge.net/examples.html#Faust

: Yann Orlary
http://faust.grame.fr/
________________________________________________________________________

guitarix development team

Inside this compact white box lurks a lot of sonic power and technical prowess. Perhaps that explains why the newest version of the open source Shruthi-1 now sports a crazy-badass wolf dog cartoon with glowing eyes.

Since its launch, the Shruthi-1 has gradually evolved new features, with a fairly sophisticated combination of hardware and extensive software. At its core, it’s a “hybrid” synth with digital/virtual analog oscillators and real-analog filter. The digital oscillators allow it to change character, for classic virtual analog subtractive, or wavetable, FM, phase distortion, and vowel synthesis.

The big news with the filter is that the various flavors of filter board are now discontinued. Sadly, the wonderful CEM3379 filter chip is just too rare to have a long-term home in this synth; the Shruthi-1, like other synths (the Dark Energy being a recent example) has hit chip scarcity.

But in its place is something else new and wonderful. The SSM2164 (uh, that doesn’t roll of the tongue, but yes, that filter) combines 15 filter responses with four resonance models, for a total of 60 possible filter sounds. See also the Oberheim Matrix-12 and Xpander for pole-mixing techniques. You also get self-oscillation, and even a Korg DS-inspired diode waveshaper. (I won’t go into any more detail, as maker Mutable describes this in gory precision.)

In a way, the Shruthi-1 – despite its minimal knobs – really hides a semi-modular instrument, one with its own built-in arpeggiator, modulation matrix, duophony, rhythmical oscillator cycling, and lots of other features. If there’s a technical feature possible – just about any feature – the Shruthi-1 does it. Combined with that terrific filter and digital grunge, I think it’s a terrific deal in desktop synths.

In fact, my only real criticism is, it does so much, you’re likely to be stuck paging through menus – or should focus on MIDI programming – because of the minimal controls. I can see why members of the Shruthi-1 community have been building expansion controllers for it to get more hands-on control. But on the other hand, to me, it’s entirely worth the tradeoff going compact – even with a complex menu system. The result is a synth that’s far more affordable and portable. It’s a natural for MIDI users.

The new design is also unquestionably the best-looking Shruthi yet, thanks to translucent white plexiglass and white LED lighting. 130 € buys you the kit (plus another 20 € in parts), but I’d strongly recommend the pre-assembled version if you’re less familiar with bigger builds. There are a lot of parts and two boards, plus a pretty white circuit board that will look grimy if you don’t solder carefully. For experienced builders, it should be a great assembly process into which you’ll want to sink your teeth, wolf-like. But for less-experienced builders – or just people who want to get straight to making sound – I think 349 € is a small price to ask. (A carry bag and European wall wart are included.) Just grab the pre-built version fast; because they’re hand-assembled, they won’t last long.

Full details:
Shruthi-1, 4-Pole Mission edition

Be sure to have a listen to the way the new stuff sounds:

The other important thing to mention about the Shruthi-1 is that it’s a fully open source synth. (An earlier version prohibited commercial use, but it now uses a more permissive license.) The best way to see what lurks inside is to check out GitHub. Apart from being able to modify the Shruthi-1 hardware and software design, there’s a library you can use in your own projects:

https://github.com/pichenettes/shruthi-1

This also means the Shruthi-1 joins our own MeeBlip among open source synths. I’ve been a bit amused at people comparing the two, because what I like about the Shruthi is that it’s basically MeeBlip’s opposite. We kept the design of the MeeBlip as minimal as possible, both with an eye to keeping one-to-one hardware controls and making modification simpler. The Shruthi is lovely because it’s the reverse: it retains a small footprint, but packs lots of sonic options. It’s the maximal alternative.

I’m just happy that the hardware landscape in general offers loads of great choices for people wanting to augment their computer soft synths with hardware. Who says the synthesizer’s best days are in the past?

A couple of days ago Emanuel Rumpf (one of the H2 users) pointed me to the fact that it is really important to follow the GM midi mapping when you create a new drumkit, and right he is!
Since we are in the middle of the Hydrogen spring drumkit contest I updated the info in the H2 manual right away, but while doing that i noticed that there is something very weird going on with Hydrogen's 'GM kit' : is't not GM compliant  :-(

While figuring out the correct mapping i decided to create a GM compliant drumkit template, and added something extra ;-)


Read more »

From: Robin Gareus <robin@...>
Subject: [LAA] [ANN] xjadeo 0.6.3 released
Date: Apr 16, 9:07 am 2012

xjadeo is a video player that synchronizes video to an external
time-source: http://xjadeo.sf.net/

This is maintenance release - preparing xjadeo for newer ffmpeg >=0.10
API. It's a source-code update only. The win32 and OSX binaries ship
with older versions of ffmpeg.

greetings from LAC,
enjoy,
robin
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From: Andreas Degert <andreas.degert@...>
Subject: [LAA] Guitarix release 0.22.0
Date: Apr 16, 9:07 am 2012

After two beta releases, we are proud to announce the final release
"drag-on-fly" guitarix2-0.22.0.

Guitarix is a tube amplifier simulation for jack, with effect modules
and an additional stereo effect chain.

Download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/guitarix/

You can find some screenshots and explanations of the new version in

https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/guitarix/index.php?title=EnhancedUI

Things that changed since the beta2 release:

* many small fixes and enhancements
* compile fixes for several environments
* convolver unit
* fixed crash
* presets like for other rack units (instead of the old "favourites")
* for beta users: parameter scaling for Vibe unit changed.
if you stored a preset with Vibe settings you'll have to
adjust the values (sorry).
* if you see corrupted graphics in screen animations: it is probably a
video driver bug. You can try to set Option "EXAPixmaps" "off" at the
end of the device section in xorg.conf (location depending on system,
e.g. /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ati.conf).


Announcement text from the beta releases:

Many things changed in the user interface. You can move rack units
by drag and drop (reflecting the signal flow), store individual
settings for each rack unit and use preset banks with several settings
for the whole rack. It's easy to take our "factory presets" and make
your own customized bank, or make your own from scratch and share it
on the Guitarix forum.

There is a new "live play mode" with only the info you need on stage
(it's fullscreen, no other penguins around), and a preset picking mode
with a foot switch (midi or usb, or if you don't have one even the
space bar of your keyboard) and the strings of your guitar to switch
settings.

Rack units are now put into categories, and two new ones are a noise
gate for high noise levels and a univibe emulation. Thanks go to the
developer of abGate and the nice guys from Rakarrack who helped
porting their univibe code and made the inclusion of it possible.

This is already too long, please check it out and give feedback if you
find a problem, this version is still beta.

Please refer to our project page for more information:

http://guitarix.sourceforge.net/

download site:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guitarix/

please report bugs and suggestions in our forum:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/guitarix/

here you can find a couple of examples produced by guitarix users:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/guitarix/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=83

have fun

_________________________________________________________________________


For extra Impulse Responses, guitarix uses the zita-convolver library,
and, for resampling we use zita-resampler, both written by Fons
Adriaensen.

http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/index.html

We use the marvellous faust compiler to build the amp and most effects
and will say thanks to

: Julius Smith
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/realsimple/faust/

: Albert Graef
http://q-lang.sourceforge.net/examples.html#Faust

: Yann Orlary
http://faust.grame.fr/
________________________________________________________________________


guitarix development team
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Hey All,

With the LAC on at the moment, its a prime time to do some extra development on features that need some finishing before being fully useful. That has been going on, and now the AutoMove feature allows the changing of the length of the fade. Currently the mapping to change the length is set to right click, that needs to be changed as we can only cycle up in length. Current options for beat lengths are 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32.

Also fixed was the "Master Beat Indicator", (the moving widget here). It now just syncs to JACK tempo, and will display which of the beats between 1 and 4 we're on. Since the AutoMove function is triggered on a downbeat (every 4th beat) the tempo indicator shows when the AutoMove fade will come into effect.

The current git head (master branch) is the exact version of Luppp that I used for the performance at the LAC Sound Night yesterday. Many thanks to Luigi Verona for his droning series which was the basis for the piece.

Greetings from the LAC, -Harry

Elektronengehirn performs at Mme Claude Berlin, 16. April 2012 21:00

José Luis Romero L. asked me for a Logo for LinuxMaya, the honduran Linux users group. I said yes, mainly because it was an interesting opportunity, stylistically, and a welcome break from my currently more layout and interaction-design heavy job.

From their self-description, they are a group of professional and enthusiast users of Free Software and GNU/Linux, who want to spread the word about Free Software and offer expertise in Honduras and Central America.

Now it would be cute if one could express such ideas in a logo, but it’s all so damn abstract and shared by many projects. The first responsibility of a logo is to be recognisable. So I focused on the name and found inspriation in mayan symbols and stone carving.

A few small sketches:

The final result:

Filed under: Logos, Planet Ubuntu

The GStreamer team announces a new release of the GStreamer core, Base/Good/Bad/Ugly/libav modules for the 0.11 GStreamer unstable release series.

This is the first release candidate of the upcoming 1.0 release. It is intended for developers and people wanting to port their plugins and applications to the new series. Only minor or absolutely necessary changes to the core/base API/ABI will happen between this release and the final 1.0.0 release.

Check out release notes for gstreamer core or gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-bad, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-libav, or download tarballs for gstreamer or gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-bad, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-libav,

From: <@...>
Subject: [LAA] Mixer 4 v 1.01
Date: Apr 12, 8:24 am 2012

--=_8f8380a726d309d2959eec148afd452b
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

BODY { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px;
}Mixer4, the new text input audio mixer has been updated. The latest
version contains a couple of eq bug fixes, and lots of work on a
recursive reverb algorithm. The user can choose the position of the
listener in the room. An RMS sensing compressor has been added to
complement the peak sensing one. Also, command line entry of source
files is possible and makes submixing doable through a script. Both
32 and 64 bit versions are available in the same small download. A
quick start pdf and manual are available, but please feel welcome to
email me for additional help.
Grekim
www.acousticrefuge.com/mixer4.htm=20
--=_8f8380a726d309d2959eec148afd452b
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"


BODY { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px; }
style>Mixer4, the new text input audio mixer has been updated.  The la=
test version
contains a couple of eq bug fixes, and lots of work on a recursive reverb=
=20
algorithm.  The user can choose the position of the listener in the ro=
om.   An RMS sensing compressor has been added to complement the =
peak sensing one.   Also, command line entry of source files is p=
ossible and=20
makes submixing doable through a script.  Both 32 and 64 bit versions=
=20
are available in the same small download.  A quick start pdf and manua=
l=20
are available, but please feel welcome to email me for additional help.


Grekim


www.acousticrefuge.com/mixer4.htm
--=_8f8380a726d309d2959eec148afd452b--

read more

From: Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings@...>
Subject: [LAA] Linux Audio Conference 2012 at CCRMA - live stream coverage starting tomorrow
Date: Apr 12, 8:23 am 2012

Hi *!


On behalf of the conference organizers, we would like to invite you to
join the Linux Audio Conference 2012, kindly hosted by the Center for
Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.

The conference will start tomorrow, Thursday April 12, at 10:00 PST
(that's UTC - 0700). Please refer to the schedule at

http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2012/program

for detailed information.

We will be streaming all paper presentations live in Ogg Theora/Ogg
Vorbis format. Users of the Firefox browser should be able to watch this
natively without any plugins. For users of other browsers, we recommend
VLC, a cross-platform media player which you can download from
http://videolan.org.

You are invited to join us on IRC while you're watching the streams, the
conference channel is #lac2012 on freenode.net, to be accessed with the
chat client of your choice, or via
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=lac2012
Remote participants can post their questions or remarks on this channel,
and a local chat operator here in Stanford will then relay them to the
presenters and the local audience. You can also use this channel to get
help in case of viewing problems.

All presentations will be recorded and uploaded for off-line watching
within a day or so.

Needless to say, access to all streams is free of charge. This is all
about open source after all :)

The primary stream relay is available at

http://ccrma.stanford.edu:8080 (located on the west coast of the US).

A secondary relay which is preferrable for European users is at

http://streamer.stackingdwarves.net (located in Germany).


Best regards,


the LAC stream team.

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New features have arrived in the devel branch:
-Interaction with the sends & return widgets
-Scope that displays the master output_W channel

Various code improvements have also been pushed along the way, be it that the headphones volume dial now goes up when you move up, or that that post-fade send now adhere's to the Mute status of the track.

Its another small step along the way! Mandatory screeny:

TL;DR: systemd does not require the performance-sensitive bits of Linux control groups enabled in the kernel. However, it does require some non-performance-sensitive bits of the control group logic.

In some areas of the community there's still some confusion about Linux control groups and their performance impact, and what precisely it is that systemd requires of them. In the hope to clear this up a bit, I'd like to point out a few things:

Control Groups are two things: (A) a way to hierarchally group and label processes, and (B) a way to then apply resource limits to these groups. systemd only requires the former (A), and not the latter (B). That means you can compile your kernel without any control group resource controllers (B) and systemd will work perfectly on it. However, if you in addition disable the grouping feature entirely (A) then systemd will loudly complain at boot and proceed only reluctantly with a big warning and in a limited functionality mode.

At compile time, the grouping/labelling feature in the kernel is enabled by CONFIG_CGROUPS=y, the individual controllers by CONFIG_CGROUP_FREEZER=y, CONFIG_CGROUP_DEVICE=y, CONFIG_CGROUP_CPUACCT=y, CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR=y, CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP=y, CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_KMEM=y, CONFIG_CGROUP_PERF=y, CONFIG_CGROUP_SCHED=y, CONFIG_BLK_CGROUP=y, CONFIG_NET_CLS_CGROUP=y, CONFIG_NETPRIO_CGROUP=y. And since (as mentioned) we only need the former (A), not the latter (B) you may disable all of the latter options while enabling CONFIG_CGROUPS=y, if you want to run systemd on your system.

What about the performance impact of these options? Well, every bit of code comes at some price, so none of these options come entirely for free. However, the grouping feature (A) alters the general logic very little, it just sticks hierarchial labels on processes, and its impact is minimal since that is usually not in any hot path of the OS. This is different for the various controllers (B) which have a much bigger impact since they influence the resource management of the OS and are full of hot paths. This means that the kernel feature that systemd mandatorily requires (A) has a minimal effect on system performance, but the actually performance-sensitive features of control groups (B) are entirely optional.

On boot, systemd will mount all controller hierarchies it finds enabled in the kernel to individual directories below /sys/fs/cgroup/. This is the official place where kernel controllers are mounted to these days. The /sys/fs/cgroup/ mount point in the kernel was created precisely for this purpose. Since the control group controllers are a shared facility that might be used by a number of different subsystems a few projects have agreed on a set of rules in order to avoid that the various bits of code step on each other's toes when using these directories.

systemd will also maintain its own, private, controller-less, named control group hierarchy which is mounted to /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/. This hierarchy is private property of systemd, and other software should not try to interfere with it. This hierarchy is how systemd makes use of the naming and grouping feature of control groups (A) without actually requiring any kernel controller enabled for that.

Now, you might notice that by default systemd does create per-service cgroups in the "cpu" controller if it finds it enabled in the kernel. This is entirely optional, however. We chose to make use of it by default to even out CPU usage between system services. Example: On a traditional web server machine Apache might end up having 100 CGI worker processes around, while MySQL only has 5 processes running. Without the use of the "cpu" controller this means that Apache all together ends up having 20x more CPU available than MySQL since the kernel tries to provide every process with the same amount of CPU time. On the other hand, if we add these two services to the "cpu" controller in individual groups by default, Apache and MySQL get the same amount of CPU, which we think is a good default.

Note that if the CPU controller is not enabled in the kernel systemd will not attempt to make use of the "cpu" hierarchy as described above. Also, even if it is enabled in the kernel it is trivial to tell systemd not to make use of it: Simply edit /etc/systemd/system.conf and set DefaultControllers= to the empty string.

Let's discuss a few frequently heard complaints regarding systemd's use of control groups:

• systemd mounts all controllers to /sys/fs/cgroup/ even though my software requires it at /dev/cgroup/ (or some other place)! The standardization of /sys/fs/cgroup/ as mount point of the hierarchies is a relatively recent change in the kernel. Some software has not been updated yet for it. If you cannot change the software in question you are welcome to unmount the hierarchies from /sys/fs/cgroup/ and mount them wherever you need them instead. However, make sure to leave /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/ untouched.
• systemd makes use of the "cpu" hierarchy, but it should leave its dirty fingers from it! As mentioned above, just set the DefaultControllers= option of systemd to the empty string.
• I need my two controllers "foo" and "bar" mounted into one hierarchy, but systemd mounts them in two! Use the JoinControllers= setting in /etc/systemd/system.conf to mount several controllers into a single hierarchy.
• Control groups are evil and they make everything slower! Well, please read the text above and understand the difference between "control-groups-as-in-naming-and-grouping" (A) and "cgroups-as-in-controllers" (B). Then, please turn off all controllers in you kernel build (B) but leave CONFIG_CGROUPS=y (A) enabled.
• I have heard some kernel developers really hate control groups and think systemd is evil because it requires them! Well, there are a couple of things behind the dislike of control groups by some folks. Primarily, this is probably caused because the hackers in question do not distuingish the naming-and-grouping bits of the control group logic (A) and the controllers that are based on it (B). Mainly, their beef is with the latter (which systemd does not require, which is the key point I am trying to make in the text above), but there are other issues as well: for example, the code of the grouping logic is not the most beautiful bit of code ever written by man (which is thankfully likely to get better now, since the control groups subsystem now has an active maintainer again). And then for some developers it is important that they can compare the runtime behaviour of many historic kernel versions in order to find bugs (git bisect). Since systemd requires kernels with basic control group support enabled, and this is a relatively recent feature addition to the kernel, this makes it difficult for them to use a newer distribution with all these old kernels that predate cgroups. Anyway, the summary is probably that what matters to developers is different from what matters to users and administrators.

I hope this explanation was useful for a reader or two! Thank you for your time!

In case you haven't submitted your talk proposal for GUADEC 2012 in A Coruña, Spain yet, hurry: the deadline is on April 14th, i.e. this saturday! Read der Call for Participation! Submit a proposal!

Who says you can’t make your own consumer electronics? David A. Mellis, a co-creator of Arduino who now is starting a PhD in Leah Buechley’s group, High-Low Tech, at the MIT Media Lab, has shared his Fab Speakers, an open source, portable speaker project:

These portable speakers are made from laser-cut wood, fabric, veneer, and electronics. They are powered by three AAA batteries and compatible with any standard audio jack (e.g. on an iPhone, iPod, or laptop).

Why open source them? Mellis says he designed the speakers to be affordable and easy to assemble, in the hopes that he would “see changes or additions that I didn’t think about and to have those changes shared publicly for others to use or continue to modify.” Speakers are perhaps ideal for this exercise: the housing matters, both aesthetically and functionally, and because a speaker is something relatively straightforward and simple, it’s easy to imagine modifications that retain the basic role of the design.

Big-league design blog Core77 takes note of what sharing this design can mean, as Mellis turns to designer Sarah Pease to imagine an alternative housing:

Here’s a great example of what can happen when experimental research is documented and posted on the web with plenty of explanation and resources. RISD student Sarah Pease, a junior in Furniture Design, took part in an independent study with the High-Low Tech Group at MIT’s Media Lab this past Fall.

Sarah Pease turns to something you probably already have in your house:

Using readily available household items and basic construction methods allow for even further customization and flexibility of the Fab Speakers. Varying jar shapes/sizes can be mixed with alternate feet for different looks.

High-Low Tech Research Group Project’s Jarring Effect

Building speakers was once a common activity, to the point that many, many musicians made their own speakers or amps or simple effect circuits. For all the excitement over DIY these days, a lot of people don’t have this experience – but with Internet documentation, the time is right for more.

Indeed, I’m keen to hear from people who do have experience building speakers: what might improve the sound quality of this design, and looks aside, what would be the best housing shapes and materials?

In the meantime, I’ll have to give this a try:
Fab Speakers [David Mellis @ MIT Media Lab]

http://sarahpease.com/audioJar

More pics:

Via comments, here’s yet another design – Jon Moeller’s adorable “owl” speakers:
http://moeller.io/owl-speakers.html

I have a bunch of jars, so I may need to give the jars a try here.

When we last caught up with the touch-less, gestural music-making of composer Chris Vik, the Australian musician was sharing his own Kinectar software and playing both dubstep and ambient scores for modern dance. Now, Vik is back playing a very substantial physical instrument: Melbourne’s four story-tall, MIDI-retrofitted Town Hall Organ. Here, the Max-powered software takes on some very big sound from some very big pipes.

He writes:

I’ve created my own software Kinectar, which allows the use of the Kinect to control MIDI devices, ie. playing notes through simple gestures and motion. The Melbourne Town Hall Organ got a referb in the late 90s adding the ability of MIDI messages to active the notes… this happened.

Controlling a 4-story pipe organ with the Kinect

Previously: From Beautiful Ambient Modern Dance to Dubstep, Gestures to Music in Kinect (Download the Tool)

From: Nils <list@...>
Subject: [LAA] Laborejo Release 0.2 Announcement
Date: Apr 9, 8:16 am 2012

Exactly one month after the first release, here is Laborejo 0.2!

Laborejo, Esperanto for "Workshop", is used to craft music through
notation. It is a Lilypond GUI frontend, a MIDI creator and finally a
tool collection to inspire and help you compose. It works by reducing
music-redundancy and by seperating layout and data.

The next release is scheduled for May, 8th. One month from now.

Before you read the details make sure to connect to Laborejos Facebook,
Twitter or Google Plus! https://www.facebook.com/Laborejo
https://twitter.com/#!/Laborejo
https://plus.google.com/b/116744898976321238325/

Screenshot (Laborejo and Lilypond, side by side):
http://www.laborejo.org/images/screenshots/latestscreenshot.png

This is the release of version 0.2
Download: https://github.com/nilsgey/Laborejo/tarball/0.2
Dependencies: http://www.laborejo.org/documentation

Linux Instructions: Unpack, cd into the created directoy, execute:
./laborejo-qt.sh

Then use the number- and cursor keys for immediate success!
Check Help->Manual for navigational and note/rest entry keys.
Everything else is in the menus.

New since version 0.1:
- Repeats, Alternate Ends and Jumps in various forms. The main Feature
for this release.
- Playback Trigger ("Only reduce volume in the second repeat" or "Mute
track if python weather module reports rain")
- Master Track (Merges with every other Track. Use to structure your
piece, make global changes, change tempo etc.)
- Various Commands like "Join Selection to Chord" and "Add Octave to
Chord/Selection"
- The usual bread&butter bugfixing and improving.

Most important known problems:
* This is Alpha Grade Software. Don't use for long-term work. However,
the produced midis and PDFs will last forever.
* There is no built-in jack midi output yet. You have to export midi
files.
* Documentation is nearly non-existent.

Have fun, it would be nice to hear from you!

Nils
http://www.laborejo.org
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From: Devin Anderson <surfacepatterns@...>
Subject: [LAA] Announcing synthclone-0.2.0! Now in beta!
Date: Apr 9, 8:16 am 2012

I'm happy to announce the first beta release of `synthclone`!

`synthclone` is a Qt-based application that can "clone" your
MIDI-capable instruments. It does this by sending out MIDI data that
instructs an instrument to emit sounds for a series of notes,
velocities, controls, and aftertouch values. It then saves this data
as a sample-based instrument that can be loaded by sampler software.

Features:

* Supports user-configurable per-zone sample time, release time, MIDI
note, MIDI velocity, MIDI aftertouch, MIDI channel pressure, MIDI
control changes, etc. via a table interface.
* Audition samples and change zone parameters until you're happy with
the data you're acquiring from your MIDI device/software.
* Save and restore sessions.
* Distributed with plugins that support the JACK Audio Connection Kit
(with JACK Session support), PortAudio and PortMidi, trimming of
samples, the creation of patches for Hydrogen and SFZ, and automated
zone generation.
* Can create multiple targets in one session (i.e. a Hydrogen patch
and an SFZ patch) from the same set of samples.
* A well-documented plugin API is available for developers to write
their own plugins to extend synthclone.

Important Changes Since 0.1.0:

* Lots of bug fixes.
* Added a "portable" semaphore implementation to the plugin API.
* Added the new PortMedia plugin, which supports sampling via
PortAudio and PortMidi.
* Get `synthclone` to compile on Mac OSX.
* Change build system to use traditional `./configure`, `make`, `make
install` scheme.
* Add new 'debian' target for building Debian packages (`./configure
--prefix=/usr`, `make debian`).

Future Development:

* Figure out a good packaging scheme for Mac OSX.
* Support the Non-Session Manager protocol.
* Write a plugin that creates Renoise instruments.
* Write a plugin that loads LADSPA effects.
* Write a plugin that loads LV2 effects.
* Write a plugin that loads samples from the filesystem (expanding on
the plugin created in this tutorial:
http://code.google.com/p/synthclone/wiki/TutorialWritingASimplePluginPart1)
* Consider different ways to support the detection and/or creation of loops.

The new version of `synthclone` is available at:

http://synthclone.googlecode.com/

Please report bugs using the issue tracker:

http://code.google.com/p/synthclone/issues/list

If you like `synthclone` and have ideas that can make it better and/or
want to keep up with its progress, join the users group:

http://groups.google.com/group/synthclone-users

If you're a developer and want to write plugins for `synthclone` or
contribute to the application itself, join the development group:

http://groups.google.com/group/synthclone-development

Thanks, and hope to meet some of you next week at the Linux Audio Conference.

--
Devin Anderson
surfacepatterns (at) gmail (dot) com

blog - http://surfacepatterns.blogspot.com/
synthclone - http://synthclone.googlecode.com/
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The next shiny new Guitarix version! Guitarix is a tube amplifier
simulation for jack, with effect modules and an additional stereo
effect chain.

Download from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guitarix/

You can find some screenshots and explanations of the new version in

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/guitarix/index.php?title=EnhancedUI

Many things changed in the user interface. Now you can move rack units
by drag and drop (reflecting the signal flow), store individual
settings for each rack unit and use preset banks with several settings
for the whole rack. It’s easy to take our “factory presets” and make
your own customized bank, or make your own from scratch and share it
on the Guitarix forum.

There is a new “live play mode” with only the info you need on stage
(it’s fullscreen, no other penguins around), and a preset picking mode
with a foot switch (midi or usb, or if you don’t have one even the
space bar of your keyboard) and the strings of your guitar to switch
settings.

Rack units are now put into categories, and two new ones are a noise
gate for high noise levels and a univibe emulation. Thanks go to the
developer of abGate and Ryan Billing from Rakarrack who helped
porting his univibe code and made the inclusion of it possible.

This is already too long, please check it out and give feedback if you
find a problem, this version is still beta.

Please refer to our project page for more information:

http://guitarix.sourceforge.net/

download site:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guitarix/

please report bugs and suggestions in our forum:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/guitarix/

here you can find a couple of examples produced by guitarix users:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/guitarix/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=83

have fun

The nightmare before a release.

I know it is possible to create a playback version of this. But it is horrible that music notation is so redundant and even allows such cases. Hint: The problem is that we have 1)a local repeat under an Alternative Ending 2)A higher-than-one repeat count for the first ending 3)finally non-linear endings including that the first ending gets already played back twice through the ending numbers alone.

I am not completely sure how that even sounds. The three times repeat is the only real problem. Imagine you strike the (3) repeats and replace them through additional ending numbers in the first ending. But which numbers are these?

Is the example even valid because the repeat-count is different from the sum of ending-numbers? But if you take this interpretation then you would have to insert a repeat counter every time you use alternative endings, clearly this is against common practise.

Using multiple repeats (n) in a Alternative-Ending environment should not be allowed in my opinion. But I already suspect that there is a mad composer in this world who wants to write multiple repeats combined with alternative endings. Screw you, unknown composer!

Airtime 2.0.3 has been released in order to fix security issues. The issues relate to pypo permissions and monit permissions and are deemed critical. Upgrade is strongly recommended for users on all versions of Airtime.