Introduction

• Outline of what is to follow
  • Some history
  • Basic Ardour/JACK/Audio kernel stack
  • Various sidetracks into audio geekery
  • Other software / resources
• Pre-emptive apologies
• I am not an expert
• Some here may be

Background on myself

• Srsly. I am not an expert
• Ordinary musician / Linux user
• Recently made an album on Linux that Rathole Radio / Blogs etc like
• My history playing with audio on computers
  • ZX81 / ZX Spectrum - 1982 to 1987 - no audio
  • MS-DOS 6.0 - 1990 to 1998? - no audio
  • Windows 95 - 1999 - Jazz++
  • Suse 5.1 - 1999 - 2000 - Slab / Jazz++
  • RedHat 6.0 March 2000 - 2004 - Slab / Jazz++
  • Debian 2004 - 2010 - woody / sarge / etch / lenny - Ardour / JACK
  • Ubuntu Studio - 2010 to date - Ardour / JACK
  • And looking... :)

Beginnings - SLab

• http://www.slabexchange.org/ is still up for a bit of history
• Last updated in 2001 though
• Failure - neither hardware nor software was up to it
• Made some really crap recordings circa 1999 - 2001 with it
• Example?

Beginnings - Jazz++

• http://jazzplusplus.sourceforge.net/ is still up
• Last update 2008
• Audio never worked for me at all. MIDI did though
• Made some pretty crap recording with that too circa 2000 - 2001
• Example?

Sidetrack - 'Proper Studios'

• First experience - Second Sense, 1988, recording onto 1/4" audio tape
• Eg http://soundcloud.com/islandmonkey-1/ - Two Dead Pigeons demo.
• By 2002, had album to record, couldn't do it. So Bonafide studios Oct 2002
• Running something - ProTools on a Mac? Probably.
• Worked though modulo my inept production skillz
• See http://music.conniptions.org/album/bush-of-thorns
• Proper studios do work. If you have the money, the right engineer, and know how to behave once you get in there. More on this later.
• Advantages of proper studios - they've already solved most of the hard problems for you, leaving you to solve the harder still problem of playing good music to order.

The Setup - Ardour / JACK / Audio Kernel

• Oh yes. This is the Linux setup that works and has done for almost ten years.
• Stuff built from the ground up to be pro-audio quality. That's the whole point of Linux, or should be.
• Used to be a lot harder than it is now we have things like Ubuntu Studio
• You can still do it the hard way if you like and compile your own cutting edge versions of everything, including rolling your own RT kernel. This may be better than Ubuntu Studio.
• Basic principle of audio recording - maximise quality of every step in the chain
• This includes hardware and software. At every level. If anything at any level screws up, the results won't come. If all sorted, the results are up to your musical ability.
• Point is to let the music come through. That's harder than it should be, but that's the way it is. Cheap consumer stuff, whether a cheap soundcard or Pulse Audio, won't cut it.

Sidetrack - Consider The Chain

• Every step of the chain must be of acceptable quality
• You can tell when it isn't - the results sound crappy
• A decent mic - Tandy don't cut it. SM58 or knockoffs better / Audio-Technica AT4033a better still. If you can, get a Rode or something.
• My mate Nick Waugh and his hard-to-record guitar. Some applications really do need a grands worth of mic.
• A decent soundcard - consumer don't cut it. M-Audio Delta 6x6 is way cheap and does. Many other options. Do not underestimate the advantages of the breakout box.
• Decent mixer. Some soundcard options give this to you. Others require you to sort it yourselves. Soundcraft Compact 4 no longer available I think, but may be. Works.
• Decent speakers - you have to hear what you are doing. M-Audio BX-5's do it for me. Alternatively, spend more money. That'll be better still.
• Decent headphones - as above but you want to work after 11pm too. Sennheiser HD 380's aren't too pricey. Lots of other options here too.

The Meat - I - Ardour

• You're going to need a decent DAW
• Ardour is the one, if you're using Linux
• See http://ardour.org/
• GPL, also runs on OS X
• Deeply integrated with JACK
• Paul Davis, 2nd employee of Amazon (no longer there) is your main man here though there were many others. GPL etc.

The Meat - II - JACK

• Sample synchronised low-level audio sub-system
• Get rid of Pulse while using JACK. Pulse is for everyday stuff. JACK is for recording. Pasuspender is your friend.
• See http://jackaudio.org/
• JACK is a pro-audio audio sub-system designed for real-time recording and for making sure that problems like drift do not occur.
• Pulse is designed for everyday use. Probably. Though I remember running sound fine on everything without it, although I couldn't stream audio on one machine to another machine across the network without installing software to do that.
• Theoretically, you could run them both on top of ALSA, but in practice, you probably can't, hence, pasuspender, or simply uninstalling Pulse altogether.
• Discussion of why it's hard to run both simultaneously would require discussing ALSA. I have no intention of going there. I hope you never have to go there youself. You may do. If so, I am sorry. ALSA is a world of pain.
• Mind you, ALSA is a world of pain that you can eventually get working, unlike the other, older options. I will not mention OSS, whatever that stood for.
• Thank Paul Davis for this too. Lots of other people as well, of course.

The Meat - III - A RT / Low Latency Kernel

• You used to have to roll it yourself. I remember applying Ingo Molnar's Low Latency patches to my own kernels, then having to redo the kernels to add stuff I'd forgotten, like mouse support.
• Alright, that only happened once. But it hurt.
• Used to be Low Latency patches, now it's RT patches (RT HowTo)
• If you're really trying to push your hardware to the limit, your setup might need the RT stuff.
• You'll probably need the RT stuff then - audio CPU requirements expand like gases
• Or you can just install Ubuntu Studio, or similar, on your studio machine, and have most of it (not all of it) done for you.
• It's still Linux - it still needs you to prod certain things in the right direction to make it work. I spent ages getting buffer underruns on Ubuntu Studio until I rebooted and found I'd managed to load a non-RT kernel.

The Meat IV - Knowing What You Are Doing When You Record

• There is a reason why most studios still run on Windows or Mac machines. The reason is that the audio geeks there are far too busy learning (all of them) the audio geek stuff to get too bothered with what is to them the lower level system stuff
• It can be done on Linux, but even when you do get your whole hardware chain running and your software chain set up, that's only a small part of the thing. Now you need to learn to actually use it to make pro audio.
• • That means things like knowing what mics to use for what instruments and where to put them.
  • Things like setting up the room, if necessary - not so long ago I took part in a recording session at a friend's house where the singer was placed with her mic in the bathroom upstairs. Why? The natural reverb from that room sounded wonderful.
  • That means, if you are recording others, knowing how to use psychological techniques to get the best out of them without going bonkers, or killing them. Or, if you are recording yourself, how to wear two hats at once. This is really really hard.
  • You need to be subscribing to TapeOp. It's free. It's also the audio engineer geek magazine.
  • TapeOp has yet, to my knowledge, to cover Linux. There's a reason for that. It will, and soon, but I haven't seen it yet. Audio is hard.

Interlude

I'm only halfway through, and I don't know about you, but I'm bored with the sound of my own voice. Here's a tune recorded on Linux.

Sweet Sister Starlight by conniptions

Case Study I - Bless Your Heart

• My 2007 studio album. Recorded and mixed entirely using Linux / JACK / Ardour / Hydrogen
• Hydrogen is a drum machine. It's pretty ok.
• See http://www.hydrogen-music.org/
• Everything on this album was by me. Do not do this unless you are brilliant at everything. I will not be doing this again.
• See http://music.conniptions.org/album/bless-your-heart

Case Study II - Sweet Sister Starlight

• My 2011 studio album.
• Drums / bass / some guitar / some vocals recorded at the drummer's place. On a Mac.
• Sorry about that. But he's got a special room with his kit set up with the mics and everything, even if he does, for some reason, have two mics on the bass drum.
• Drummers are like that. They'll a) use Macs, and b) have two mics on the bass drum.
• Redid most guitars, all vocals, added keys and sax and BVs at home
• That's a lie. The trumpet and Jamika's vocals were recorded by them. We will not speak of the systems they used to do that. But such systems can record audio too.
• See http://soundcloud.com/ for your remote collaboration friend.
• See also mixing and mastering

Mixing / LADSPA / LV2

• This is a black art.
  • What sounds good on your system one day will sound rubbish on a different system the following day.
  • Learning how to make this not happen is the art of mixing.
  • There are no formulae for this. Different styles are mixed differently.
  • EQ and compression are your friends. So is reverb.
• Plugins. First there was LADSPA. Now there is LV2, a better, cuter successor.
  • Some months into an attempt to mix a serious recording on Linux, using available free software plugins from the Steve Harris plugin collection at http://plugin.org.uk/ and elsewhere is approximately the point when you start considering reinstalling Windows. Or getting a Mac.
  • Especially when you start looking up mixing tutorials. That proprietary software is so pretty. Everything is GUI based and visually oriented for a reason. The reason is that the task is hard enough without making it harder still by making everything numeric and on sliders.
  • All is not lost. Pretty plugins to help you mix do exist. They ain't GPL though, not at least at the point when I needed them nine months ago.
  • I am aware that LV2 was invented to address this. I don't know how far things have got though.
  • See http://www.linuxdsp.co.uk/ from which I bought the only Linux software I ever bought - the EQ and stereo EQ. Not just pretty. Actually lets you make the EQ work. If you can do this with existing plugins, good luck to you. I couldn't.

Mastering

• This is an even more black art. I know absolutely nothing about it.
• Ok, that's a lie. I know what it's for but I don't know how to do it and I also know I don't have the kit for it. It's about making all the tracks on an album sound good together as a collection; it's also about making them all work on everything from high end to low end kit
• It's not about making everything as loud as possible, though there are some who think it is.
• You need a dead room and special speakers, for a start. The place you recorded and mixed in probably isn't it. Nor are those speakers.
• You need really good ears. I mean really really good ears.
• There's a thing called Jamin, it's a mastering tool.
• See http://jamin.sourceforge.net/
• I went to a guy called Jeff Mortimer of JM Mastering in Hornsey somewhere. After tracking and mixing my album myself, the last thing I wanted was to screw up the mastering.
• He used Windows. Sorry.

Other stuff I - Audacity

• Audacity is a great audio editor
• Quick'n'easy rough mastering thing (hard limit to crop tails, amplify)
• Simple audio editing
• Incredibly rough mixing
• Podcasts. Probably. I haven't.
• See http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Other stuff II - MuseScore

• Like Sibelius only free. Score editor.
• See http://musescore.org/
• You can also use Lilypond if you like banging your head against things.
• Relevance to pro audio production? Arrangements.
• Used eg in Sweet Sister Starlight for the penny whistle part in Wander in a Dream.

Other stuff III - GTick

• It's a metronome.
• That's all it is.
• You're recording pro audio and you're playing instruments yourself? That means you're practicing daily, right?
• Right.
• So you need a metronome.
• Yes you do.
• GTick is your metronome. You may already have one, but this is another one.
• You know about the practising to a metronome using it at half-speed on the off-beat thing, right? (1) tush (3) tush etc... Well now you do.

Other stuff IV - linuxaudio.org

• That's http://linuxaudio.org/
• Comprehensive list of pro audio Linux resources.
• There's probably definitely all kinds of stuff there that I don't know about
• Mailing lists - linux-audio-user, linux-audio-dev etc.
• I should have probably mentioned this talk on lau. Sorry about that.

Other stuff V - Bandcamp

• When you've finished your hit album, how do you release it?
• See http://bandcamp.com/
• Set your own price, multi-format, sell physical, CC-license friendly etc.
• Examples
  • Steve Lawson - jazzy ambient - http://music.stevelawson.net/
  • Matt Stevens - prog - http://mattstevens.bandcamp.com/
  • 20lb Sounds - rock (you may know one of them) - http://20lb.bandcamp.com/
• Free to set up, 15% cut, their bandwidth not yours, cute widgets.

Other stuff VI - Licensing

• Creative Commons for me. I encourage this. But YMMV.
• I made the error of using the CC BY-NC-ND license for a bit
• I thought it would mean that people who wanted to use my stuff would have to talk to me before they did so
• Actually it meant that no-one used my stuff
• Then I switched to BY-NC-SA, and behold - lots of podcast love.
• They still talk to you (largely). Saying thank you is natural and normal.

Other stuff VII - Csound / PureData

• See http://www.csounds.com/ - the sound oriented programming language
• The entirety of synthesis is encapsulated in this language.
• Syntax is from hell. You'll be writing Perl scripts to write your Csound code.
• Python, now, probably. You kids. I don't know.
• Either way, that can be fun.
• I made an extreme ambient album with it: http://occasionalbong.bandcamp.com/
• Pure Data - http://puredata.info/ - basically the same but with a GUI.
• A GUI from hell, mind. I once had to help a friend who had done something in it.
• Neither of us are quite sure what happened.

Conclusion

• Audio is hard
• Tracking, mixing, mastering are all areas where you can't learn too much, and there are serious opportunities for geeking here.
• All of this can also be done using Linux to the highest level.
• Be prepared to compromise on everything but the music.