Navaho Gunleg

In recent months I’ve been taking up my old “audio hobby”… I’m Dutch, so, it shouldn’t cost much — the reason I’m using open-source only.

The hardware collection is slowly growing (still in the process of acquiring all the basics though). The most recent addition was a 61-keys USB MIDI keyboard. I always wanted to have a velocity-sensitive keyboard since I was a young kid. Back in the days those things were awfully expensive and now they are very reasonably priced! (Next obstacle: actually learn to play the damn thing. )

Anyway, almost everything in the set-up works fine. I could play back my compositions — but the ‘jackrec’ utility was inserting static after 10 or 15 seconds (always at about the same time, but it depended on the buffer size that I used).

This prevented me from getting a whole piece olayed back and recorded into a file. Kind of a bummer, that being the most essential part of the process…

Before debugging it myself, I tried compiling a more recent version which “just works” perfectly. So that was cool.

Having updated LinuxSampler recently as well, today I have been testing out the complete set-up of “new” audio software to get to grips with the “mastering process” to get Rosegarden compositions into a portable format like WAV and MP3.

My Rosegarden app is running on a real-time kernel and it uses MIDI (over network transport with JACK) to talk to my LinuxSampler running on another machine (also a real-time kernel)… Latency isn’t that bad at all. (But I do have the machines on a seperate switch so they don’t have to deal with all the other network traffic.)

I free-styled a short little piece with, at times, a hideously out-of-tune accompaniment (I didn’t care to re-do it or to tweak it). I did care about the even more hideous percussion track — which I have muted in the final file below.

The Reverb and EQ-ing is done real-time with ‘jack-rack’, but that is something that I really need to do later in the process. Not only would it reduce load and latency; doing it later would allow me access to some non-realtime LADSPA plugins (with Audacity).

BTW, speaking of Audacity, one of the most cool features is, when zoomed in at a high level, you can use a draw tool to polish away clicks and pops.

The original recording of the “mastered” file had one distinct click that I could get rid of in such a way.

Check it out — it’s free “music”! (Yeh, you get what you pay for )