Professional audio packages

Arch has been missing some important packages, so I put them up in AUR:

  • industrializer great industrial sound synthesizer
  • jack_capture CLI tool to record from JACK to WAV and FLAC. KISS philosophy.
  • ams AlsaModularSynth is not a new package, but it was broken due to Qt transition. Fixed.
  • vocoder-ladspa LADSPA vocoder plugin.
  • kaconnect Qt version of aconnect utility.

The Linux Audio User list has started a virtual jam session, the current state of which can be seen at http://lau-cb.peterlutek.com.

Happy music making!

New collection of Gimp scripts in AUR

The gimpfx-foundry package offers a bunch of Scheme scripts for the Gimp.
After installing you should be able to use them right away.

WikiHow: Baking bread baskets

[...] anything that’s in your fridge or pantry that is delicious and would usually be suitable for an appetizer is perfect for a bread basket.

Yummy and versatile.

Serving multi-lingual web content with Apache httpd

There is quite a bit of information on serving multiple versions of pages via Apache httpd’s content negotiation module, but Daniel Lorch’s notes on this topic is the best one I have seen so far.

It adresses all important issues and does it both straight to the point and in depth.

“Welcome to Straylight — please enjoy yourself”

Straylight Suites (Freeside Mix) is a Neuromancer-themed mix of four early Symphonic Electronica pieces. Both the original pieces and the mix were produced by the independent artist Wintermute. There are some female vocals and a distinct synth leitmotiv that accompanies you throughout the song.

Click on the icon with the downward pointing arrow to download, then close your eyes and savour it thoroughly.

Escaping LaTeX code in Lisp

I need to escape strings that get inserted into a LaTeX document for an upcoming project, and found this on the net:

(define latex-escape (string-escaper '((#\\ . "\\\\")
                                       (#\~ . "\\~")
                                       (#\# . "\\#")
                                       (#\$ . "\\$")
                                       (#\% . "\\%")
                                       (#\^ . "\\^")
                                       (#\& . "\\&")
                                       (#\{ . "\\{")
                                       (#\} . "\\}")
                                       (#\_ . "\\_"))))

where string-escaper obviously is a function returning a function that escapes those characters in the string. They implemented string-escaper in Scheme (probably portable) and thus got a quite large bunch of LOC; I suppose it’d be less in Lisp. especially with the help of loop constructs.

I’ll keep you updated on it, since I can’t work on it right now.