Space Station Lambda

Ardour belongs to the flagship class of GNU/Linux software:

It’s a free software DAW and thus a valuable program that has the potential to attract a lot of semi-professional and professional audio users to GNU/Linux (given the pricing, missing portability and inferior support for customization of the commercial alternatives).

Until now its main developer Paul Davis was living off a corporate sponsorship. This has changed:

With the end of SAE sponsorship, subscriptions & donations are the only thing that make it possible for full-time development of Ardour to continue. In January this added up to US$1968. That’s less than 1 copy of Nuendo, 4 copies of Logic or 40 personal copies of Reaper. If you agree that it takes more than this to support to keep Ardour moving forward, please subscribe or donate. Your support is critical and much appreciated.

Paul has not only been the industrious main developer of a great piece of free software but also a valuable member of the GNU/Linux audio user and developer community.

Although I’m not an Ardour user right now I have subscribed for a monthly donation nevertheless.

I strongly suggest you support him, too.

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Pianist and composer Marcus Loeber is collecting money for the release of his album “At the very moment”.

Here’s how it works:

First you choose how much you commit to pay while listening to excerpts from Marcus’ album.

If the target price total is reached by the end of 26 December 2008, the album is released under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND and you will be charged the fee you committed to pay before.

If the price is not reached then either Marcus will release the album nevertheless or he will decide to try something else. In the latter case you won’t be charged any money.

This album is definitely worth the money not only because of the music itself but also because it’s one of the new ways to get paid for digital content.

Remember? This is one of the new ways of selling music that the music industry refuses to take serious.

Let’s show them.

And while you’re at it, grab some free music at Jamendo, too. :)

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Here’s a simple shell script that uses the amazing Ecasound to remove any silence from the beginning and end of an audio file:

#!/bin/sh
#
# from http://osdir.com/ml/audio.ecasound.general/2005-08/msg00002.html
#
# description: removes silence from the beginning and the end
#              of a file
# version: 20050807-1
# usage: ecatrimsilence.sh <inputfile>
 
tmp=ecatrimsilence-tmp.wav
 
if test -e "$tmp" ; then
  echo "error: temp file $tmp exists, unable to continue..."
  exit 1
fi
 
if test ! -e "$1" ; then
  echo "error: input file $1 does not exist, unable to continue..."
  exit 2
fi
 
format=`ecalength -sf "$1"`
 
echo "Trimming file ${1}."
echo "Removing silence at the end..."
ecasound -q -f:${format} -i reverse,"${1}" -o "${tmp}" -ge:1,0,0 -b:256
rm -f "${1}"
echo "Removing silence at the beginning..."
ecasound -q -f:${format} -i reverse,"${tmp}" -o "${1}" -ge:1,0,0 -b:256
rm -f "${tmp}"
echo "Done."
</inputfile>

I know some GUI programs that offer this functionality (Audacity, for example), but no other command-line tool.

Do you?

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Jamendo lets you listen to and download full Creative Commons-licensed albums and support the artists with donations.

They have many different kinds of music. I can recommend, for example, Grace Valhalla‘s album “Peak” in Electro and Matt Pepper Trio‘s album “Une Femme”.

The only thing I’m missing is FLAC as download format, but I read they were working on it. Seems to be mainly a bandwidth problem, of course…

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More than one week has passed since I started to post classic chiptunes. Time for another one, a real classic by jester/sanity (Volker Tripp), called Stardust Memories.

About 15 years have passed since its release at the World of Commodore compo.

See the linked first post if you want to know how to play this.

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I really like old tracker tunes, and would like to share my favorite ones with you.

For playback, I recommend a player using the ModPlug engine. There’s ModPlug XMMS for GNU/Linux (which comes with an ModPlug Player for Microsoft Windows.

The first tune is a Protracker module called Tubular Vectors. In the beginning it conveys a serene mood featuring heavy cadences which leads to a second part with a vigorous synth line at 85″.

Have fun!

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About a month ago, sfxr was released.

sfxr is an easy-to-use synthesizer for retro game effects. The author originally wrote it for Microsoft Windows, but an SDL port apparently was a simple thing. With this port, we GNU/Linux users can use it, too. Unfortunately, the port didn’t work on my system; it failed to start when trying to initialize the audio subsystem:

[!] main.cpp:1167  !SDL_OpenAudio(&des, __null)

It turned out that the initialization routine was missing one parameter. I fixed it, and here’s the patch:

--- main.cpp.old        2008-01-24 13:54:01.000000000 +0100
+++ main.cpp    2008-01-24 13:52:37.000000000 +0100
@@ -1164,6 +1164,7 @@ void ddkInit()
        des.channels = 1;
        des.callback = SDLAudioCallback;
        des.userdata = NULL;
+       des.samples = 4096;
        VERIFY(!SDL_OpenAudio(&des, NULL));
        SDL_PauseAudio(0);
 #endif

I’ll try to put up a static binary later.

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The Last Man Standing Doom III mod has released its soundtrack for free download. I’m listening to it right now, and it’s a great mixture of heavy rock and retro-gaming synth sounds. What’s more, it’s not in MP3, but in Ogg Vorbis format, making it doubly sweet! :)

I’d post a torrent file, but I’m not sure whether that’s covered by the terse license terms. So let me just point you to the official HTTP download page, section “Last Man Standing Official Soundtrack”.

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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!

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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.

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