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.

Comments(1)

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?

Comments(5)

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.

Comments(2)

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!

Comments(0)