I’ve been thinking for a while on what to do with my 2 domain names and I’ve come to a decision.  deadbeatguitarist.com will now be exclusively for music and beer related topics and all technology related topics will move to stevebaer.com. My reasoning for this is twofold.

1. It opens up deadbeatguitarist.com to people who might have stopped listening or reading due to the Linux content.
2. It builds Google juice and makes me more visible on stevebaer.com as a technologist and acts a bit like a resume.

I also am going to be pragmatic and lose the ogg only feed which limits my audience to just fellow freedom loving geeks. At this point I’m not certain I will continue the mugcast but if I do I’d like to offer ogg and mp3 feeds.  This will likely cause me to lose my listing on oggcastplanet.org which makes me a bit sad but I feel strongly enough to do it anyways. The mugcast as we know it will change. Thanks for your patronage if you were a mugcast listener. Thank you for your support up until now.  New format coming soon.

From what I can see, Falktx – the maintainer for the distro is working very hard testing and packaging the latest apps – Jack2, VST support,  Ladish and Ardour3, Mumble with Jack support are just a few examples.  He is also doing things like patching older applications here and there – an example being the gNinjam client which no longer compiled under Ubuntu Lucid.  I expect to see other projects such as Ubuntu Studio benefit from the experimental playground that is KXStudio.

There have been a few changes in KXStudio recently and you can read all about them in the atom feed here: http://feeds.launchpad.net/kxstudio/announcements.atom

Chiefly, the most recent change in direction to run audio from Alsa to Jack vs Alsa to PulseAudio to Jack as detailed here:

https://launchpad.net/kxstudio/+announcement/6106

While it does appear that PulseAudio bridge is still running, it is not the preferred way to go unless you have to.

So, if Alsa is layer 1, and PulseAudio sits upon layer 2, then Jack is either on layer 2 (no PulseAudio – just Alsa then Jack) or layer 3 which would be Alsa -> PulseAudio -> Jack.  The more layers involved or the more complexity involved.

For those that don’t understand what all this means.  Alsa is one of the main sound servers running under Linux to handle audio, and if you have an Alsa supported sound card you could get sound with just Alsa.  Alsa however doesn’t handle situations where more then 1 application wants the audio card at the same time, therefore workarounds such as PulseAudio which is a layer above Alsa allows for the sound card to be accessed by many applications at the same time and offers volumes controls from each application in a PulseAudio mixer as well as the ability to stream audio on the network.

PulseAudio has come under fire (unjustly or justly – you decide) for not being a very good resolution to the common challenges that have plagued Linux audio for years.  Be as it may, PulseAudio under KXStudio is stable for me under the Generic and the Lowlatency kernel, so I can’t complain at all – it runs stable.

Which brings me to the part of the post I am most excited to announce.

As a co-host of The Open Source Musician Podcast separated from the host by geography, we had relied on a closed source application to handle our phone call to one another.   This was always a sore spot because all the other software we use is Open Source, however this was one last hurdle we couldn’t get over.  Recently this all changed and we did our first fully open broadcast Friday using the GPL’d VOIP client called Mumble.  The Mumble team has added experimental integration with JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit).  This completely solves our VOIP issues.  The quality is excellent and Dan and myself can record a good track of local audio and each other’s VOIP call into its own track in the Ardour DAW software, we stream this all out on the internets and it all takes place with just 1 PC on each end – no double-ender, no extra hardware – it’s all in the box and its pure gold.

So life is peachy.  Our audio woes are virtually non-existant.  A big thanks goes to Falktx of KXStudio for packaging this experimental Mumble version,  and of course to the Mumble developers themselves for making this all possible!

I must confess in advance to not being a KDE 4 fan in the past,  but after living the dream in KXStudio, I’m hitting the KDE Koolaid and hitting it hard.

Sure, I could rave on about the beauty of the desktop environment and how it really enhances my work flow, but I’ll move onto the main reason I think this is an important milestone in Linux audio.

What really interests me most is that the developer (Falktx) a young fellow from Portugal has made the decision to make the Jack audio server run at boot.  No messing around.  This is the kind of gutsy move I’ve been waiting for to upgrade my Desktop box.

Rest assured that whatever doesn’t run through the Jack audio sound server will run through the Pulseaudio to Jack bridge and you’ll be ready to rock those video sound samples, SIP or mumble VOIP calls into an armed track in Ardour.

Not only has Falktx included the latest audio applications – too numerous to list, he’s also given you Abigoni’s low latency kernel (through PPA), Ardourvst (vst support enabled Ardour through the wine emulation layer),  free VST plugins, the LADI tools for session management, and you could also take a peak at  Ardour 3.0 with ease – it’s in the repos and will install to /opt so you don’t need to worry about it borking whats working.

KXStudio has both 32 bit and 64 bit DVD ISO’s as well as NETinstall disks, and a recent revision to the distro brings some important fixes rolling it up to its current 10.04.1 release.

I have flip flopped between running audio specific Linux distributions and regular Linux distributions fitted with the audio applications of my choice and configured the way I like.  There are pros and cons to both methods, the pros being everything is setup for you, and the cons being, well -  everything is setup for you and it may not be exactly as you like.

KXStudio for me makes the best case for a pre-configured best of breed Linux Audio Distribution and I see no reason to remove it from my laptop, and many reasons to consider dropping it onto my Desktop.

I took this screenshot because it shows one of the compelling reasons for me to switch – the latest jack and the pulse to jack bridge which will allow for a skype free podcast.   Very important to note as of now that the PULSE-JACK bridge is only reliable in a NON RT kernel, so Generic and Low Latency are fine, but RT will crash PULSE-JACK after a minute of running.

KXStudio liveDVD in action

KXStudio project website can be found at http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/

First I had to ask myself what that really meant.  I think to sum it up it would be someone who writes amazing poetry and puts it to good music.

There really is only one Leonard Cohen or say, one Bob Dylan.

However, there are  I think good lyricists/musicians, Ben Folds comes to mind as does Hawksley Workman.

I do find something  about this question interesting, but it’s not the hunt for a new Leonard Cohen, its more to do with the enjoyment of music based on the strength of the lyrics.

Lyrics to the song are very important to some people,  and if the lyrics aren’t good, the song won’t interest them – yet to me, the melody,  interesting chords and phrasing are of greater importance.

The way the words tumble out and mingle with each other, not so much the lyrical content, or the way the melody sits against the chords are of primary interest to me.  This is not to say the lyrics aren’t important to me, I can appreciate good lyrics when I see/hear them and that adds to the overall tastiness of a song, but I won’t hate on a song just because the words aren’t clever.

That said, I’m sure there is some overlap and sliding scale because people who value the lyrics greatly will still reject a song with good lyrics if music is terrible to the  ears.

In fact, this segues a bit is into my new mission. To analyze the ingredients of a memorable pop song – in fact – I want to write an unabashedly catchy pop song.   Like sugary cereal or cotton candy – almost zero substance to it but addictive like crack.

The next post will detail my analysis of what key ingredients are needed to make a catchy pop song,  I must add – by identifying what they are, I can’t guarantee I will come up with a good poppy song, but it will be an interesting exercise, and I will share my findings in the form of a song.

Steve

I’m working at getting an RSS feed going for Open Source Musician and my personal podcast – The Deadbeat Guitarist Monologues. I also plan to post my own music content here as well.

Keep checking back as I promise there will be interesting things happening.

Take care,

Steve