Ubuntu studio - progress report

[Jay Vaughan]

Kai - its been great to hear of your progress and serious effort in learning all this stuff.  I wanted to follow up with a few comments that might be of interest:

> ..you need to read a lot, make mistakes, start over (after asking Jay for advice!) and make fewer mistakes the second (and third and fourth... ) time around.

I can’t stress how important it is to experiment in a way that you feel safe, and comfortable, with making mistakes.  The strength with your action Kai is that you were able to devote a non-essential Macbook to the effort, and this definitely makes the whole experiment a lot more relaxed.  


> So after a few attempts that were spread out over a number of days (or rather, nights), I now have a working Ubuntu Studio running on my old macbook. US comes with a large number of applications, some are extremely useful (PD, Audacity, Ardour), while others are pretty basic or crash prone beta (a promising drum sequencer called Hydrogen that just keeps crashing...).
> 

I wonder what your problem with Hydrogen is?  I have a very stable installation of it on my machine, never had any crashes at all .. so this is a bit weird.  Whats your sound-card setup - are you using the internal audio, or will you try your hand at USB/Firewire interfaces with this machine?

> Linux is weird when you are coming from the Mac, since installing usually involves (seems to involve?) the terminal, something I find attractive and geeky,

To be fair you can use the Ubuntu Software Center GUI to do all this stuff too .. 


> but also something I need to get used to... I feel comfortable typing commands into the terminal that I find somewhere, but I am far from knowing much beyond what "sudo" means…


User rights and permissions can be a thorny subject if you’re coming from an OS where that stuff is all tucked away under the covers, but on the other hand the granularity with which you can administer all of this stuff is one of Linux’ primary strengths.  Good thing though, is that ‘what does sudo do?’ is a 30-year old FAQ.  :)


> Like I already told Jay in private conversations, I feel just about ready for the green belt of Linux-ninja-dom...;) (Jay didn't reply to that, so I guess I'm still striving for yellow in his eyes...;-)

Ah, you are wise, but not experienced, youngling.  ‘man man’ is your next command.  Master it well, and you will find many other colours spread out before you .. ;)


> Jack is a tool that i haven't grokked, but then I was trying for some other parts of the computer first... (like trying to get *!"§$%&/ing soundcloud.com to make a sound…!)

Jack is very important in the Studio context.  The Jack server is the central point around which all Audio I/O is organized in Ubuntu Studio, and the most difficult thing for folks to understand, in my experience, is that Jack is not alone (although it should be).  There is also ALSA, and OSS, and .. horror of horrors .. PulseAudio.  You can take the road of trying to get all these things to party, or you could just throw it all away and focus only on the one true Audio I/O subsystem, which is of course Jack.  In my case, I have an ALSA->Jack bridge, have completely removed all PulseAudio, and rely exclusively on Jack .. which in my case provides over 40+ channels of Audio I/O over Firewire with my rock-solid, works out of the box, Presonus FP10 audio interfaces.  They work so well, and I cannot stress enough how great it is to just have class-compliant devices in the mix.  Presonus don’t get much love, but they’re one of the best supports of Linux for audio, from the beginning (I’m biased: during my Access/Kemper days, I was sent to BridgeCo, makers of the Firewire audio chips used in the Presonus products, to assist in the effort of Linux compatibility..)


> so yes, it's bumpy, if you need to switch to a productive Ubuntu studio system, you should probably have someone like Jay sit next to you (or set it up for you in probably less than 2 hours)

Well I’m always happy to help anyone on the music-bar experiment with this stuff.  I look forward to hearing that you got Ardour all set up, and have multi-channel audio i/o working in your environment, Kai.  You should be just an hour or so away from that target, methinks ..

> in the past 2 weeks I have learned a lot about computers, Linux, to admire the incredible amount of work (and quality control) that must go into something like OS X, to make it "Just Work"…

OSX is not without its fuss!  The MI4 interface I have on my desk doesn’t work in OSX nearly as well as it does on Linux, for example .. OSX tends to ‘throw away’ support for the older accessories pretty quickly, whereas Linux just snowballs a lot of this stuff into the future.
 

> I'm very psyched... If you asked my why I do it, I think my answer would be: because I'm curious what I might find...;-)


Really looking forward to more progress reports from you, Kai!


j.