 Well, let's see. Okay. I think it is not a loose connection. I think it is a hum, but from the thing I might have a loose a Color change So I leave and now it changed again. I can so I can control the sound from the speakers with the Okay, so bonus Bonus commentary about technology and sound for people who showed up early There is obviously parallels between the issues of electricity and Sound and all of these things and so the way speakers work, of course You have a magnet connected to the electrical inputs that magnet that basically electrify this Metal chassis around the magnet and the magnets connected to paper and then the magnet vibrates Then you get the paper or whatever and then so electricity going through the system is creating some sort of Electrical field around that magnet and there we go. We have a buzz so I tried to Various times figure out how to deal with this buzz issue and you can get little buzz Canceler types of things that try to do that. They don't always work because it depends on what the solution is in my home Teaching studio it turns out that what I did was at one point Figure out that if in fact I plug in my external audio and I plug that in to my PA, but I plug the PA into a different outlet and then I plug the Computer into the outlet on the opposite side of the room then the buzz goes away and Doesn't matter if I have the PA on but I had to make sure that the External audio was in fact plugged into the PA because if I just tried to run the computer on its own without being plugged into The PA that was off then I would have a buzz coming from the computer itself, which I was using or even just the headphones and in my recordings and So if I could plug in the PA, but keep it off then I will have no buzz And sometimes that's the type of crazy things you have to do when you're trying to deal with audio That's hilarious Yeah, so the Issue I think something to some degree varies a lot based on the Computer you're using so I recognize actually now Although ironically enough Someone is what's going on there That's funny I'm going to turn off my networking Because I have a conflict in some sense with my audio setup and my networking on this particular laptop Looks like about three minutes. So I'm gonna still wait till that Yes question so What happened is that my particular audio interface was a powered one So it needed to be plugged in and then I was still connected to the electrical system and so When I switched to a different audio interface that was USB powered Then I was able to run without the buzz when everything was completely, you know, no connection to the power circuit But it was like if I had the audio interface plugged in then I Originally was trying to think we know how do I just have the audio interface and the computer and maybe I plug them both in I didn't actually work However, it panned out to have the computer plugged into one thing and the audio interface plugged into the other one That didn't even cancel the loop. It had to be that the audio output from the interface went to the PA Or I had to have everything not plugged in and it was all just battery powered. Yeah That's an interesting interesting point Right. Yeah, I didn't I don't don't think anything. I was well the PA actually did have a ground That might have been related to it, but that actually canceled it interesting if I understand right I should just go ahead and get started then sooner I Don't think I have any third prongs today So Welcome everybody. Thanks for showing up. My name is Aaron Wolf. I am a music teacher I live in Portland, Oregon and I happen to also be involved in this crazy project called snowdrift.coop which has a booth here at the Expo as a non-profit sort of community-run thing that we're trying to get off the ground and so that's one of the big things that brought me here, but for some crazy reason I decided to also give this talk and this is actually connected what I do for a living because I teach music lessons and I went through a process in 2012 basically frustrated with Issues that I saw in where Apple was going and like I had been a Mac user And that relates more to my students as much as to me and has to do with the idea that I was really happy to find that I could find programs like MuseScore and Audacity that are under the GPL and I was using them and they were neat And I could show them to my students and this is about enabling my students to use interesting technology that they use to make music so Excuse me so in 2012 I Decided to switch to a Linux system after being frustrated with not being able to tell my students who are now switching to iPads and things That I've had found this really neat software that they could use for free and everybody could share it It was great and Apple would not let them use it So the only thing you can use on an iPad is the MuseScore reader thing which happens to be Proprietary and it just will show you things won't actually let you do anything. It's not the program and I Don't like that direction So I'm freaked out about whether Apple is gonna turn the Mac into something like the iPhone in the long run and You know they do because I tell people you should use Audacity. It's really cool And then people say oh I tried to install it, but it gave me a warning something was wrong It was a it was a virus because you know it says there's a security issue if you install this thing It didn't come from the Mac App Store so I could go on about that stuff, but it got me in 2012 to switch to a Linux system and it's both very very promising and also very Troubling so it's not as easy to use. It's not as easy to set up. There's a lot more variabilities But there's also a lot of interesting promise and after a decent amount of Hassell figuring this out. I ended up moving to KX Studio, which is what I use today And I will take a moment to explain to everybody what this is There's a guy who original lives in Portugal. I think he lives in Germany now But KX Studio, which the K comes from the KDE desktop, but it does not it's not a desktop specific thing Actually is a set of repositories that you can add to any Debian based operating system it just is a collection of settings for audio a collection of Plugins and tools and a ton of really cool things Super well maintained and packaged by this one guy who's basically volunteering his entire life to just doing this and is not actually even I was kind of shocked to figure out how this even exists, but He lives on the modest very small amount of donations and is just a guy who doesn't even have a programming background prior to getting involved in this Picked up a Python book one day or something and started learning Linux audio and he's now one of the world's Linux audio experts and packages all of the plugins and software and things that I ever need So you don't need to install KX Studio as a distro You can just add the repositories to any Ubuntu or Debian based system So if you even want a completely full FSF endorsed fully free software system you could get Triscale or Debian core stuff and add the KX Studio repositories but enough people Were asking that he would release an ISO we can install and that's what I'm actually using is his little I'm not really running a distro. I'm just trying to make these repositories, but fine. Here's an ISO and So that's what I'm running. It's Ubuntu based and AV Linux is all another thing that I'll just give a shout-out to it's based on Debian and Fedora jam uses a lot of the same stuff including some of the programs that the guy who does KX Studio put together And that's another music distro and there's a few others, but those are the big ones So I will bring this slide back Whoops that slide didn't show my picture that's supposed to be on that slide supposed to explain the Layout of let me see if it works if I do this and maybe it will whoo What happened? That's really strange. It's not right through Glitches with my slides Sorry, I Will just explain there are a whole bunch of different Audio back-ends that are involved in this and so the standard systems come with pulse One of the comment I'll make on the distro thing while I'm at it is that a lot of people use Ubuntu studio or hear about that because Ubuntu is popular and you look up Ubuntu studio. It has a few settings. It's not really super well maintained It doesn't have all the stuff you'd want. So I don't oppose anybody using it I would just say if you use Ubuntu studio, you should also add the KX studio repositories and then you will have everything At any rate the KX studio system allows me to manage all of this stuff And I'm gonna do a bit of a demo today and so At this point, I'm going to stop and just ask if everybody give me some sort of show of hands How much how many of the people here today already do use and are sort of aware of the stuff in the Linux world for making music Okay, how many people are familiar with how Jack works? Okay, a couple of the you okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and give this talk from the user perspective This is a demo of somebody who's not a programmer not focused on command line things Although I do now have gotten comfortable with some of that Jack is the main thing you're going to be thinking about But when you're talking about audio hardware you want to deal with also and also is a part of the kernel So you don't have to worry about it's just a question of which hardware's you have supported So I have this focus right USB thing that's plugged into my computer and despite that it is not Getting rid of the buzz, but the quality is a lot nicer But you can do a lot of stuff just with the built-in audio just in terms of playing around so The easiest way to visualize this is to understand how the KX studio tools work because they're excellent so the first thing is this program called cadence and We can see here that I'm running an Ubuntu based system even though it's actually the KX studio thing and that I have a low latency kernel which helps with dealing with the things when I want rapid response doing stuff live and Right here is a little thing to set my CPU scaler and I can check that I'm a user in the audio group all this stuff is set if you just use KX studio and so the configuration for Jack and it relates to the hardware and It looks like this and so Overall, there's some engine settings, which I don't really touch very much you can learn about that more later But basically I have some different interfaces So this analog interface is my built-in laptop audio and then I have my USB audio And if I use a duplex mode I can actually use a different input and output if I want to play with those types of things and Then the sample rate refers to the audio rate This is the rate of taking pressure samples if I was recording From audio from my analog and then buffer size is actually going to be how much latency I have and That turns out to be calculated so that back here you can see I have a latency of about 21.3 milliseconds And so I will demonstrate for you what that What the effect of that type of latency is And so I'm going to this is the type of thing you can do with KX studio because everything else is all set I can just open my thing and say I'd like to play with some say an organ and Wait a moment something is going too strangely with my computer here for some reason This is Linux for you things are sometimes not as reliable as you'd hope Why is that not loading? What is happening? Jack is going crazy on me. I see what is happening And so this is an example of the types of glitches you may find in using Linux This focus right audio interface and my computer for some reason and may relate to something about the power settings Lost its connection. And so what I'm going to do That's this is a frustration. I've had lately is go ahead and kill the connection Because Jack didn't know what to do and something went wrong with also connecting to my audio interface And so now that I've done that I will have to go back To here and notice that nothing is running and that's not good. So Is Jack still running no Jack is done What is going on? Okay, so I'm going to bring that Window back. That's actually even worse than I usually experience. How strange so I'm going to unplug that and plug in my built-in sound and What else so this is the sort of Craziness that sometimes happens with Linux audio. And this is not what I mean it to be Oh boy, my entire computer is having trouble. Okay, and Restarting my computer This is not actually something I've even experienced before and that does not happen typically with Some other systems. I didn't used to have that problem with my Apple computers And that relates to the snowdrift dilemma, which I'll tell you about briefly while this computer starts up We're trying to get better funding for free software that serves everybody's interests Because I don't like this situation where I have more glitches to deal with and the hardware is less well supported But I don't like having Apple have control over my life and everything else that I do and being locked into systems That may undermine what I'm trying to do in the long run So that's why I'm involved with snowdrift I co-op but I'm going to turn off my networking again and Everybody sees that and now I'm back And here we are Jack is running again And I'm going to not even worry about the external interface And I'll explain that if you have a different computer you might in fact never have these troubles But these things are hard to troubleshoot and so the most important thing that I will Bring up yet again But I will emphasize right now so that we don't run out of time is that I Found absolutely invaluable to have these sorts of research. Oh, hey the file this showed up again How about that? So I will explain this and then I'll give a thought. It's what I was saying the hardware is obviously your biggest issue And so there's tons of different things my laptop happens to be one that has been successful to do what I want to do in some cases but there are unfortunate connections between the network and The sound and other things and you can notice this Uncomfortable amount of buzz that's happening now, which is exacerbated for some reason by Libre office. How insane is that? and On top of that FFADO is for fire wire nobody really uses that anymore OSS is outdated. Also is the main thing that everybody's using for USB stuff like that and so Jack can run directly with also also and in KX Studio in the way I have it set up. I do not use pulse audio. It is gone. It is usually used for things that are not very applicable to music making and so instead I have a bridge that bridges everything through all the programs that directly support Also instead bridge through Jack to also and I'll explain how that works later Phone on is also relevant. That's KDE type of stuff that relates to routing audio So I leave that and boy it's buzz goes changes. Okay, but going back This oh Crazy so now there you go as long as this doesn't actually put out light then we don't have a buzz So I should have made my slides darker. I'm sorry for the green background They should have been black and then the white text or something These are the main resources. I recommend everybody can sort of course look these up But Linux audio is a great wiki that collects a lot of things and is good introductory resources Linux musicians comm is a PHP BB forum that is pretty active and has people who will help you with all sorts of things and The open source musicians channel and this great website that has all sorts of guides and things Lieber music production if you don't find something on there You will find people who will tell you where else to find out some answer to anything And let's make that buzz go away. I Should try to use black stuff as much as I can. Okay, so I was talking about latency and so I'm going to load up my organ and Then the question would be how can I play it? Well, I could tap on the organ Keys like this Now I'll try to make this very noticeable if I tap here and now listen to the delay You can't really play it very effectively that way But even to make this a little more practical. I will want to plug in this external MIDI keyboard that I have so I go to this Tool here thing and I can go to the tools and these are all Why did I open firefox because I clicked in the wrong place on my screen move around sorry Close that go away firefox Okay, so Katya is a very simple version of this and Claudia is one that does session management And I'll explain that later, but the idea is that in Jack each program has a input and an output of different sorts in this case Here is my organ it has an input for MIDI control an output for Notifying of MIDI events that could go to something else and output for audio And so this is plugged into the speakers and this is a virtual patch bay and now on top of all of this I've plugged in my Little keyboard here and that's this one. It's called the Q-Nexus and so I can plug in the Q-Nexus to the organ and now I can play There's still a bunch of latency so I would want to go back to my settings here and Say oh, I need to have I'm sorry for the I didn't get a mirroring image. Well To change my buffer size down to something smaller and the problem here is That depending upon the settings of your computer you can overload the computer if you have too low of a buffer So we'll see what happens. I'm going to try 120 at which is quite a lot less than 1024 And then to make an instant change without stopping jack. I can use this switch master button and Now you'll see down here. I could have changed it right here, but that's another way to set this Everything seems to be working and now here's my latency Much better so basically usable and If I wanted to change that on the fly I can do it here and Go back to low latency. Oh, look at that. I got 19 X runs, but it happened while I was shifting things around So I'm not too worried about that But if I was recording I'd want to track those types of things because that basically is a glitch where something got lost in the overall flow at some level the maximizing of or the minimizing of X runs comes from getting powerful hardware and powerful computers and figuring out all your right settings But it's pretty easy to track here And so there's an organ and I can do there's a ton of other sense and other things I can play with so the other tools that I'm going to highlight today are The hydrogen drum machine, which is I think one of the most easy to use beginners tools And I tend to highlight things that are cross-platform so I can recommend them to my students who may not be on Linux Although this is definitely a Linux focused system as you saw with the splash stream So this is a drum machine Sample set up and so I can have drum patterns different sounds and then you can easily just lay them out across this grid And so here's the demo thing I had set up Maybe not One of the features I like about this program especially is the ability to Just some of the controls there's this is a humanizing feature I can go to Over here I changed the velocity, so it's not so computer rigid. It will modulate sometimes louder sometimes quieter That's a little more interesting. I could actually modulate the timing a little bit That's not quite as rigid that way and I can turn on and off the amount of swing And then you can actually add plug-ins and effects and so it's actually pretty powerful easy to use things so let's see how this is working in the case of Hydrogen here. I have this each of these samples is just a Layer here, which is just a recording and so In this you can actually edit each of these Instruments so I can actually go ahead and put my own samples in any audio that I want and Then you can actually change all sorts of settings so you can basically create your own sample sets I'm then trigger them in any arbitrary way And I can also create songs so in this case there's like the syncopated version I can say oh, I wanted to do this three times and I do that one for the fourth time and play that out as a song and I could make this long thing go ahead and I can of course change the tempo or So very cool program hydrogen drum machine. I recommend that to everybody it comes with sets of Drum tracks that people have put together that are freely licensed and so you can in fact contribute your own Sample sets and we could potentially if more people contribute to this build a whole library of wonderful Samples that people can use and their music and so what's really cool about Jack is that maybe I want to do something very different from that I want to use something like news score where I'm doing music notation And so in this case, this is at the point of a completely fully professional level music notation program So let's start a piece of music What should we call it? okay scale I can type and of course we need to say Because that's the most important thing on any piece of music And we will move on and we say let's choose some instruments Somebody name an instrument you'd like me to use Okay trombones brass there we go trombone add Let's just do a trombone. That'll be enough for now We'll just go with whatever key. I don't care and let's have a pickup measure and it'll be four four and let's go with Other stick with four four and I'll explain why why later. I like and this is actually an issue of free software and tools I don't like how tools would put you into this this program that can do anything rhythmically. It's fantastic Hydrogen can also do some things But I wish somebody would come along and better support odd rhythms in hydrogen And so if I'm going to try to connect this with other things I will have to do some funny tweaking like pretend that hide to hydrogen that I only say have five Eighth notes in a measure or something or whatever else and then I'll have to say that there's actually really slow tempo Or do some tweaks you can do and it's possible, but it's not the same thing as hydrogen doing all of the odd time Stuff that I wish it could do so somebody please add that to hydrogen question No, no hydrogen is more flexible than that But let me explain I'll explain briefly So you have this size and it's like eight eighth notes And then there's a certain sort of resolution for where I put these in and so I could say for example But I want the resolution to be these triplet options or off Which is putting them anywhere and then I can use any of these sizes. There's 11 eighth notes or whatever so any number So I could do something like that, but that's in a set time Frame so it's basically saying there's this eighth note thing that's thought of as a Certain level in the hierarchy and you can just have an arbitrary amount of those But that doesn't mean I can do the types of things I could do in music or where I could nest quintuplets Inside something else or I could have five four and then switch to four four or whatever else instead. It's more like this grid But yes, the grid isn't stuck to four four So it's something but it's free software people should help improve it and make it more flexible at any rate, I'm gonna do something in Actually, I'm not gonna work if I do the I Think I'm gonna not get I'm gonna get rid of this measure. We're not gonna have to pick up measure I like that idea, but I'll make this simpler and we'll get rid of it Okay, so here's where I trombone and I'm gonna show you a brief intro to how to use music score This is the easiest thing to use. It's a fantastic program and for note entry mode and then name a letter What key should we be in? I? Don't know we're in C. Okay. What was that B flat? Okay? So I'm gonna do a C There's a C and then I'll say I want to be and I'm gonna hit B But I'll put it down and there's a flat and I can just type out letters this way and we can just Do interesting rhythms by clicking up here and that actually goes along with the number keypad So one two three four five whatever different numbers and I can quickly type in whatever I want And so I can say that was nice, but I don't want to do a little fun run or something So I'll go to G and oh, I really wanted it to be the higher G Just control up and I go to a different G and I don't know it's going to F and a G and an E flat or something and now we're like in C minor so I Don't know I'll go back to the longer thing and we'll do a B flat again. How about there we go B flat, okay? And so let's see what that sounds like Hey, the drums played how about that? That's because in hydrogen There's this thing called jack transport which knows where I am in the song and I can choose which thing sets the master So in this case it moved to 120 because that's our music score was set But I might want me hydrogen to be the master and so I'm going to set this to a slower tempo Maybe and say I want it to be like 80 and we'll go back to the beginning and play our song here And that sort of worked except that the tempo from music score didn't actually adjust so Let's see preferences. I go to I owe I'm in Jack use Jack midi time-based master, so I think I need to tell it that It is not the master now hydrogen is the master. Let's see if that works. I have to go back to the beginning There we go So you can actually create a thing where we were doing is and I'll go back to the view where you can see where everything is plugged in music score is plugged in to the output so that I'm hearing the sound and The organ is plugged into the output so I could be playing the organ live at the same time and Hydrogen is plugged in here and So I've got all these different things, but notice there's an interesting music score midi output So maybe I want the organ to play those notes I just added for the trombone and so I'll just have it send the midi out there Let's see how that works. I just play it from any of these actually. I think I can play it right here Here's the transport watch this Yeah, I hear like a funny organ background there Maybe if I add some crazy high you'll hear it more clearly if I do something else with the organ, so Let's see. I'll put in some higher register or something and I'm not sure exactly what that'll do, but let's go back to music score and I'll put something stupidly high up here I'm gonna do something relatively arbitrary. So a leotoric sort of knew a Novel guard music here. Let's see. Oh, that's a too slow. Let's go with Sure That's enough. Okay, and maybe I want to take this. I'll move it up an octave or something. So I hear an organ better. I Don't know if that'll do, but we'll see what happens Back to some place where I'll play there we go I got an organ and so music score is sending stuff out to nor now I could do first put this on a separate music score track and we could have music score sending some track to an organ so I don't have to use music score as built-in sounds and then I can have it playing the drums with Hydrogen and I could even have music score send audio output or MIDI or MIDI output. I'm sorry into a Here's it's separated in this case, but here's the hydrogen MIDI track So if I wanted to make a drum track, this is how I would use hydrogen or hydrogen's drum samples in a more interesting rhythmic sense I could create on any sort of drum line in music score And output the MIDI from that into hydrogen and then that will actually play just like everything else. Yes question Yeah, so I could put any arbitrary rhythm in music score and have hydrogen play it Of course, I could do that at the same time as hydrogen is playing in other ways, but It's pretty flexible. So this is all a modular system It's kind of the Unix philosophy of you can mix and match any tool that you want one of the other tools that I'm going to highlight at this point would be I'm going to go ahead and use I'm going to turn the volume down just in case because I don't remember if the presets are going to do what I want them to Do, but I use often this program called guitar X which is a virtual guitar synthesizer now it is in fact Picking up my sound of doing all sorts of crazy things right now, which I don't really want it to do There we go a little hard to see on this small screen, but Get rid of the plug-ins bar there Okay, so I've got a virtual guitar amp and this is a picking up my voice and it's telling me whether I'm tuned And then we can set up the gains and all sorts of other effects and I could if I had a Set up right now where I was going to use headphones I didn't have this thing on so I wasn't worried about all sorts of other stuff I could route this through and maybe even live sing something into the guitar amp thing or I could plug in my guitar through my Interface, but for now just to make it simple Let's just plug the organ into the guitar X drum machine guitar X thing that's your machine So I'm gonna go back to Katya and we'll take our organ Where is it? Here we are set B3 and I'm going to unplug it from the Output here, so I don't want that directly. I'm also going to go ahead and make sure to unplug the microphone from guitar X and Then I'm going to plug in the organ into guitar X and see what that sounds like I can go ahead and play live because I Already have my controller from Q-Nexus going into the organ. I should be working That's working. Why are these down? Okay, which is of changing programs too quickly Okay, so that's working There's that and I think if I now just turn my volume back up You'll hear it so I can go back to guitar X now and Pick some sort of interesting preset. So for the heck of it. Let's go with a Go with something kind of crazy and I've lying down a little bit, but you get the idea In that case it's a very powerful amplifier and so it can be used for a very hard rock sorts of sounds We can also do a number of other things and so in this case We have EQs and multiband compressors and all sorts of other Reverbs and all this stuff is available as plugins in recording equipment as well So obviously it would be possible now, although it's not a perfect sort of setup I could go back to the score and let's delete this little strange thing and I'll just do a Copy and paste for now, although there's other ways to do this and make a little loop Go on obviously could edit that a bunch And I had that plugged into the organ So let's go ahead to Unplug music score from the organ and just let it play the trombone I would have loved to have had all of these things with my juggling my attention A little smoother, but I think you get the idea. So I'm gonna pause for just a second. Does anybody have any questions at this point? Yes Yes, so it is a MIDI connection as I showed you I could send an output from Mu score or anything else or any other drum program or MIDI sequencer of which there are several and So you could do the same thing where just like I have let me let me give you a very quick demonstration if I go back to my thing here, I have my Controller right now set into the organ, but instead let's go ahead and plug it into the hydrogen So I can play the hydrogen sounds on my controller right now Yeah, absolutely And so the real question though is in terms of how we want to output all this so you can see that There's we're connecting a lot of stuff and the question now is let's say I had some combination of my playing live and a bunch of composed things and I want to output this and have some finished recording well Let's start with a first earlier statement. Maybe I like something of what I did today, but I'm not going to actually want to Record this because this is not very interesting. This is a bunch of garbage, but I like some pieces of it So I want to save this for later. And what do I do? I don't want to have to set up all of this stuff again and so that's where session management comes in and so there's not a Perfect support for this because some of the programs support it better than others and there's a couple different session managers But the one that comes with KX studio. Well, actually, there's a couple ones one of them is Called the Claudia and it's sort of a more it includes a broader set of things than the one we were just doing just now but in Just a moment. Okay in Claudia I Actually have this set up here with a default internal name in terms of my overall studio And I can load different studios and a studio is sort of a set like you have all of everything all saved together And what you can do is you can also create little rooms where you have certain sets of things plugged in together and so in your overall application I can use Claudia to specifically tell Claudia that I wanted to use a particular program like hydrogen or Muse or I could have this recording program Arter, which is an excellent, which is generally the most popular Audio recording program. So one option would be that I take my results and I just Play it and have all plug everything into Arter and have it record. That's one option. I wouldn't suggest that one particularly But basically I can tell Claudia here I didn't do this before but if I was starting this plan I would tell it I want hydrogen and then Claudia would know not only that I Have hydrogen plugged into whatever but that I wanted hydrogen as one of the things it tracks And then when I save my studio it knows that hydrogen should be opened It should be this pro this file particular drum pattern that I saved with hydrogen and hydrogen should be plugged into this and this thing should Be plugged in there and the entire session is saved so that when I open it again It will start hydrogen choose the right file and plug it into all the right things and I'm just back to where I started so that's how you save and Come back now. There's a thing called non session manager Which is an alternative one that actually in some ways works a little better but there's pros and cons what I actually do is Take my basic setup, which is like what hardware setting I'm using I have my focus right or whatever else and I save that in Claudia and I use non session manager to Keep track of where all the jack plug-ins are which programs I want because it does a little bit better managing of The particular like I can do command line arguments for a particular thing Any questions about that that clear? Okay, so if I wanted to actually then output my thing I would use the render program and so the render oops, sorry The render program allows me to simply say I want to start at this particular time in the overall song And it's going to end that whatever in this case two minutes thirty seconds And so it's whatever my length of time is and I can actually hit play and beat you know Jump to the end of the song in the hydrogen or in use score and just say now and then I choose my format wave or whatever else and bit depth and those things and real time it means that I basically hit play and What this actually does and I will show you briefly is if you'll notice over here my This bit is my hardware all of this stuff ends up plugged into here. That's where the final output comes in So when I hit render This is fine. I can just do this. Sorry. Okay, so I will explain what happened What happened was it? Replugged in guitarics it for some reason Thought that guitarists are supposed to be plugged into there and non-session manager would have actually handled that better But I'm not going to worry about that right now But what that did? Briefly, I turned it off Let me see I can okay. I have this volume down. So I'll try that again Render, where is that? Did I close it? You may have closed it Okay, try that again render I Will go back to here and Where's guitarics? Okay, we're still plugged in there. So I don't want that feedback. So I will unplug that But you'll notice that there is now something called jack capture and jack capture automatically connected itself to a ton of things Basically everything that was plugged into the speaker output got plugged into jack capture automatically as the thing plays And so that program actually then captures The output that the computer is playing and renders it to a file. I will stop that because I don't care about that right now Okay, so all of this is mostly talking about plugging things into different things effects synthesizers MIDI types of stuff and doesn't necessarily focus on live audio although I did a little bit of that so I'm gonna focus on that now and we have The most basic tool that everybody should use for if you're doing some audio recording at all it's audacity How many people are familiar with audacity? Seems like most everybody so I'll give you a quick run through of how this fits in Audacity is a absolutely fascinating program. It does all sorts of interesting recordings and It supports jack in that here jack is chosen and I can use whatever inputs. I want I can check that it's In fact hearing me clearly enough. Whoops or not because it crashed on me for some reason Why did it do that? Okay, so there's a funny little glitch here Audacity is not a full-blown jack supporting program. It uses jack But you'll see this funny little thing port audio. What is that? Maybe I need to clean up this canvas because it looks a little bit funny So I will refresh that went away. That was there for a second So you don't see audacity. There's no audacity in here. What's going on? I'm going to record something and here we are. I'm talking That's working obviously and I go back it's not there, huh? Well, let's try this again. I'm going to where how did it get that sound? I'm recording something and look there's this funny thing called port audio and it's plugged into my microphone And I could have plugged it into something else because if I wanted to make an audio recording of the drums or something But when I hit stop it goes away So it's only got a temporary thing and I can't use audacity in a way where I plug it into different things VLC works the same way it will interact with jack But I can't actually use it as one of these session tools along with everything else so I use audacity primarily if I want to go in and do fine audio editing or play with crazy things or do something like my favorite effect Which now let me move this up so that Hope that didn't work. I guess it puts it up there because I have another screen up there it really I think I have both that Yes And it also includes that a very simple version of this crazy thing called Paul stretch Where I can say that I would like to stretch my little recording of myself talking by a factor of say 200 Maybe I won't worry about that right now. I'll show you in a moment Paul stretch is amazing. So here's what you could do with Paul stretch. I'm going to I'll give you a very simple example. So this is a quirky thing that I just love so I'm gonna show off I'm gonna record something quietly That's enough and I'm gonna save it There's a built-in version of this, you know, I was short enough. Maybe I'll try that Paul stretch thing here Now I'll show you the real one. So there's a very simple version of Paul stretch built into audacity but if I Export my file as a wave, that's fine. That's good enough desktop. Okay, okay Now I'm going to open this crazy awesome program that is not installed by default But is in the KX Studio repository. So if you want to add this and you have the KX Studio repositories You can just add it. It's called Paul's extreme sound stretch and Whoa, what happened? That's interesting Okay Got rid of the buzz. That was funny. So I'm going to open my Audio file I just made Which I saved on my desktop is called test and let's see if that works So it's right now set to a stretch factor of 8 and so it's going to take that little very short thing I made and spread it out over 32 seconds in ambient textures and you can see what you can do with actual things like a song that you like or an orchestra piece or Some cord you'd strum on a guitar or anything else and so These interesting ambient textures will follow the pitch of everything that's going on some of that feedback that we were hearing is actually that I should close Audacity probably whoops No, I don't care about that and What's going on? I need to go back to Here something is heating back. What's going on guitar. It's got plugged into the thing again That would happen Don't do that. Okay. I should probably just quit guitar It's at some level even though I would have loved all of this to be perfectly smooth What I want to give is an accurate experience of using Linux audio You need some patience and some things will be glitchy and this is how it is and I hope that it will keep improving I'm very very happy with today's state of things compared to how it was a couple years ago So here's Paul stretch again I'm getting feedback again Guitarics got plugged into the microphone again. That's crazy. Okay, so I don't know what why that's happening What I'm going to do is quit guitarics go away and We will now check out Paul's extreme sound stretch for real much more than That's a factor of eight And if I was to know that the thing was going to evolve in a certain way I could actually play very interesting music against that or a problem that Okay, so Here's my factor of eight I could stretch that out. Let's keep going. Oh, maybe a factor of it, okay We'll make it last three minutes And I could go on and on and the thing will go. Oh, we can make it last. Oh, let's go with an hour and 22 minutes for those Two notes that I hummed Now the thing that is really interesting about this program because this is the sort of silly things programmers might get into doing is You can do something called hyper stretch which takes another level of this and So it can start off at kind of modest levels like oh, we'll stretch that out to Two hours or something, but let's keep going and I could be like oh, you know Let's do that. It'll take 40 days to go through that and You can see where I am in this slider So somebody just was being silly with their parameters here because if I keep going Anyway, I won't hit play now. We won't worry about that but even in the regular stretch mode this This software is a lot of fun and you can do some very interesting things in terms of adjusting the process. So And I can do some interesting things with the tonal versus noise selection here More towards the pure pitch Or more towards the noisy ambience sort of sound Anyway, so I think it's a very interesting ambient sound creator and this is a skewer thing most people don't know about her highlight And that does not do anything with Jack I had to save the audio and then open it up But I could then put that into a program and which I then integrated with everything else and the program that I would use for that would be Arder and So Arder is a really truly professional digital audio workstation. It includes some level of MIDI stuff I'm going to just go ahead and make a new session and We're going to put it on my desktop and just call it test And in this case I can set up all sorts of neat things Now on a very basic level if you don't even have all this other stuff installed You just use Arder the newest version works directly with also and you can skip all the jack stuff I of course like using jack best because I can integrate it with all these things But it can sort of be a monolithic thing where you just put everything in Arder my understanding is the actual creator of Arder is the same guy who made Jack Who later on decided that it was kind of crazy to deal with Jack and people are doing all sorts of weird things with it And he was going to create this monolithic thing instead, but it certainly supports Jack And so everything is can be used however you like So Open There let's see if this works where's where is it there it is but on my screen, so I'll drag it down I think I'll drag it down Can I do this? Bam, okay So Arder is a full-blown digital audio workstation. I can add an audio track I can put whatever I want in there. I can record stuff and If I want to record you then enable the recording and then you hit play and now I'm recording And when I'm done you can have this audio which you can do very simple fading And you can go ahead and edit the audio you can also do some levels of time stretch I move things around all that stuff if you're familiar with that Basically we can mix and match all sorts of tracks and it's a very high level high quality program We can do mixing and then it also does relate to the Jack stuff So in here it's internal thing is telling you that it's just a monolithic thing doing its own thing But I could switch to Jack and now it will follow the time frame and it will choose whoever is the master And it will follow the tempo settings so I could go in here and say Oh I want the tempo to change to a 5-4 time signature over here and I want it to become a different speed And then it will adjust those things in all the other programs And so it integrates very nicely is high quality and I have a mixer here where I can add all sorts of plugins So one way to do this would be to just go ahead and look at all the tons of plugins I got All of this is because KX Studio set me up with all these things and I didn't have to think about it And I could add this synthesizer or I could add limiter or I could add all these other cool filters or choices for whatever I want to do And sometimes all of that's most appropriate because I want to actually edit the audio in order and set up automation and do all the other things that people would do So people use this for professional recordings on live bands or any of the other types of use like that But I'm going to pause for a moment. Does anybody have any questions or anything particularly you would like to know about Arder? Yes. No, not the full functionality So Audacity will allow you to go in and do sample, you know, per sample edits Like all of the noise reduction, all of the you can deal with a quick detail You're doing very fine waveform things. I would always go to Audacity for that But it includes everything you would ever want to do with general, you know, slicing and putting in different things in sections and some level of manipulating the audio Let me be a little more specific. Audacity is a waveform editor It is about going into the raw data of there is this exact waveform It went to this exact sequence sampler level at whatever and we're going to manipulate that stuff And this is about mixing different tracks together and editing them in a creative sort of a song way and integrating a bunch of different effects and then automating that It should get louder here and all these other things. Yeah. Depending upon who you are, I would not say that I would say if you are a beginner who doesn't know anything that you would start playing with Audacity because you would just want to make some recordings and play with them But if you were just even for a beginner If you knew that what you wanted to do was put together interesting compositions and you wanted to use audio, not just MIDI compositions you're not just writing in a musescore or a sequencer, you would use Arter and you would start with Arter, you would make your recordings and then if you found that there was a particular thing where you were like I want to play this bit of the audio backwards and then I wanted to have this particular quirky fade and you would open it in Audacity and you would edit that audio for that use So mostly you use Audacity for these fine tuning things of the audio details itself and you do almost all of the composition in Arter Arter is really the competitor to something like Pro Tools or Logic or these other programs that are big massive digital audio workstations is the term DAW Any other questions about this? So I'm going to move on and highlight one of the other things that the amazing guy who just put together KX Studio is doing and it's a program called Karla and Karla is itself a plugin manager basically So what we have is all these plugins that are installed in the system Arter could put them into the mixer internally Other programs like Guitar X can have all sorts of plugins In fact, you can use plugins inside Hydrogen but sometimes you just want it to be an independent thing that you can mix and match whatever you like and so in this case, you just add a plugin Sorry again for the screen issues Just add a plugin from the list So for reference, this is the list of plugins that we've got with KX Studio Most of them are usable or interesting some of them are sort of just funny and quirky and so let's say I wanted an organ I could find that the organs I've got available Notice I do not see that one that I was using before which is sort of an independent jack supporting but standalone organ It's not a plugin Some of these are also available that way but there's the CAF Studio Gear Oh here, I've scrolled over Okay there we are So the name is Heath We have the CAF organ Oh there it is So there's the set B3 That's the same organ I was using before It is available as a plugin And then there's a different organ and then there's the CAF organ So I'll just choose that one And now we have this rack in which I can open the GUI and set all of the organ settings and it's quite nice if you want to go into all those details You could also edit in the functional sort of this is the internal universal just set all of the stuff So some of these have nice GUIs and some of them don't And this connects Here's the patch bay again I now have my... not that's the other organ I have my CAF organ here and it's not plugged into anything but I could plug in the output See what that sounds like So let's see Not jacked to the awesome system There we are So I'm going to plug in my system And now in this view it's very interesting I click this I actually have a keyboard down here So this can now be plugged in just like everything else It's an independent thing but this is not an application that normally is a standalone application So this allows me to set up any arbitrary sets of racks of instruments that I can save their presets and I can save them as a unit and then all of them show up in jack And so that way I could add a reverb that I want to plug any of my other arbitrary jack things into I could set up basically any type of thing that I want to plug in and use them independently whether I want them accessible in Arder or somewhere else So there's a lot of modularity there and he's got some crazy amounts of features here that I don't have even explored in terms of the ways that this will work I happen to use this often for one of the very few non-free software things that I ever use which I wish was free software but I can't convince my friend who makes this to make it free software because he doesn't quite get it yet Anyway, I can understand in certain ways So I often use this to show off this plug-in ReJS which actually comes from the proprietary software It's called Reaper is the DAW which is a Windows Mac based DAW and they have this plug-in thing called Jesusonic which is like a programming language that this thing is written in and then this thing is a wrapper for that So because I don't want to subject myself to Windows and Microsoft but I still want access to this particular tool I can use this wrapper inside Carla and then open this up and get my view here where I'm going to open up Alt-Tuner and now I can plug this in as a MIDI thing in my rack and what this particular program does is that if I actually I'm going to make this a little simpler so that you can actually experience this I'm going to quit No, that's a wrong thing to do I'm going to close just quit Okay, so I'm going to use I would actually like to use Helm, I'm going to try it that way So there's a Oh, sorry I discard I didn't save it, oh well So this wonderful synthesizer called Helm the guy who makes this is somebody I've actually had a chance to talk to recently which is my favorite thing about the entire Linux audio world is that I actually get to talk to different people and so I know that I'm actually I think I'm running out of time here Okay, so the last little bit of here is that if I plug in if I plug in the where was it? cap organ Alright, not that one, the Oh, it's the MIDI throughput I do the MIDI through to Helm I think that will work Oh, no, ReJS there it is Okay, so ReJS will output to Helm and then I can plug in my controller to ReJS and I don't want it to be plugged in here or here and now it's a little bit quiet, but I hope you can hear this clearly this will be the last little hint of something ReJS Okay, Helm Helm needs to be just a little louder Where's the volume? Do you see the general output? Where is it? Ah, here, yeah Okay, I don't know if you can tell but this is actually now in just intonation whereas if they did not use that E for example the wrong E that would not fit as well Helm is a synthesizer and so I can actually tune my pitches to be whatever I want them to be and this is not written specifically for Linux through Wine because Carla supports Wine so that I can run plugins that would work in a window system under VST and I can actually run them under Linux because Cake Studio actually has all that support and so I can use this program to actually play in just intonation and to play with alternate tunings that will get me all sorts of different things that you can't get with a standard tempered system and there's a ton of interesting other programs I would like to show off but the point at the end of the day is there's a lot of options if you're willing to be patient and play with it in how to do very interesting creative things and I've barely touched the surface of this so I wish we had more time I could go on all day but thanks for hanging out and getting the introduction What's the deal with timing? Okay, there's an hour before the next session Okay, so I can hang out for some questions Do you want me to start with the point where the next works or the part where I was able to like start programs and things but like I didn't actually I mean I'm not sure I mean Right, well I think I will put it this way the tools have improved a lot when I first started just even getting the hardware set up was harder than it is now these things that this Cake Studio guy is putting together all those tools I was showing you there's much clunkier looking things that were harder to mess with and harder to understand what was what and you couldn't click the thing and just reset that it's a much easier thing today than it had been in the past there's still room to improve but I think that somebody who's comfortable with Linux and knows how to basically find their way around could do useful things today and when I say useful things today I mean if you add Cake Studio Repositories to your system you download the things so you have your software you could start MuseScore and you could go ahead and write a song it's really that simple now integrating all of the things is a different question I highlighted these things that I think are that easy to get going Hydrogen just works MuseScore is professional level Arter is works it's just fantastic now there are tons of other things and you notice that I had to restart my computer at one point and I decided to give up on using my focus right thing and what I would have liked although I just partly traveling I didn't bring a guitar or something and play something else live and the music that I put out wasn't I didn't blow your mind with it be doing amazing things I'm an incredible musician you don't really have any clue what sort of music I could make because I spent this much time just fiddling with stuff but it's really not that that hard I think there are places where you'll run into little glitches so if you want to get comfortable with the session management part where you set up all this stuff but then you want to save it you'd probably have to read some things it'll take you an hour to get comfortable and then you'll get good at it after a little bit I definitely recommend non-session manager I think a lot of this has to do with choosing the right tools and there are people who have I have a friend who does stuff on Arc Linux so if he doesn't have KX Studio and he has to sort of pick and choose all the different things and I don't actually know how he works but I'm not saying he doesn't work I don't know how he does it I will say I am running KX Studio because I went and said I don't want to think about all this stuff this guy who put this together including it being a KDE desktop which I'm happy with he went ahead and put out an ISO built on Ubuntu and I was just like okay I'll use that I'll use the system I installed even though you can add KX Studio to anything sure yeah good question well I'm pulling that up this one happens to be a Q-nexus it's very portable and a little bit higher pricey because it's actually after touch sensitive it's by Keith McMillan my favorite controller I think that I would sort of be happy to encourage and promote for anybody that I don't have myself yet because it is a it's a ribbon style controller but three dimensional pressure this way and up and down for different settings and it's a MIDI controller and the thing about it that's amazing is he actually made the software open source and so you can actually go ahead and do amazing things with this and I would love to see the community improve it and work on it and that's one of the very first times I've seen anything like that in the music hardware world $50 or something I think I want to get one even though it's because it's totally amazing but you can get little controllers like this for cheap not this particular one this one's a couple hundred but you can get $50 controller that's workable this focus right is the Scarlett 2i2 the basic Scarlett series is all supporting Linux quite well the audio the purpose of an audio interface is to have a much better hardware than the built in microphones and things on my computer so even that thing I did with Paul Stretch I was just using my laptop thing because I ended up with a glitch for this and I didn't want to wait but if I had used this I would use it with my higher quality condenser microphone and I could get much better higher quality sound it's called a and overall this is an audio interface and this is a focus right Scarlett series an audio interface will plug in professional level microphones to give you the right plugs to plug into professional sound equipment and go through USB and then you just have to set that up and different audio interfaces like this case allow work with my computer well enough that I can get very nice low latency and decent quality sound so let's see let's see what sort of stuff can I use briefly stuff that I've done in this and I could open up a full thing but I don't want to have time for that right now let's see new no new stuff new recordings yes it's a good question they're not responsive enough for nice live playing in some ways but I actually got a touch sensitive touch display myself specifically to use a program called which I think is amazing and I just didn't get a chance to highlight today it's a fully microtonal amazing fluid basically inspired by creating super amazing synthesizer modern computerized stuff built on Indian classical music ideas and has sort of like particular pitch statements that you can spread in whatever way and then glide between them smoothly just crazy interesting stuff so the thing is it started by a Linux guy who based this is an interesting story about make brief about the free software world and about the nature of free software and why I'm working on snowdrift.co which I can talk all day about the guy who started this is basically some guy who wanted to make really interesting music software and he made one of the most amazing pieces of music software ever I okay we have a moment I'm going to show you again this is a separate side but why did that not work let's see I'll just do it this way I will show you what DIN does oh damn it I for some reason I must have reinstalled my system apparently I don't have it installed right now I'm going to enable networking and install it it won't take long because it's in the KX studio repository and that makes everything really easy I don't know why I don't have it installed that's crazy it must have been when I updated my system okay so I'll tell you what DIN does in a moment after I finished setting that up what was that so let me clarify my little story so this program I'm about to show you in a second is built by a guy who basically was just had no income at all and just wanted to spend all day working on this program and he believed in free software so he decided it needed to be a free software program and he it was just Linux only and it's a really cool thing to have any Linux system and after a while he was basically like I'm poor and I'm starving and I don't want to go get some shitty corporate job and I want to work on my software so he made a Mac and Windows release of the thing and made it proprietary and kept working on that and so the Linux thing fell behind and then more recently he basically got really angry about people complaining about how he wants to spend his time working on his program and he wants to have food and get complained about him not making it free software and so I had to talk to him and try to clarify that like I want him funded I want him to have food I want him to keep working on this but I also want it to be free software and so if enough people would support him otherwise he would be happy to make it free software and his basic statement is he will never ever make it proprietary software for Linux because he doesn't think that's right for the community but he wants it to be proprietary software for Windows and Mac and he spends time on that so the Linux system being open sourced if it was fully free software then somebody could port it to Mac or something and he wouldn't have his proprietary control on that so the Linux system the Linux version is basically behind but the new version he added like craziness that's bizarro and all these things that fly all over the place and it's a bizarre system but he's a good example of the type of thing we deal with in free software because I'm talking literally somebody who is like sleeping on somebody's couch and trying to figure out how to work on making the software and the software works like this here's Den and see what do I do I forget what the particular control is but I haven't messed with this in a while okay oh I have to click something I'm a donor I am actually a donor so there's all these things that are like a drone here and I can select these and delete them as you see this is how whatever I had it set when I was last using this see some other things here delete that there okay so the core version of how this works is that I can go into a input mode there's my flat 3 tuned to justice nation and so I can make my little drone things and then I can go back to here and go and the entire thing if I went to the different modes or something that this does I forget how it all works at the moment it's all based on bezier curves and so you can create wave forms with bezier curves to create any type of sound control and synthesis that interacts in all of these different ways to create amazing fluid melodies that work against any type of drone and so I absolutely adore this software it's completely amazing mind blowing stuff how do I leave it forget how to quit the program let's see oops, okay yeah and so I'm very happy about that but there was one last request to hear some music that I made so let's see where am I going to go with this I was hanging out with some other friend and we did some stuff here's a drum beat that was in 7 I've done in hydrogen with some synthesizer stuff and then some guitar you know that's the sense of that there's live bass various other things that was recorded in arder with hydrogen drums and a synthesizer and live guitar and some other things like that and some other recordings mixed in arder everything I ever do is under CC by SA so I have a I can go back to I should go back to I have a website this is my personal website www.WolfTune.com and there's links to some of these things I'm working to get up other stuff a lot of it's older this particular piece I was really thrilled that somebody used this as I said I do everything they're like I think all music in all cultures should be under that license and somebody actually made a video about making chutney or something some people from Brazil and they used this as their backing track so yeah free culture I'm always happy to talk about those things too and I've done a lot of other things I've dabbled with electronic music and a number of other things so I made music with Linux yeah so yes but nothing that does it very smoothly unless you have a special guitar controller that makes the guitar translate into a MIDI thing and there's a number of things that are super missing I didn't emphasize this I really really really like and have done lots of interesting things with pitch and exploring the nature of music and music theory in melodyne when I was on Apple and there is nothing like melodyne available at all I'm sorry just give up there's no melodyne or anything like it or actual auto tune not just a goofy little I can do some stupid little something in tune to tempered systems melodyne is like a auto tune that's much much more creative it allows you to go in and modulate the pitch and timing of individual events in an actual recording of audio at a mind blowing level of stuff proprietary software it's amazing and I really wish we'd have something like that at any point I have right now and anyway yeah so there we are thanks everybody for hanging out I'm going to go back to the Snowdrift.co app booth and promote free software Mark