 Hey, I'm Anfa, I'm an electronic music producer and sound designer, so I work exclusively with open source software and Linux. In early 2022 I was asked to give a presentation for HKU students. HKU is an artistic university in the Netherlands. This video is a recording of that presentation, intended as an absolute beginner introduction to open source audio software, hopefully giving people a good sense of what is possible and where to look for, allowing them to transition to open source software and liberate their noise making workflow. Enjoy. I'm very confident that we can enjoy a very high quality stereo audio and one thing, we are recording this session, which is for later publishing and you can look back things later on. And also because it's all about open systems, open software, we wanted to be open about these things. So that's why we recorded with your permission. If you don't permit, please let us know and we can maybe cut you out or something. Feel free to ask questions, but I think Anfa is going to address that issue. Ask questions in the chat or raise your hand, or, okay, I think it's time to hand over the stick to Anfa. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for inviting me to this session. As you already introduced me, I am Anfa. My real name is Tobiasz Karoń. I live in Poland and I'm a music producer and sound designer, so I exclusively work with open source software and Linux, which is quite unusual in this space. I've been doing music since around 2005, and I started using FL Studio 5, which was pirated at the time, but I wanted to be legal and I couldn't afford anything, so I was looking for free programs that also resulted in me getting interested in Linux and then I learned that free and free can mean different things. You may have watched a video that was sent to you with an invitation email where I explained the difference between free software and freeware, and at that point I started to see the difference that there is open source software, which is also called free software, and I like to call it liberal software because that clearly correlates to the word liberty, which means freedom and is not confused with free of charge, which is the unfortunate ambiguity in the English language when you talk about free software. Some people think you're talking about freeware and in this context I specifically mean free and open source software, which is also called liberal software. So I've started to work with open source software around probably 2008. I've been making a lot of music. I've released quite a few long plays, probably a dozen singles, and I'm currently working on my next album, which is, you may hear some exclusive previews in the background right now. The track playing in the background at this very moment is titled Learning Ardor, because I also made some official videos for the Ardor developers, and Ardor is a open source DAW that we're going to be using today. We'll jump into it in a moment. So the confusing thing about open source software or liberal software is that it doesn't have to be free of cost, free of charge. For example, Ardor, which is the DAW we're going to be using, let me just show it, is open source. Everybody can freely download the source code and compile it for themselves, but the official binaries are distributed for a price. And this is very symbolic because you can just pay one dollar and get the official binaries for all the operating systems, Linux, Mac and Windows. So if you are using Linux, like I am, you also may not need to do even that because most Linux distributions compile Ardor on their own and package it in their software repositories, which means you just type one command on Linux and you have Ardor running and you don't need to pay anything. And it's also completely legal because of the open source licensing, which is GNU, GPL or GNU General Public License. That's usually the license that is used. There are some other licenses, but this is not about licensing. I just wanted to introduce you to what open source software means because maybe some of you are familiar with it. I know Mark has been trying to make you familiar with it. And I'm sure he's doing a great job at it, but you may be stubborn and defensive about it. And so I'm here to show you that open source software is a thing and you can actually use it and you can do commercial work, you can do professional work with it. Yeah I have credits in a few commercially released games. I worked in the video game industry for like one and a half years, unfortunately not longer, but I am looking forward to work more in this industry. So unfortunately a lot of people there don't realize audio is so important. And it's often an afterthought. For example, I was recruited as a 3D artist and I only started making sound effects and music and voice acting for the company later when they realized that, oh, we need something like that. Yeah, but this also has allowed me to test, to battle test free and open source software in like production, serious production where you know, you need to meet deadlines and there's pressure. Nobody's gonna accept you saying, oh, but the program crashed for me or something. And I've been working on Windows a little bit then, still using only free and open source software. I was using Ardor on Windows, I was using open source plugins. I was not able to find everything open source I needed because some of the plugins I use are exclusively available on Linux. Unfortunately had to support myself with some freeware plugins, which means free of charge, but proprietary. So not, not Libre. But yeah, I didn't have a choice, unfortunately, at that point. But I think, but later I switched to Linux and I've continued to do my work on Linux and using Linux also enabled me to do some cool things that nobody on Windows was able to figure out. Like I could write a simple bash script for myself to automate converting files or moving them to appropriate directories. I wrote a Python script that was cross-platform, it would work on Windows and on Linux. So I could export my sound effects to a one directory, have them all prefixed with a number and I create a file, a text file with a table where the number was translated to a subdirectory in the game project files. So that I exported my sound effects around the script and it would update the files in multiple subdirectories in the entire game, get a repository. Because normally this is not something you can do with ARGOR. You have one export directory and if you want to automate exporting to multiple directories then you need to do special stuff. Yeah I've, I was informed that some of you are familiar with game development and you're also familiar with programming and making sound effects for games as well. Yeah so I guess it's relevant to bring this up. I also have some video tutorials about sound design for games specifically. Some of the videos were inspired by my experiences while working for the company. So they are like drawing from exactly stuff I just had to come up with and do to to get my work done. Yeah I was, I was singing in a rock band, actually in a couple of rock bands. I also played keyboard a little bit. I even played electronic drums once on a rock concert, it was funny. Yeah I love playing drums but I don't do it much unfortunately. And I'm not great about it, I'm not great at it. I was also singing in a choir as a bass baritone and that's where I met my wife. And then I got her to play bass guitar in the band I was singing in. So that was, you know, the band split up pretty quickly but she's my wife now. Yeah I'm teaching my craft on YouTube, I am making videos. Usually I release like one, two, maybe three a month. And also I do live streams every month where I make music live similarly to what we're doing today. And I also play submissions from viewers. So I encourage people in the open source music production community to send in, submit their music that they made with open source software. And I sift through that and I play the tracks I really like. And everybody gets to be inspired by that and see what is possible. The submissions always include some information, always always what software was used so everyone can know like, oh, this was made with this program, which is open source. And this was made with that program and these plugins. Yeah, I see that the communities really like they value this, this part of the live streams and it's a good idea, I think, to foster the community and make everyone realize, hey, you can make really awesome stuff with this. So what started as a means of not feeling like a software pirate without having money turned into my decision to dedicate myself to work with open source software, not because it's not doesn't cost money, but because I love the philosophy and I love the people behind it. Because this is software that is made by people for people. And it's all just a product of a lot of people loving what they do, having issues and wanting to solve those issues. And then others benefit from that. And the thing similarly works with how I make videos because my work is crowd funded, people decide to submit and donate to my work every month. And this is how I can keep doing these videos itself. So as opposed to using products of a company and hoping the company will fix something, you can just jump in on a chat or to GitHub and report a bug. And often I've been reporting bugs and had them fixed in two days by developers. There's a lot of lovely people. And people are like half the whole entire thing. All right, I think I've covered everything in the slide. This is some music that I've been making for the past two years and I'm going to release it in an album. I'll just play out, give you an idea of what can I do. Your microphone is failing a bit, I think. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I forgot to turn it up. I turned it down to not to not play solo over the track. On the last, I think last or one before the previous livestream, we've actually done a track where I sampled my me blowing my nose because I have nose issues. So we actually made a track out of that and I published it pretty silly. All right, so this is Ardor. It's a DW that works on Linux Mac and Windows. It's open source. You can compile it for yourself or you can buy the official binaries for $1 or subscribe for $1 per month, which is what I do or more. And I've prepared a little synthetic drum kit. So I want to show you some instruments. I want to give you a taste of what tools are available if you are into electronic music. If you want to synthesize sounds, I'm a big synthesizer freak. I love the virtual synthesizers and nearly all the sounds you've heard were synthesized. I I love synthesizing my drums and rarely used samples. But I know a lot of people want to use samples. Most people want to use samples, so I also will show you a little bit of that. So first, let's see at synthesized drums. I made this little I made this little drum pattern. And how this works is I have a plugin called Geon Kick, which is, of course, a free and open source synthesizer plugin, which is specifically target for making drums. And before I found Geon Kick, I was using other synthesizers, mostly Zenatsub FX, which for a long, long time was the best you could you could find in the open source space. But things have progressed immensely in the past five years. Like I have not been using Zenatsub FX because just we get so many awesome synthesizers that do things better that I rarely needed. So Geon Kick comes in two variants. This is a variant that has 16 instruments outputs. So you have 16 stereo outputs. You can have an entire drum kit, which is what I have here. You see, oh, yeah, there it is. So I have my kick, my snare, one hi hat. No, sorry, that's the snare ghost. So short hi hat, a long hi hat. And I have tons, high, medium and low. And this is all synthesized. So let's take a look at the kick. If we go to the controls, we have. First, this synthesizer has three three layers per. Per instrument, so you can enable and disable them here. For example, by default, you know, a layer is just a sine wave. And this layer has noise component. And an oscillator. This is just a noise component. And this is the oscillator. The oscillator is a sine wave and we can modulate its frequency. If I click on these buttons, you can see that I can edit the envelope. And this is the best part about Geon Kick. If you've used something like kick to you probably you're probably familiar with like the concept, because this is nothing new in the commercial world. But for a long, long time, we didn't have the kind of drums in the size or in the open source space. And what this allows me to do is create incredibly precise sounds for my drums. I can have long ringing. I have short, thumpy. I can like you can just spend hours just just tweaking the envelopes on the pitch, you know. And it may be daunting. I'm kind of person that enjoys this. And I also always make drums from scratch for every track. But I love that I can imprint some character in that my drums are never going to sound the same as anybody else's because I made them from scratch. So my music is going to be unique as that. And I know most producers will just grab a random free drums, free EDM drums from the Internet. And like there's nothing wrong with that, except that your sound is going to be the same as everyone else's unless you do your own clever processing and you imprint your own character. Also, I forgot to enable screen display. So now we have, you can see in the bottom, you can see what I'm clicking with my mouse. You can see what I'm typing on my keyboard. And also if I'm holding any modifier keys. So this may probably be difficult to follow live. But if you want to watch the recording, you can pause, rewind and see what did I click, what did I press? Because I may not always explain every hotkey because we would just we wouldn't manage to do too much actual music. I have tutorials where I excruciating tutorials where I explain every single hotkey for two hours and you can watch that. But today we're going to do something a bit more exciting. I hope. OK, so we have our kick. There is a running joke in my community that every, every single live stream starts with me making a kick drum from scratch. So that's why I made this one beforehand. So you don't have to witness that. Of course, I have probably five videos where I make a kick drum from scratch using different synthesizers. This is my snare and. I don't know if you're familiar with electronic dance music like drum and bass, et cetera. Drum and bass is a huge influence. And I like I even have an album called drum and bass payload, which like it's 20 something tracks of various forms of drum and bass. So I was never good at making actually boring music. So I always overcomplicate it and make things not that much good for a party. Most. Anyway, this was the inspiration for the skit because initially I was working with this track in the tempo of one hundred seventy three BPM, but it was very frantic. And I decided to slow it down to one hundred thirty five. So how does the snare work? Yeah, the snare. We have two layers in the snare drum. If I disable the second layer. Or just the second layer. Now, there is some stuff that is going on afterwards because the drums here is the G on kick instrument. It's outputting 32 audio channels. So 16 pairs. And this gets split into 16 audio tracks. Where I can apply individual processing and just mix this like a like a drum kit because it's a drum kit. And that's what I do. And after that, I send all of these tracks to a common submix bus. I I'm calling all my submixes with capital letters just to make it clear that this is a submix. Maybe I should call this without capital letters. So it's just, you know, buses have different color. Buses are like dark blue tracks are dark green. So the this is a reverb send, for example, my snare, my snare is sending to the drum reverb bus, which is applying some reverb, applying some flanger, applying hypers filter just to not muddy the bass frequencies. And then it's fed back into the drums bus. Where is it? Where everything is mixed together and it's compressed. This is a stock plugin of Ardor, by the way. So this comes with Ardor, whatever you install it on Linux Mac or Windows. Yeah, I have also ghost snares. Yeah, I don't want to show you exactly how I synthesize the drums because maybe not everyone is going to be interested in it. And I have a bunch of videos where I show it. So if you want to learn how to use this exact synthesizer, just type ANFA and Geon kick and you'll find a bunch of videos and live streams where you can watch me do it. And explain it. So we have a little drum kit and in Geon kick, I can assign a single note to every element. This is why we have this all in one midi track. I don't usually do that. I just often I just have a bunch of Geon kick single, which is a variant that doesn't have all the 16 instruments. It doesn't have a kit. It's just one instrument. And usually I use that variant. So it's Geon kick single. Yeah, you can see Geon kick single is a favorite plugin. Here's the tick because that's what I use often. And I just add a four of these to create my basic drum kit and go from there. All right, so that's for synthesized drums. Now for sampled drums. There are many different ways to use drum samples. The problem is always licensing because you want something that is not going to limit your freedom, what you can do with your music. With synthesizers, this is pretty clear, like there is no licensing issues, but with anything involving samples, there's always this thing on what is the license of these samples? So there is something called AVL drum kits. Should actually open up the website and show this to you. AVL drum kits. Yeah, there's a plugin, a bunch of plugins, actually there are two. There is a drum kit called Black Pearl and a drum kit called Red Zeppelin. And these are plugins that pack a set of free samples, a set of free sampled acoustic drum kits. And they are licensed in such a way that you can use them in your music and you don't have to add it any credit, information or something like that. I'm talking about this because there was a debacle with, I made a video about this where there is a popular collection of orchestral instruments, sampled instruments that claimed that it's free to use without attribution, without crediting the authors, but the listed licenses for the source samples stated otherwise. So it's like, did they license the samples under a license they don't understand or the author of the collection not understand the licensing? I don't know. The author claims that the authors agreed for him to make this collection and it's okay for people to use that without attribution, I'm not okay with it. So yeah, because they're of course, except of drum sample libraries, there's also orchestral sample libraries. There's a project called Free Pats. Where you can find various sampled instruments and these are often in formats like SoundFont, which is SF2 or SFZ. Or SFZ, I guess depends on where you are from. Yeah, and there isn't super much but these are very precisely picked so licensing is not an issue. Anyway, there's also a fantastic project called Drum Gizmo, which is, it's a plugin that outputs, I believe it's 32 channels of audio and it emulates what it would be if you had a drummer with a kid in a studio with mics and you just have raw input from the audio interface. And you feed this plugin media inputs and it outputs exactly what you would get from a drummer in this room playing your MIDI. It's pretty crazy but it requires extra work because you need to mix the drums. You just get raw mic inputs and it can sound absolutely amazing and it provides you with unparalleled flexibility but the drum kits require you to attribute the drum kit creator. So if you go to download drum kits, there's a bunch of kits they made. And these are a bunch of metalheads. I met them, they're great guys. We met at Sony convention in Cologne. And I thought maybe we should make like a crowdfunding campaign to donate to them and make them re-license one of the kits under Creative Commons Zero license which would enable everyone to use it without attribution, that would be awesome. But the licensing is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 which means if I use any of these kits in my song, I need to add a little note that I used Crotchall kit from Drum Gizmo under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 which is a bit problematic. For example, for my own personal projects, I can do that but if I'm gonna do work for clients, that's not gonna fly. So yeah, this is a problem. You may be also familiar with freesound.org. I have uploaded probably around 900 sounds to freesound over the years. And when I started making sound effects for games, I realized how amazing this resource is. So I asked the freesound people, administrators to re-license all my sounds to Creative Commons Zero license so that everyone can do whatever they want with them. And yeah, cause I use these sounds a lot in sound design work. And as long as something is licensed in Creative Commons Zero, you can use it commercially, whatever, you don't need to credit the author. Of course, assuming that the author didn't steal the sound. But well, we can't know that. So I'm not gonna be demonstrating Drum Gizmo, I made a live stream about that where I jump right in and we mix the drums because that's gonna be quite involved. But we're gonna use the AVL drum kits, specifically the Black Pearl drum kit. Yes. And these drum kits come in two variants each. So let me open the plugin browser. I'm gonna type Black Pearl and you can see there is a variant that is regular and a multi output variant. So we can either have a stereo output with all the drum elements pre-mixed for us or we can have multiple, actually there's nine individual tracks and we can mix them on our own which is nice cause we have some more flexibility cause the kick snare, hi-hat, possibly toms and the cymbals are going to be isolated. It's not as flexible as Drum Gizmo but it's already a lot and you don't need to attribute anyone and you can do quite a lot of cool things with this and there's two different drum kits. What I've done with this drum kit is totally massacred it with effects. So that's what I did through it. As a way to fill up the space between like support the synthetic drum kit. I'm going to disable the effects one by one and I'm going to explain to you what they are, what they do and of course all of these effects are free and open source software. So that's the basic input. Gonna make it louder, so. After this, I apply pitch shifting with a plugin titled MA Pitch Shifter which is a little bit special because it allows you to change the, some extra parameters like how large is the buffer that the pitch shifter is using to do its shifting which if you set it to a very small window you can get a lot of glitchy effects which can be creatively used with success and there's also this blur parameter. I'm not sure what it does but I think it crossfades between the buffers. So that's pitch shifted. After that, I apply a plugin called Dopser which is made by a member of my community which is a face rotator or face disperser plugin. The name is, I believe it's a corruption of disperser which is a commercial plugin available. This is just a bunch of all pass filters in series. So if I make this to zero, that means no all pass filtering. Sounds normal. So you are probably familiar with all pass filters and you know what they do. When you push all pass filters to extreme you can create very interesting effects. This also does weird things to vocals because every click becomes a pew. And it can also add a lot of punch to drums, recorded drums because it creates a pitch envelope where there was none, which is very interesting but here I used more for just making the sound a bit different. Afterwards I apply multi-band compression. This is one of the simpler multi-band compressor plugins. It's called ZA Multicomp X2, which means it's stereo. This is from a set of plugins called ZAM plugins by Damian Zammit. And this plugin, I can smash this even harder. Multi-band compression is great for creative purposes. Not so great for mixing. I mean, it can be great for mixing but you need to be subtle because multi-band compression can very easily ruin your sound if you don't know how it works. It's so easy to totally mess up the balance of frequencies but for creative purposes I think it's really an interesting tool to even out the frequency spectrum to make things sound bigger. After the multi-band compressor I also apply regular compressor, a single-band compressor to smash it even more. Then I apply a guitar amplifier emulation. This plugin is called Swanky Amp and it has a nice amplifier and cabinet simulation in it. Without the cabinet it sounds like this. And that's because I've turned up the presence to max bass to nothing. Of course we can change that. This is intended to use some guitars of course. I rarely use things like that as intended. After that I apply a high-pass filter to make sure I don't mess up any low frequencies in the whole drum kit's submix bus. And this is another built-in plugin of Ardor. It's called Ace, high-low-pass filter. And one unique feature of Ardor is that it has what is called an inline display function. And these are tiny little spaces where plugins can draw. You can see that the Ace compressor also uses that. And this lets you to get visual feedback on what's going on in your plugin stack without opening the user interface. And I don't think I've seen any DAW that does this. And also this is only possible in the LV2 plugin format. Ha, what is LV2 plugin format? I always heard about VSTs and AUs, oh my God. Yeah, so LV2 is a Linux native format of audio plugins. I have a whole video talking about the history and what are different plugin formats so I'm not going to repeat that. It's been searched on YouTube and find it. But LV2 is the best that open source community has come up with. And LV2 plugins are extensible. So you can write extensions and the inline display is one of the extensions. So any LV2 plugin can specify, hey, I support the inline display extension. And then if a plugin host supports that extension like Ardor does, it says, oh, cool. Show me what you've got. And then it displays it. And there are some settings I believe for the inline displays. Not in every plugin. Oh yeah, because there are also inline, ACE spectrogram. Oh yeah, ACE inline spectrogram. For example, this is a plugin that strictly exists just to provide you with an inline display. And you can choose the height of this inline display. Oh, it does an update. You can also hide and show the inline display. Oh, it doesn't update for some reason. Something is not working as it should. But anyway, this is a nice thing to have a very quick and small tool to look at your signal. There's also an oscillator, I believe. Inline scope, yeah, there's also a scope. Oh, now it updated. I needed to add another plugin. It doesn't usually work like that. Yeah, one thing about free and open-store software is that there is bugs. If you didn't notice, you saw nothing. Like the running joke in my community is that anybody who's joining a live stream, I do these once a month and they are late. They ask in the chat, how many crashes? Because I've even made a tool that is monitoring specific programs like Ardor. And when it detects that the program stopped, it triggers an animation and sound effect and shows a counter how many times Ardor crashed. Yes, by the way, I also dabble in game development myself and I use, of course, of open-store software. I use Godot Engine. You may have heard about it. It's getting more and more recognized alongside Unity and Unreal Engine. And I made this tool in Godot Engine, so I'm capturing the output of that and it draws the particle effects of an explosion and I made it text them. It's funny. An author of open-source plugins, Chris Johnson, who is making plugins under the moniker Airwindows. Airwindows is like, he's got a cult following among the audio people because he is able to make some insanely accurate and good-sounding analog emulations. He's made a few plugins that emulate tape saturation. The most used ones are two-tape five and two-tape six. He's also made some plugins that do console, like they simulate analog summing. So you can insert a plugin that we can actually do that because I can hear the difference. I'm deaf for this kind of nuance, but people who know this stuff, who spent two decades in a basement with nothing but a tape machine and a stack of guitars, they listen to this and they go like, whoa, that's awesome. I go and listen and see how I can push this and break it. So I push the gain to 12 and I think, yeah, that sounds really nice. I like it. I have no idea if it sounds like an accurate tape distortion. I don't care. It just makes my drums sound really cool. One of the best, most useful plugins he's made is called Debass. I actually am in a process of making a video about it. I've already recorded all the footage. I just need to edit it. Debass is a de-esser, which separates sibilants extremely cleanly. And I can actually demonstrate this to you with the audio setup that is actually right now processing my voice as I'm doing this presentation to you. But this is how my audio processing graph looks like. This is Ardor. This is all the tracks of Ardor, all the media inputs, outputs, et cetera. This is my audio interface right now. It's a PreSonus Studio 24C. I've been testing a bunch of these. I've made a video about Scarlett Focusrite 2i2 for Jen and this is another one I'm testing and there's also gonna be Stainberg UR 22C. I test them on Linux and I show what works, what doesn't work. Basically they just work when you plug them in, but there's some quirks sometimes. So I also made this little thing so you thought this was complex. Nah. Let's open this Carla Rack or Patch Bay plugin, which inside has this. And this is the audio processing of my voice and also the Dawn audio that you're hearing. I also have MIDI controls so that if I feel rowdy and I wanna say something bad, I can go, what the fuck? And nobody can, like, no one can do anything. I just can bleep myself. It didn't work this time, sorry. It didn't? No. Oh, beautiful. It didn't trigger. Hello? Try again. Try again, okay. Oh, that's the perfect fail. Okay, let's try, does the reverb work? Don't think so. Oh, I think I know what I've done. I have probably, yeah, I just, I forgot to connect my audio interface to the control port, which means this whole setup didn't receive events from my keyboard. So I have some, yeah, okay, there it is. So these are the MIDI inputs available in my system. There is the audio interface which has like standard DIN connectors. I don't use them so I have a USB keyboard. And now I should be able to change the sound. Ah, shit, did it work this time? Yeah, perfect. Yeah. Nice. That must be embarrassing. It was embarrassing, I didn't work the first time. Okay, I'm gonna show you how it works if you're interested. So, all right, let's go to the beginning. This is my, these are the inputs. The first and second are from my DW. So everything I make in Ardor, it goes to these. And I've also made myself, here's an amplifier plug-in just as a bypass cause I can add some plugins that display a spectrogram and then use that to overlay on my screen. That's not used now. The second, the third and fourth are microphone inputs. I was using two. I had a second microphone, which was a room mic and I use it like a, I use them as if they were mid and side microphones. So there was no directionality to it. It was just serleness, which sounded good. So I'm denoising my microphone input and actually disable denoising. If I disable the noising and I turn on my computer's cooling to maximum, you can probably hear the noise now. I'm gonna turn off my mic, so I can hear it better. I've now turned off the noising and now it should be less noise. I'm normally monitoring this when I set it up. Oh, sorry, I didn't turn down the gain. But I also have a compressor and limiter, so that's no biggie. I have auto-tune effect, so I can sing, which is controlled by MIDI. I have an EQ, which cuts off some lows, a little bit of boxiness about 300 Hertz, boost some highs. I have a gate, which I can also control with my MIDI controller. So it's like I cut off the noise with denoising a little bit, and then I remove the rest with the gate. I can adjust that if I need. This is LSP gate stereo. LSP stands for Linux Studio Plugins. Linux Studio Project, Linux Studio Plugins, I think. And these are some, one of the most overkill, over-engineered plugins I've seen. They have so many options. The equalizer from this suit lets you choose four different digital implementations of filter modeling, like 20 different modes, and it's crazy, but if you need to do something extremely specific, this is great. For example, this is the only gate plugin that has hysteresis, hysteresis. So I can make a different threshold for turning this gate on and turning it off so that it doesn't just jump on and off when it's on the edge, which is awesome. Oh, there's also some other crazy plugins like RSP LSP Room Builder, which is a plugin where you can import a free model and simulate how sound reflects from, emitted from virtual speakers and captured by virtual microphones. So you can generate your own reverb, kind of like ray tracing only for audio. So after that, I apply compression. I have also assigned a control so I can change the compressor with my own keyboard. And that's just so I have a lot of headroom because I'm like, I do have a lot of headroom, so I can get loud and nobody suffers and there is no clipping. Hopefully, after compression, I use DBest, the plugin which started this whole analysis, which is fantastic because it can separate assets very, very clearly. And right now it's the removing assets. If I bypass this plugin, special sound synthesizer. Now it's on, special sound synthesizer. Yeah, I'm making a video about this, so if you wanna see that video, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel, I guess. Yeah, lots of stuff. I am then mixing the first microphone as a mid and the other as a side signal so that from left to right, I convert it to mid-side and there's some other stuff like gain. And there is, oh, there's reverb. This is gain that makes this pretty much just a send so I can send my signal to reverb. Here's the reverb, then it gets mixed back into a limiter, which is my favorite limiter, X42 DPL. It's of course an open source limiter and it's really the best. It's so clean, it's so easy, it just does the job perfectly. I made a video about it some time ago. And here is the, the shit button. So I have an analog oscillator. This is a plugin that generates a one kilohertz sine wave with a little bit of instability so it's a little bit, like, it has some little jittery to it. And then I use a side chain gate. The side chain gate is using my voice as input. Yeah, basically it means that when the oscillator, yeah, how is it working? See, I forgot how that's working. Ah, yeah, I know. Okay, so I'm changing the amplifier of the, yeah, so now I'm sending my voice. I'm sending my voice to a surge filter, which is another plugin by LSP. And it's a plugin that can turn on and off based on the signal. It's not, especially, it's not a gate. It's something different than a gate. And it does some interesting stuff. So I'm using it to kind of like make it more stable so that when it turns on, it stays on for a while. It's gonna turn off immediately. Then, when speaking, my voice is key to the oscillator. And when it peaks up something, and I use some filtering to specifically trigger it only on vowels. So I can say, shit, and it will only cut off it. It's not gonna cut off the first, because a lot of swear words start with a sibilant sound. And this makes it so I can press the key and hold it throughout the whole word. And it's only going to eliminate vowels, which is sounds much better than everything. What's then, yeah, I have a little gate just to cut things off. And then I have the actual oscillator when it's on, it will cut off my voice so that we only have the beep. And we don't have beep and my speech mixed. There's also a sidechain compressor that ducks my DW output when I speak so that when I play some sounds for you, and I say things, there's a sidechain compressor that turns it down. I can also control the threshold with my keyboard. I can make it extreme or subtle. Also that was in my right ear. Oh yeah, I think I did something to change that. All right, let's maybe go back to music making. By the way, this whole program is called Karla. It's a non-linear plugin host, which means you can of course load your plugins and route them between. I also, this is my go-to for live audio processing because I can very easily assign MIDI CCs to different things. And I can make a reliable setup that I can control with a MIDI controller and have this work every time. So this is what is part of my live streaming setup every time and also recording. All right, let's go back maybe to this drum kit. That was a tangent. Ah yes, the Hi-Pass filter. After the Hi-Pass filter, there's a little gate. This is a very old plugin, which isn't LV2. It's LV1, which is a predecessor to the format. No longer used, also called Ladspaw or Linux Audio Developers, simple plugin API. The API might be simple, but the name isn't. And this is still one of the best gates I have because it's so simple and does the job. That's just to cut off the tails. The ringing of the snare, especially, this is especially apparent when I have all this compression and distortion. So it cuts it short. And yeah, I also had some stereo width changes. Yeah, so this is a plugin called CULF Stereo Tools. CULF is another open source plugin suit only on Linux. It has a bunch of useful plugins. Some of them are kind of weird and have their own sound, which not everyone may like. Like the multi-band compressor from theirs is a bit weird. But the Stereo Tools is a very useful thing that can convert a left right signal to a mid-side signal to flip the channels, do all kinds of weird stuff, increase the width or reverse channels. It's a very useful plugin to have if you need stereo manipulation. So I'm making this a little bit less stereo. I can make a fully mono, but let's not do that. All right, so these are sampled drums. We have synthetic drums. Together, they sound like this. I'm gonna turn down the acoustic drum kits so they are just filling in the space rather than being the main dish. Okay, let's now talk about some synthesizers and make some melodic parts to this drum pattern that we have. I have prepared three synthesizers that I wanna cover today, from a simple to a complex to a insane. So we start off simple. This is all in two. If you are familiar with, or you just happen to recognize Propellerhead Reason, there was a synthesizer called Thor. And Odin is like a re-implementation. It's the same idea, but it's a completely independent maker. And this is an open source synthesizer plugin. The good thing about it is it sounds very analog. It's also pretty easy to do to use. So you can add an envelope. Here is our filter envelope. Maybe we can make a plug. We can enable Unison, which will make our sound chorusy, because we have now multiple voices. Maybe free. Okay, so we have D2 and we have Width. It will make this, use this as a lead. You can also make this filter follow the keyboard so that if I play high notes, the filter's relative cutoff frequency is, the filter's cutoff frequency is relative to the pitch of the note and not just static. Because if I disable that, well, the high notes are being cutoff. The filter also has saturation, which is very nice. I think I'm a bit quiet. Yeah, okay. This is the low pass filter. There's a bunch of other filters. We have different low pass filters. We have a band pass, high pass. There's also specific emulations of some ladder. I believe that's a MOOG filter, some emulation. Also change the oscillator. We have an analog oscillator, which is these basic waveforms. We have a wave table oscillator, which has a bunch of preset wave tables. These wave tables are only four, have only four waves. So they are very like simple, right? But still, they can do some nice things. We can also easily assign an LFO to modulate the wave table position. An LFO one is here. We can sync it to tempo. There is a modulation matrix where we can take various things. One of the cool features is that there is audio rate modulation. So we can use outputs of a filter or oscillator to modulate a different parameter. For example, I can take the output of first filter, which is this one. And use that to modulate pitch of a second oscillator. So this is destination oscillator two pitch exponential. Now we can make the filter one. So we have also routing here. We have wave table oscillator. Here we have inputs. So this filter one takes inputs from oscillator one, two and three. I'm gonna disable two and three. So it's just wave oscillator one goes to filter one. And then we have these arrows. So filter one goes to filter two. We can disable that. And now filter one doesn't go anywhere. It's just a voltage we can use to modulate something else. And I can feed oscillator two into filter two, which is not used. It's empty, but we have this arrow enabled. So it's passing through. So now we have the oscillator two going through here and going out. And we can use our filter one to modulate the pitch. I think something is weird. Oh, I'm modulating oscillator one pitch. That's the problem. I should be modulating oscillator two pitch. And this is horrible streaking noise, but it's also really cool. And if we, for example, tune this properly, maybe try and use pitch linear. You can also shift the octave. Some really awesome streaking noise. Let's see what we can do with that. Gonna create a new media region. I think I'm gonna turn it down a little bit because it's quite loud. What about doing it octave up? Yeah. Now I can shift D to duplicate this three times. And there we go. Alter this a little bit. So maybe shorten these notes and make it like out in two. Also has some effects, like delay, which is very long. I think the sound is gone. Oh. At least I don't hear anything anymore. See it, I see it going out. Which one did you cut? Oh, no, okay. I think I must have pressed M while I was focused on the browser window and it muted my microphone. Yeah, and it's muting, okay. Yeah, okay. I hope this wasn't going on for long. It's all right. It's gonna be in the recording though. Yeah, we heard the streaking noise. Oh, you heard the awesome streaking noise, great. So Audintu also has effects. It has delay, can sync it to musical time. Stereo, can hypersit. And there's also ducking, which I believe is kinda like side-chain compression. Yeah, so the delay is not present when the source signal is present. It's like side-chain compressed with the source signal. Now, this may not work for our context, so maybe I'll just make it very, very subtle. There's also reverb, but reverb is quite experimental. The last time I tried it, it didn't work very well. Because, well, this is one of the parts of open-source software. You often get people release things which are not fully functional. And it's a great thing, and it's a terrible thing at the same time, because you as the user, you're a part of the development process. You're testing the software. You are responsible for reporting the problems to the developers, because they are not a company. They don't pay 50 people to test the software. So the benefits are that you get this for free, but you also, you're taking part in the development process. So, yeah, sometimes I spend a lot of time reporting bugs, which is frustrating. But then I see them fixing these bugs, which is wonderful. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie and say that it's all sunshine and rainbows. So open-source software can be very frustrating at times. And it's fun when you ask for features and they get implemented. Oh yeah, and I've had this a couple of times when I've been doing videos or live streams about some plugins I'm using, and I said, oh, it would be so cool if this plugin could also do this and that. And then I see someone written it down in the GitHub of the project, and they implemented it like two weeks later. And I update and I see like, whoa, there's the new feature that I was talking that I would love to see. All right, just go to GitHub and report issues myself or features, feature requests. I can't code DSP, I can program some things, but not audio processing, because this is way, way too much for me. But I can give feedback, I can test, I can show people the software like I'm doing now. So I can bring new users to the projects, I can bring interest to the software and help the development this way. All right, so we have Audient 2, which is awesome shrieking noise capable. There's a lot more that we could do with it, but I don't want to spend too much time on it. I wanted to use it as an example of a pretty simple plugin that is not going to require a lot of time to learn and you can just dive in, turn some knobs and have some fun sounds. Now let's go to something a bit more involved. This plugin is called Vitallium and it's an open source or a, may I say, community edition of a commercially released plugin called Vitall. Vitall is a, yeah, let me show you. Vitall.audio. Vitall is a very, oh my goodness, now I click the link to Instagram. No! Shit! Vitall is a- It didn't work this time. No, no! Oh! Another... It's so unreliable. Oh yeah, disconnected. You're gonna have to edit the video afterwards. Yes. You see, because normally I have a script that restores all the important connections from my keyboard to my setup, from microphones to the setup, et cetera. But this is non-standard what we're doing right now, so I didn't run a script, so I just managed this manually. Maybe I should have run the script. Well, anyway, Vitall is a... Have you heard about Serum? All right, I see people nodding. Yeah, Serum is pretty much the industry standard of sound synthesis for a lot of people. And Vitall is better. Vitall is incredibly visual. It's very well animated and it gives great visual feedback. And it was created by Matt Tytel, who has created a synthesizer called Helm before. And Helm was already very popular and people are still using it. But I prefer Vitall because Vitall is everything that Helm was better by 1,000% or even more. Well, this is Vitallium, which is an open source version of that because Matt Tytel has his proprietary release and his proprietary product, which is using his online services because people have accounts, can log in, can buy preset packs and other things, skins. But he's also released a source code so that anyone can compile the community version, which was renamed to Vitallium to avoid confusion. Also, it just so happens that I like contacted Matt Tytel when he was, when he written on this his blog that he's working on new synthesizer and I emailed him and I said, hey, what's this new synthesizer you're working on? Can you show it to me? And he showed me an early version of it. And I've been helping him with the development. I've been testing it and I also was doing some designs for a possible logo for him. And this is one of the designs I proposed which wasn't used for Vitall, but later found used as a logo for Vitallium. So this is pretty much the same synthesizer. It has all the same features except for one. And it's that the, yeah, the Vitall has an option to use text to speech to generate a wave table for you. So you can just type text and it generates and it's using, it's using I believe a Google service. So this costs money and like, and we could implement like some other open source speech synthesizers to be used for that, but nobody bothered yet. So you can just use another one and create wave tables. Anyway, so this is Vitallium. Is it too loud? Maybe it's not. Okay. The fantastic thing about the synthesizer is you can edit your own wave tables and can do things like just make some shapes and then make keyframes from these shapes, draw in the frequency domain, which is one of my favorite ways of making wave tables. I'm gonna actually play this lower. Oh yeah, that's a way to enjoy this sound. Yeah, we really like drawing these frequency peaks because you can pretty much just create sounds working like formats and then, okay, this is pretty dull. Let's compress into everything else. This is pretty dull as well. That's the basic things, but you can also add modifiers like a wave folder. You can also animate this. So you can change the parameters of that. Okay, let me add an LFO to this. So I'm gonna click and drag here. Maybe let's make it slower. Okay, we can also make this sync to the session transport because right now it's trigger. So the LFO will restart with every key. If we set it to sync, it's going to keep going. We can make this patch monophonic by lowering the voice number to one. Can enable glide, which is often known as portamento. It's a bit short, maybe I can make a low. No, that's too much. There's also a slope function so we can make the glide not be ramping linearly, but ramping in a different time scale. Time scale of different interpolation function. Maybe let's say that. All right, we also have distortion effects, which are like these are working on the waveform level. So time domain. I like a band. Can also add another LFO to drive this. Let's make it sync. So you see we have two LFOs, one and two, driving this oscillator. But wait, there's more. We have phase disperse and this all works in real time. So we can have another LFO. This is way too fast now. Let's go save. But why do we have to use such boring LFO patterns? Let's do something else. I can paint steps. We can make our grid. Let's make 16 and four. And now we can make some patterns here. Okay, but we didn't use any filters yet. Let's enable the filter one. There's a bunch of different filter algorithms. The basic ones are called analog. There's also dirty ladder, which I believe is also a Moog diode, I think is a Korg filter. And they're very clean digital filters, which with no saturation. There's also calm. Confluence are crazy and are really cool. Because this is actually a feedback delay line, of course, but with extra filtering, because we have a band test filter, or I think this is a low pass filter. And we also have... Yeah. We can enable key tracking. We should move the cut. Okay, so it's 42 semitones. Now if we right click, enter a value and let's go with, I don't know, 84. Oh, wait, this is cut. All right, okay. No, no, no. We set cutoff. Okay, cutoff. So cutoff, and this isn't hertz, but we can go to advanced and we can switch display from hertz to semitones. And then this is zero semitones. So this is like following the key. And we want to just move this up to octaves. So 24 semitones. So now our comp filter is tuned to what we're playing. Of course, we can make this dynamic. Maybe not with LFO this time. Let's use an envelope. We can have this filter. I'm gonna remove the attack from the amplitude filter. Sorry, amplitude envelope. The first one is always the global amplitude envelope. I feel like it's a little bit. What is it, Mark? Are you aware of the time? Yeah, we have like 40 minutes. Okay, like half an hour. Yeah, almost officially. Officially, well, we started like 10 minutes. That's right. So, yeah, that's right. 36 minutes, I guess. 36 minutes. Yeah, cool. Okay. So we can also use another filter to, as a band pass, and we can also use another filter to, as a band pass, see a ladder bands. And now we can take input from the first filter, not from oscillator two. Now we have oscillator one going to filter one, and filter one going to filter two, which is we can also apply some of the existing LFOs. And what we can do more is we can go to matrix, and here we have all the modulations we've assigned. For example, here is filter two cutoff being driven by LFO two, which is what we've just created. And with this selected, and we can also disable these, temporarily, with these selected, we can edit the, the mapping function. So we can, for example, invert the path of that. We'll do some other crazy things. It's the same function, but now it's pushed for this, it's the same LFO shape, but it's now pushed for this function only for this modulation destination. So we can have a, this is also very powerful because you have these macro controls, which means we can automate things through them, or it's useful for performing live. You can map them to a MIDI CC control. And then you can assign the macros to various things, like the frequency, for example. And you can assign it to different stuff and multiple things, and then have these mapping functions, and you can program almost like presets with using different values at different points in time, and also have pretty complex sequences going on with just a simple single knob. So for live performances, this is very powerful. All right, there's also a frequency modulation. You can have a oscillator, I'm gonna make it a sine. Oh, not a display, didn't update. Now we also have different displays. So we can have a sine wave oscillator. Here is phase randomization, I'm gonna turn it to zero. So we can have a sine wave oscillator. Here is phase randomization, I'm gonna turn it to zero. You can have another oscillator. Let's disable the grid, and we can just draw something. This could be our sub oscillator, and now we can use FM from oscillator two. We can use oscillator two as a frequency modulation source for oscillator three. Now if I turn down level of oscillator two, it's not going to be audible. It's just going to be an FM operator for oscillator three. So now if I change the octaves, with shift you can change the pitch of oscillators and increments of 12 semitones. You can have an envelope, an LFO as well. Or we could have some spectral modulation on our LFO. Let's make it sync. And I want this oscillator three to be sent directly to output. So no filters, no effects, because there are effects. I'm gonna make this quieter a bit. And now we can add some effects in the effect tab. There's a multi-band compressor, which is working like OTT, which is a well-known plugin. You've probably heard about OTT if you've been exploring electronic music production. So what it does is it's a multi-band upwards-downwards compressor. So it splits the sound into three bands, and then it first compresses them downwards, which means it turns down the loud stuff, and then it compresses it upwards, which means it brings up the quiet stuff. And there's a very nice visual way of editing these ratios and thresholds. These are thresholds and these are ratios. Maybe I'm gonna mute the... ...the sub oscillator, which I created. So this is the bass. I can force the bass to be cool loudness all the time. So we can both turn down and bring up these quieter sounds to limit the dynamics in both directions. Not just limit them from upwards, or limit. Compress the dynamics, but also we can... Yeah, it's like a reverse expansion. It's weird, but it does cool things, the sounds. And then we can also add another filter, because why not? Which can be a high pass for us, so our sub oscillator is not fighting our main oscillator. And there's a bunch of other effects, like distortion, which can be, for example, sine-folding. We can mix that in a little bit. Also apply a filtering before. A band-pass filter. Maybe let's apply it after. Yeah, we can also add this. And a bunch of more stuff. Alright, by default, Vitallium is also two times oversampled. I believe it only just works for... I guess it's doing this for oscillators, filters and distortion and everything that can produce overtones. We could turn it up if we want. If we notice some aliasing in distortion, we want to get rid of it, to get a cleaner, more analog sound, I guess. And you know what, I didn't even cover a random modulation source in stereo modulation. Like, we can make a stereo offset. And we can also have random modulations, which are, like, wandering noise. Which can be, for example, sample and hold. Okay. Shall we see if there are some requests or questions from the audience? Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any questions about what we've done so far? About Vitallium, maybe? Well, not a real question, but just let me enable my microphone at this size for a second. Then I can hear myself using my headphones. I've been using Linux for quite a while. I think more than 10 years. But for me, the reason to not use it actively was because, in my opinion, there was no great audio software for Linux. But now it turns out that there is. I'm amazed by the plugins and software you're showing. So it's really cool. Nice. Thanks. I didn't know it existed yet. This is exactly why I do my YouTube channel. Because there is a lot of amazing things almost nobody knows about. And I'm almost tempted to do a clickbait video. Like, plugin companies don't want you to know this. Or music software manufacturers hate him. But it's kind of true. There's so many great software. And I'm just showing you the tip of the iceberg now. Because we just have so much time. I want to show you one more synthesizer today. Which is fully modular. You've probably heard about VCVrack. If you've been interested in modular synthesis, et cetera. So there's a plugin which was released 14th of February. So it was like a week ago. And it's, well, we'll get to it in a while. It's a fully modular environment inside of a plugin. Where we have basically Eurorack emulation. And we have dozens of various modules. And it's self-contained. So there is no logins installing, downloading. And all the modules are open source. I made a track to demo the whole thing. And I made a video about this synthesizer last week. And I wanted to show it off as well. Because I did not get into modular synthesizers before. Really? Because I wanted to have my sessions always be encapsulated in a DAW project. I want to be able to just open a single project and have everything working. I don't want to have five different programs. Where I need to load them individually. Connect things between them to just be able to continue working on a song. That's why I did not touch modular synthesizers too much. I still did touch them a bit. But now, since we have this plugin and we have it for literally, we just had it for one week. And this puts true modular synthesizers on my map. Because I can use them in the way I want. Both Vitalium and Cardinal, which is the name of the plugin. You can see we have Cardinal synth in here. That's a pretty punny name, I must say. Both of these plugins were made by the same person. I mean, Vital was made by Matt Tytel. But a person who has compiled and modified and cleaned up the code of this vital synthesizer. The vital synthesizer to make Vitalium is Folk TX. And that's the same person as the same guy who's made Cardinal, is the same guy who's made Carla. And it's also the same guy who is managing Jack Audio Connection Kit, if you're familiar with that. He's the sole maintainer of Jack right now. He's just a superhero of Open Source Audio. Is he working on mod devices or he used to be? Oh yeah, he's also worked for mods. I think I have a Mod Duo somewhere here. I'm not a guitarist, so I don't use it much. But he also made it so you can run Cardinal on Mod Duo. So you can make your modular Eurorack style patches on your computer and then send them to your Mod Duo. I yet have to try this out. And I think I'll finally find it used for this Mod Duo because I'm not a guitarist, so I don't really use it that much. Okay, we've made this patch. I believe there is also... I think when you install Vitalium you should be able to get a bunch of patches I made, but maybe... I'm not sure if they are patched packages. I think we should figure out ways to get more presets. I'm going to just take a couple of days to just make presets for Vitalium and wavetables because... The one bad thing about Vitalium is that it comes without anything. It's just a tool. You need to make even your sine wavewavetable on your own because it just doesn't come with anything. And you just have the white noise because we have a sampler here. And you can load anything here and Vital comes with a bunch of presets of different kinds of noise. Anyway, I've made videos about Vitalium. I want to give you a vertical slice of the whole software stack so you can get leads what you want to research more. And I guess my YouTube channel may be a good resource if you are interested in exploring open source audio production. So we've made a little bit of a patch. Let's try and incorporate it here. What did we play here? G6. Oh, it doesn't really sound like a note. Funky. Move this one an octave up. We're going to copy this. I'm going to just duplicate this. And let's make something else. Let's make another sound with Cardinal this time. Let's go. Cardinal. Cardinal is a plug-in based on VCV Rack. VCV Rack is a software emulation of Eurorack system. And a lot of commercial plugins or modules that you can buy for VCV Rack have their physical counterparts because companies sell physical modules. And they also sell plugins versions of these modules. I never wanted to get into the hardware side because it's super expensive and super limited still. Because if you want to have two voices in your synthesizer, you need to buy every single module twice. And you need twice as much power from your grid and you need twice as much cables and you need twice as much rack space. And I know it's a fantastic hobby, but I am interested in making music and not in collecting hardware as much. So that's why I love the software emulation of it. And of course it's very skeuomorphic in its nature. It's emulating a hardware device, actually a bunch of hardware devices. But still it's great. So what do we have here? Cardinal is a version of version. It's based on VCV Rack. What's different is that it comes with a bunch of modules that are pre-packaged and you cannot add more. There's just a collection of modules which is insanely large already and there's only going to be more with new updates. So these are all the modules. There's also some cute modules like this little blank panel with an anime character. And that's a character which is licensed under Creative Commons license. It's a special case, that's why it's there, I believe. FalkTX, the creator of K-Studio, which is a project packaging open source software for various language distributions based on Dibyan. I believe he likes this character and he's using it in his projects sometimes. So yeah, these are all the modules. I think it's a lot to do some cool stuff. Let's find an oscillator. I like this macro oscillator from Audible Instruments. So what we need to do to create a sound is first we need to get control voltages from our MIDI input. So I'm going to be feeding MIDI input into this track. But what we get is virtual voltages on this cardinal host MIDI. So volts per octave is going here and this is communicating pitch. I believe if I play a high note, yeah, you can see there's a tiny, tiny light in here. If I play a low note, it's going darker. If I play a high note, it's going brighter. And if I go very low, it's going to go red. Because I believe C4 is the middle of the scale and that's basically zero volts. Yeah, so this is controlling our pitch. Now, if we just plug this in, we're going to hear a constant tone. We need an amplifier and an envelope generator to cut off the notes when we're not hitting any keys. So let's go do that. Envelope. Actually, I could just type ADSR. Because if I search for envelope, I'm going to probably find a bunch of super crazy advanced envelope generators. ADSR and I just need very simple ones. Write this one. Bog audio ADSR. Great. This is perfect. Tiny. I don't know if this is 1U. If there is something like 1U in your arachnus, this is probably it. I can't imagine a module being smaller than this. All right, so this is the envelope generator. So if I give my gate input here, it's going to generate moving voltages that can drive an amplifier. Amp. Amp. Voltage controlled amplifier with 12 decibel gain. Maybe this. All right, so we have input. This is the signal we want to amplify. I'm going to take output of the macro oscillator, put it here. And now CV is control voltage. So this needs to take output from my envelope generator. And now let's feed the output to our audio output. And indeed, we have sound. It's just in one channel, though. And this is because I must have pressed some key. Cardinal is smart enough that if you plug something in just in the left output channel, it's going to duplicate it to the right channel so you have mono. It would be very annoying if it didn't do that. So I'm really glad it does it. If I plug it into the right channel, it's going to be just in the right here. And because while making a patch, we're probably going to be rerouting these cables a lot, having this simple function is very cool. This is cardinal synth. So this is a version of the plugin. If I go to the plugin manager cardinal, there is a bunch of plugins. There is also cardinal effects. Effects. And this is a plug, a version that takes two audio inputs, two channels of audio input. So we can use that as an effect to process something else, like our voice or guitar. So we can make a guitar pedal with these modules and have it all encapsulated in a nice plugin. There's also, I believe, I don't know why I don't see that, but there's also a cardinal. Yeah, I don't know why it doesn't show here, but there's also a general cardinal plugin that has, I believe, well, sorry, hit the microphone, that has, I believe, eight audio inputs, eight audio outputs, and it has ten voltage control, control voltage ports for input and ten control voltage outputs. And also it has midi input and output. So it's like, crazy, you can do crazy things with it. I guess you can produce an entire track with just this thing. So now we've produced a simple saw wave synthesizer. I'm going to turn down the attack. Or the release a bit. It would be nice to plug in a filter to that, to this. So let's find a filter, filter. There is some problem with Ardor that when I type, some keystrokes are being captured by Ardor and some keystrokes are not. And there is a function that should make Ardor ignore all the keystrokes and push them through to the plugin, but it doesn't really work very well. There is some bug with this. Liquid filter. Let's try that. Okay, let's get our, we can apply the filter. The great power of modular synthesis like that is that you can decide about everything. For example, standard synthesizer layout will put the filter before the final amplifier. So that if you have a resident peak or a self oscillating filter, it's going to be cut off with the main amplifier envelope. But here we can change that. We can apply the filter after the amplifier and let's do that. So I'm going to push the output of our VCA, voltage controlled amplifier into the input, audio input. I'm going to push the, where is the output? Oh, there's multiple outputs. Okay, there's band pass output, low pass filter. Okay, I'm going to use the two pole filter. So 12 decibels per octave because that's a bit more musical. Now, frequency and resonance. There's also a fem. And I believe we can deliver another oscillator output that will drive this thing for us. So, yeah, audio rate modulation of filter cutoff is something really cool. That can produce very interesting sounds. And not many synthesizers can do this. Odin 2 can, but Vitallium cannot. I believe, yeah, it can do a lot, but audio rate modulation is not going to work. There's going to be some loss with that, involved with that. Okay, we have 10 more minutes till the official part is over. And I want to make a simple patch and make something useful so we have a complete musical loop. So let's duplicate this envelope generator. Let's route gate input to it. Oh, no, okay, I need to use shift. No, not shift. I need to use control to have two cables coming from the same source. Now the output will go to frequency. Now we can... All right, that's a very simple patch. I said that the module set is static. You can't add new modules. And that's true, but there is one crazy thing. There is a module called Ildaeil, which is a plugin created by FalkTX. And this plugin can load another plugin. We can even load Cardinal inside Cardinal. And I've done this on my live stream, yeah, my recent live stream, I believe. And we managed to crash Cardinal with that, even so it works. But I'm not going to do that, but I can load a different plugin. And I'm going to load Ether, which is a fantastic open source reverb plugin. The problem is it's quite computationally expensive. It's not by FalkTX, is it? Excuse me? This is not made by FalkTX. The Ether plugin? No, no, Ether is made... It seems like he's everywhere. Yes, he is. No, Ether is someone else's work. So, yeah, now we can patch our sound into Ether. So I'm going to take the output of the filter, put it here. I'm going to control drag to split the signal. And now I'm going to connect the outputs. We want stereo output. Ether is very cool because you can use random seeds for different delay... feedback delay loops and delay times inside. Like the networks of all pass filters, I guess, and lots of other things. So we can find different characters. I also have just a lot of things. I'm not going to play too much with it because I just want to have a nice lush... Oh, nice. We can do a little simple arpeggio part. All right, sweet. I see my transport has gone in a weird place. If we make the notes overlap, we're going to have a nice legato effect. So I want these notes to overlap and this one last notes. Okay, this is a little loop. We can add a sidechain compressor to our cardinal patch so that it gets cut off when our kick hits. I'm doing this very quickly now because we don't have much time. I have videos covering all of that. Sidechain compression, etc. So our kick hits and it's going to cut off our pad or lead or whatever it is. That's going to make it pump. Okay, this is our loop. Do you have any questions? I have one question. You said in cardinal you can... with this plug-in-plug-in host thing within cardinal. Yes. What plug-in format is that? Right now it only supports LV2 plugins. Oh, you can actually, yeah. And one big use case for this plugin is that the plugin is available in VST-free NIU formats, I believe. And Falk TX, the author, has already tested that using it you can load LV2 plugins in various DAWs that don't support LV2 format. Like Cubase and Protools. No, Protools doesn't support anything. Logic, I believe, and some other ones, yeah. Wow. The one limitation is you cannot do any automation because it doesn't expose the automatable parameters for now. Like we have all the parameters here, but for example in cardinal there is no way for me to have anything else affect the parameters. So the settings are static for now. I hope this can be addressed in the future and there could be a bunch of little control inputs that I can route to different parameters. I think that would be awesome. So of course that wouldn't work as audio-rate modulation because these controls would have to be converted into just plug-in controls which don't have as much time resolution as audio or control voltage ports. But still it would allow for some LFO operations, etc. In order I can automate all the parameters of a plug-in like Ether. So automating river parameters sometimes results in clicks because if it has to recompute the delay patterns, that's not intended for real-time manipulations. So I can change the feedback factors to make the reverb suddenly become short, but I can't really change the character so much. There are so many awesome plugins I have not talked about and I can't even show off because there's just not enough time. So if you are interested in learning more, please find me on YouTube. Here is a link to my personal website. You can find all the links to my videos there. And also links to my community chat where there is a community of open-source audio enthusiasts, other people making software, making music with the software. There's a couple of hundred people there I think. And there's also friendly challenges going on where we have a theme. This is like I didn't organize it, just guys in my community said, hey, let's make it monthly challenge and just give a topic. Have people try out different open-source software, like sometimes it's a plug-in, sometimes it's a DAW. Because there are more open-source DAWs than Ardor. Ardor is something I know and can use best, but there are other ones that there is a developing DAW called the Z-Rhythm, which is more focused on electronic music production and MIDI and automation. Because Ardor's MIDI unfortunately is a little bit lacking. It's a bit strange also because the piano roll editors are embedded in the tracks. This is a bit weird. Many people can't get used to this very easily. I made a two-hour masterclass just about MIDI in Ardor, covering like 99% of functionality. And it really took two hours of highly scripted video. I was working for half a year on this video from research, scripting, recording and editing. And I'm really happy that I did it because a lot of people use that and they say like, oh, I didn't know you can do this kind of stuff in Ardor at all. It is problematic. There are some bugs. I am complaining about some issues like disappearing MIDI regions or some other stuff. Like there are timing issues where sometimes your notes are misaligned and you want to snap and it's not integrated. But this is version 6.9 of Ardor and we are all waiting for 7.0, which is in alpha. And they have pretty much ripped out the whole time core and rewritten it. So the internal time handling will be completely new. So I hope that this will fix most of the pretty much unfixable problems with MIDI manipulation in Ardor 6 and previous versions. But there's going to be a bunch of new bugs. But well, there's always stuff to look forward to. There's a question in the chat. Yes. Let me see. Marcin asks, does Linux work much better for real-time audio input processing as opposed to Windows? I have heard opinions that this is the case, mostly because on Linux you have much more fine-grained control. You can literally run a different kernel that will give you better performance for this case. And there are multiple different sets of patches that people apply to the Linux kernel to tweak various things. I am right now using Arch Linux, by the way. I can't believe I did that. I'm using the stock kernel. I've been using some tweaked kernels for better low-latency audio performance. But I had some other issues with them, like very strange things. My mouse would start lagging and losing USB packets when I have plugged in a USB PCI extension card. Kind of strange things. But this generic kernel works very well. I was doing some benchmarking of latency when I was testing this interface. I made a video, a Linux focus review of this device last month or this month. I managed to get 5 milliseconds of total round-trip latency between the signal coming into the USB audio interface and coming out. This is including all the USB and any possible circuitry. This is full physical latency. 5.6 milliseconds, something like this. It took a lot of tweaking and I don't think I could support this for heavy processing. But for just pass-through, I managed to get this. There is also this mod-duo. Do I have it? Where is the mod-duo? Oh, I don't have it. I have a box. There is this company called Mod Devices. They are making hardware for music producers. The hardware is running Linux inside. And there is the Jack Audio Server running. And normally, oh yeah, Mark has a mod-duo. Wow, it's blue. Whoa, that must be limited edition or something. This was one of the first ones in the Kickstarter project. Oh nice. Yeah, I'm really proud of it. That's cool. I have won my mod-duo in an open-source music contest. I made a track with Ardor using a synthesizer called Oxy FM Synth. There was a challenge about FM synthesis. And yeah, I made a drone bass track and I was voted first place and I won a mod-duo. And I unfortunately didn't do much with it. Maybe I should donate it to someone. Maybe I should make another contest. And give it away as a prize. That would be interesting. So I should probably test Cardinal on this mod-duo first. Yeah, let's organize another contest. Okay, I think we will be wrapping up the official part. So thank you so much for attending this session. I'm gonna show my personal info once again so we can take a screenshot or something and then find me if you'd like to get in touch. I'd love to get in touch with you. I've heard you guys are doing very interesting things and I'd love to learn more about you. And I hope I will mourn in the after-party because we're gonna take a short break. I guess anybody could use a few minutes of downtime after two hours. Grab something to drink. And then we'll turn off the recording. And we can have an extended Q&A session or whatever and just talk things. Who still has energy? If people still have energy, right? Unless you want to go to sleep. I'm a bit empty at the moment. I had to work all day. Oh yeah, right. This is a weekday. And it's getting late so maybe you want to just get in touch later and we can... Yeah, I will invite you to my live stream. It's first Sundays. So the next one is 6th of March. It's gonna be not the next Sunday but the next after the next Sunday. If you go to my website you can find the links to my community chat and my YouTube. And you should find information there. Thank you, Anfa. Thanks a lot for all the information you provided, all the tools that you showed. I've been looking at numerous videos of you on your YouTube channel. There's so much more that you can tell about. So this is only scratching the surface. But I think you've done a good job showing a lot of possibilities of several Linux audio plugins. But there's much more. Thank you very much for inviting me, Mark. I'm really happy that I had this opportunity. Yeah, I really enjoyed the support, the promotion of Libre software. So you are one of the people who really promotes that in a very good way. I might even make t-shirts. Oh yeah, I should have put on my t-shirt. That's a missed opportunity. Since I'm also a graphic designer, I work on this front as well. I had a t-shirt that says, please wait, synthesizing GNU base. But it was black and the background is black, so I picked a different t-shirt. The t-shirts are also open source. You can print your own copy if you want. The files are on GitHub. Excellent. I think we're going to have to invite you someday to Utrecht. Yeah, sure. I have a friend in the Netherlands, so I'd love to visit you sometime. I don't remember if I was in Utrecht. I believe I was in a few places. I can't remember the names, so it was a few years back. Let's do that. And make more music. Oh, I will. I'll make more videos. I'm going to stop the recording, or at least on my end. Yeah, I'll do that as well. Thank you so much for joining me in this session. I hope to see you again sometime. Stop the recording. Yeah, thank you. Thanks.