Audio Rendering

My cat killing off the rme forced me to think about the musical development process. I have 4 machines available to me that can do some of this work - 2 x86_64, 2 x86. I wondered if ardour, rosegarden, and hydrogen would run over X (linuxsampler is already a client/server application in it's own right), and logged in to the laptop after first enabling X with xhost + on my box, doing a export DISPLAY=mingus:0.0...

Out of the box both 64 studio and FC6 disable connections from X applications, to turn it on you need to put in a

[security]
DisallowTCP=false

line into /etc/gdm/gdm.conf on 64 studio and into /etc/X11/gdm/gdmsomething on FC6.

Logout, and login again. xhost +. ssh dhcp-206. export DISPLAY=mingus:0.0; qjackctl & linuxsampler & # wait, then run ardour, then rosegarden...

Boom. Everything works over X now. AND - Finally, while doing all these applications at the same time, over the net, my laptop ends up with a mere 3MB on swap just to start. The meters in ardour lag a little (hydrogen doesn't), but otherwise I don't notice that I'm actually running over the net!

I realize that I can treat the process of moving all this audio from linuxsampler and rosegarden and hydrogen as a rendering pipeline, much like someone would do the same with graphics. I can for example, move jackd's latencies back to 20ms - and just walk away while all these tools do their magic.

And - importantly - hold cat while rendering - while, finally, she's tired of sleeping on the piano, the mixer, and the keyboard stand, and has moved to a chair behind me, she takes idle opportunities to jump on the keyboard when I'm not looking.

I do a big render of my 26 minute long session, and end up with 600MB on swap - but it completes!

Not only that, but by moving a few other sessions off to other machines, copying them over via NFS, and using X to run client server, I render a couple more sessions, then export as a float wav file mix it all down at the same time using oggenc --resample -q 48000 file.wav. cool. I have to automate this to put tags in. And burn a CD.

Later on I try lame to get mp3s out of the wav files - nothing doing, it reads the floating point data and turns it into digital hash. Either I need to find a command line converter or export to some other format (24 bit int?).

I dump nearly 2 hours of ogg files onto my samsung mp3 player (I don't know what all the furor is over the ipod nano - the samsung rocks, and supports ogg)

Unfortunately, the overhead of doing ardour and linuxsampler has led to a few overruns on the laptop generated stuff which sound aweful. I need to leave the firewire drive plugged in and use that to drive linuxsampler, just in general, drive linuxsampler from a separate drive.

Note to self: And next time, before I fall asleep, remove the earbuds. My right ear hurts like the devil this morning.

As a first pass at rendering all this music, it's not bad, but Sturgeon's Law really applies. There's fragments of 4 old songs in here, a few excursions into covers to try and break me out of habits, and most promising - at least 4 pieces of new sounding material. Yea! I might actually get a pure piano record done by Christmas.

Since I've been effective in using jack sync for the first time, timing information has propigated through it all and I can go on the road, take notes as to what worked and what didn't, when, and then find the precise spot where the midi for all this was and re-edit.

The studio is still a mess of cables and I haven't figured out what carpet (or even maybe hardwood floors) I'm going to put in - and maybe I should build some sort of box to keep all the cables or raise it off the floor. It kind of has that garage band ambiance now though...  ¶ 12:47 PM