Is GNUGuitarINUX a FOSS Gateway Drug?

Recently I heard an interview on Frostcast specifically this episode where the host Jonathan Nadeau interviewed Victor Rosales the creator of the GNUGuitarINUX linux distribution.

What is GNUGuitariNUX you ask? Well, it is a live boot only (not installable) FOSS Linux distribution with a focus on a minimal speedy environment for guitarists to jam out, study or make music in. Basically it's something you can put into your computer without changing your existing operating system to try out some great FOSS music tools for guitarists.

Hardware you will need in advance:

a 1/4 inch male phone jack to 1/8 miniplug male jack to put in your Mic in or Line in input on your PC - looks like this or a USB audio device that looks like this. There is a great article on the Rakarrack web site that covers the hardware in detail - click here. Otherwise if you already have a USB external soundcard then it will be a question of configuring it.

So where are we going to now? This means that someone with an old laptop P3 or above can download and write this ISO image to a USB stick /SD card using Unetbootin or to a CD-R using these steps or using the tutorial directly from the GNUGuitarinux web page. After getting the image onto the bootable media, you will need to reboot your PC and press whatever key that allows you to choose the boot device (device to look for an operating system on). Examples are F12 or F9 or F10 - read the screen on boot and it should mention which key - in the case of my HPMini 110, its F9 to choose the boot device. Once you see the GNUGuitarINUX bootsplash screen, press Enter on Default. You should now after a time be seeing the pretty guitar wallpaper and some icons on the left of the screen - it should look like this.

Now that your here - lets take a look at the main apps and describe what they do:

Rakarrack: (sound of pic on strings) - this is the guitar effects box in software form.

Guitarix: another guitar effects box in software form.

Sooperlooper: create, layer, trigger loops to play along with.

TuxGuitar: tablature editor and player - Guitar Pro compatible import/export.

Jackd2: the patchbay to route your signal into the programs that will shape your sound.

Jack Capture: Record to WAV or OGG/MP3 what is going through the jack patchbay.

Hydrogen: Drum machine you can program and play along to.

gNinjam: A server you can join to jam along with other musicians across the internet.

GNU Solfege: Ear pitch training software.

Many of you reading this may be starting to nod off - you already know the apps, you already know the distro ... I don't want to preach to the choir. For you, I have something different in mind.

Let's suppose we demonstrate or give away a sd/usb/cd of GNUGuitarINUX to a Windows using guitarist friend with a laptop... What would happen? Would it get used as a general copy device or would it inspire and delight? Could GNUGuitarINUX be a soft drug on the way to becoming a hard core FOSS enthusiast?

Let's find out. If you do end up giving away or showing GNUGuitarINUX off - I'd like to hear about it. Please comment.

To find out more about GNUGuitarINUX visit the sourceforge web site for the Project.

To find out more about Frostcast and Frostbite media visit frostbitesystems.org and frostbitesystems.com

KVR One Synth Challenge 26: ZynAddSubFX

The softsynth KVR picked out for this month's One Synth Challenge happens to be nothing less than good old ZynAddSubFX! The challenge is quite simple: create a track by using a single softsynth. Beats, basslines, everything has to be done with only one softsynth. Multiple instances are allowed, external effects also as long as they are freely and easily available. Well, since practically all plug-ins or external effect applications for Linux are freely available you can use just about anything. I've asked about the 'easily available' part but it doesn't matter if there are no Mac/Windows binaries available or no possibilities for using the plug-ins or apps on the aforementioned platforms. Apparently it's also ok to use a ZASFX derivative like Yoshimi.

This is actually the very first One Synth Challenge focusing on a Linux based softsynth so I'm expecting loads of entries from Linux musicians. I'd like to call upon all the jaycapela's, bass akwardz's, shrp.me's, folderol's, doosc's, louigi verona's and squeakyshoecore's within the Linux Audio community to cook up an entry and go for the honour as the prices are basically useless for Linux users anyway. How cool would it be if first place would be taken by a musician using Linux? The challenge lasts until the first of April so still two weeks to go. I'm working on my entry right as we speak and hopefully I manage to enter even more than one track because it is really fun and instructive to just work with Yoshimi and a sequencer (seq24 in my case).

Jeremy Jongepier

Edit: I've also posted an announcement on the Linux Audio User mailing list. To my surprise the discussion is going into a slight different direction than I had hoped. Bummer.

Podcast editing using Ardour

I hear from a lot of podcasters that Ardour is too intimidating to use to edit their podcasts. I've created a screencast to take some of the scary out and show how easy it really is.

Another new LV2 Plug-in

I missed the release of this a few weeks ago but was made aware of it by Autostatic, who is a new editor of this blog, on IRC.

The new plug-in is called abGate and is written by Antanas Bružas. It's a noise gate with a retro look. It features threshold, attack, hold, decay and range. It also features saving presets in XML format for later use.

Autostatic has made his first contribution to the KXStudio project by adding this plug-in to the PPA. You learn how to add the KXStudio PPA's here.

As always it's great to have a new plug-in to play with, so check this one out and consider kicking him a few bucks to encourage more development.

http://abgate.sourceforge.net/

Is Skype relevant anymore?

As a podcaster it's virtually impossible to avoid the need for a voip solution. No matter how much money you have to invest in you gear, if you want to do a show that involves people who are in different geographical locations you need a reliable voip solution. The standard in the podcasting world has for a while been Skype because It's easy to set up and was the only real game in town for a long time. I have spent more time than I care to add up tinkering with getting Skype to work under Linux with my recording software so I could reliably put out a show with a co-host who is in a far off land. Up until recently we used Skype to record OSMP. We only recently made the switch to mumble. Recent events have led me to ask, does anyone still need Skype?

As some of you know I am now a co-host on a show call OS Perspectives, that features a "Microsoft" guy a "Mac" guy and me the "Linux" guy. It was Esby, the "Windows" guy, that started the show and has put together the infrastructure to host the show via video copying some of the work done by Leo Laporte of the Twit Network. Naturally his "Skypeosarus" was put together with 4 computers hosting 4 instances of Skype allowing him to have 4 people cohost on his show with audio and Video. It is no small feat to put together a setup like this and he can be applauded for his effort. The only real issue we seem to have with this is that the Skype client for Linux is very out of date and doesn't support nearly as much features as it's Windows and Mac counterparts. As a result of the lack of Skype support on Linux for the last two shows we have not been able to get video from me to Esby's setup. While I haven't confirmed the cause of the issues with Skype we where able to confirm that Google's Video Chat service does work pretty painlessly and have since switched to using it for my connection to the show. We haven't, however, made the switch for the rest of the show but I haven't seen anything to show that we couldn't. In fact a recent episode of Leo Laporte's show This Week In Google had a Skype failure and was able to complete the show using Google video chat.

To speak a little on the FLOSS merits of Google's video chat service, it is built using open source standards such as XMPP, Jabber and libjingle. Libjingle is an FLOSS project created and hosted by Google and is used for voip and video over XMPP. This allows for many clients not involved with Google to support the protocol.

So this all begs the question, other than people who have built specific workflows around Skype, what it the point of using Skype over Google's video chat? I guess it's not neatly cut and dry but as far as I'm concerned, I don't see any reason to sit around and wait for Skype to catch up on Linux.

Plug It In Plug It In

It's been an exciting time for Linux audio recently as we have had a fantastic sweep of new plug-ins come out for your mixing and synthing pleasure.

First up we have a fantastic new plug-in providing a nice front-end to zita-convolver called IR















If you have never tried convolution then you don't know what you are missing. IR files can apply equalization and reverb to any track or bus in real time. The IR file stands for impulse response and is a short recording of nearly anything you like, from a special microphone to a guitar cab and from a small club to a large cathedral. There are lot's of free and donationware IR's out there and this gives us an easy way to enjoy this state of the art technology. It is available as an LV2 plug-in only.

IR Website

Next up is a payed application in LV2 and native VST format by LinuxDSP called the MKII GRAPH-EQ.






It's a graphical equalizer that features smoothly interpolated filters, realtime graphical eq graph, variable filter types, a de-cramped bandpass filter and a universal gui. If you are in need a beautiful looking and great sounding eq plugin then this might be the perfect one for you.

MKII GRAPH-EQ Website

Lastly, we have an emulator of the famous dive down combo organ made by Yamaha in the late 60's called the YC-20. The plug-in carries the name Foo-YC-20.







The plug-in faithfully reproduces all of it's features and flaws and is available across all three platforms in VSTi, LV2 and stand alone Jack variants.

Foo-YC-20 Website

Tunestorm #4

Don't forget that the Tunestorm is fast approaching!

You can find out more here.

http://opensourcemusician.com/index.php/Tunestorm#Current_Tunestorm

Deadline is Friday the 21st of January.

You can upload your submissions to the OSMP group on SoundCloud.