Audio Apps

[danboid]

Strange co-incidence just happened.

Of course it was only a few hours ago I posted my last message to this thread, asking about this mysterious 'unsequencer' and dissing the possibility of doing anything impressive with JACK on the Pandora. I was just glancing over the Linux Audio Developer's archive when I came across these little beauties:

http://non.tuxfamily.org/

I've yet to try non-sequencer and non-daw as I've only just discovered they exist but the docs and pics certainly sound promising. The most important feature about these apps (esp. for Pandora users) is their minimal dependencies and use of the excellent, super lightweight (in memory consumption terms), super-quick FLTK toolkit, which Linux musicians will know from its use in the excellent zynaddsubfx synth.

Before these non (un?) apps arrived, Ardour and Rosegarden were the only viable choices for powerful open source music production, but they would both be unusable with only 128MB. Now I'm hunting for a sampler program ala specimen but with a cool FLTK interface to compliment non and zyn and complete the potential Pandora DAW suite in style.

 

[socket]

Here's my thinking on sequencers and trackers... Simple is better.

For example, people act as if Nitrotracker for DS is a kids toy... It is an extremely powerful sequencer. I think part of the problem with a lot of sequencing software is that it starts to get too "involved" and there are too many effects and "features" and whatnot. I was far more productive in making music back in the non-mouse tracker days where it was basically songwriting that was important. Now it's all about who can twiddle the knobs best and whatnot. I really think a good tracker with a top notch interface is most important. But what do I know.

 

[sold]

I hope the pandora gets something better than piggy tracker. All those old style trackers kinda suck.

 

[trooper]

I hope the pandora gets something better than piggy tracker. All those old style trackers kinda suck.

Thats a bit harsh, Wasn`t it ?.

Trooper

 

[sold]

Not meaning to sound harsh. When I say the old style trackers suck, I mean in terms of interface rather than functionality. I'm not criticizing the actual software, or the devs involved. I just hope there should be something with more features and a better interface for the pandora than some of these tracker programs. I'm hoping there will be something a little more full featured.

I suppose I could've worded it better than saying it sucks.

 

[Babrios]

I suppose expecting a full fletched vst host with several plugins playing at the same time stretches it a bit too far. Can't imagine the Pandora coping with that many calculations rt.
A sequencer triggering a sample based soundbank seems a lot more realistic to me.
Sufficient enough as a kind of composers notebook on the road.
... and it has been done before on lesser hardware (with older arm chips).
Look at the Syntrax for smartphones, now free:
http://www.finished.nl
Its a bit tracker style, but with many synth-like sound mangling options on the actual samples.

And there was also MidiWriterPro(no longer available), a good midi sequencer, on Symbian smartphones which used the beatnik-engine driven soundbank of those phones.

Another approach, fitting the Pandoras strengths in emulation, however could be a more complete atari emulation with harddisk and midi support. There are so many unique free atari midi progs (incl. advanced notation apps) out there. They are offering much more creative potential than can be found in the "rather boring" linear tape machine like hosts of today. The Midi driver would have to be channeled into some sort of sampler running in parallel for use on the road, or for home use it could just drive (enslave) your home pc via usb or wifi. Tons of feature rich midi sequencers and trackers and notation progs could be had by developping one complete atari emu. Not to mention all the other advantages running all kinds of apps, now its only good for games.

 

[kaimerra]

As I've mentioned in a similar thread earlier. I REALLY want to use my Pandora for live performance. Right now I use a laptop running Specimen and an Organ emu with my midi keyboard. Bringing a laptop to practice/shows is kind of clunky and doing this from a Pandora would make me look really cool! Specimen is alright, but is kind of limited it seems. I have recently started working with Linuxsampler which can run a script from command line once you get it setup so it could be really low resources.
But the question is, sound driver. I keep hearing differing opinions about Jack running on the Pandora. Does anyone know what the sound driver is in the Pandora linux distro, ALSA? OSS? The sound chip in Pandora is supposed to be good quality right? But latency is probaly an issue. I would most likely use my USB Edirol UA-4FX to drive the sound, and MIDI if I can ever figure out the patch from the ALSA wiki. I am hoping USB audio devices will work from the Pandora, or at least add them in.
Maybe getting some organization and a central place for this would be a good idea. Start up a place in the Wiki for Pandora audio dev and musicians? Get a plan for a add-on of packages with a neato name to configure Pandora for "Studio" mode and install the right packages?
There is obviously interest in this as this thread has been started a few times, who is in to get this project rollin?

 

[danboid]

OK, I've had a quick go with non-sequencer now. It could be summed up as the ideal successor to seq24, for any of you familiar with that. It currently seems to lack any graphical curve/ automation editor for MIDI data though so really you'd have to use it with a MIDI adapter and an keyboard or other MIDI input device unless you want to hand edit (or script) the control values yourself, which is an option! Another awkward thing is that it doesn't support ALSA MIDI but instead talks purely JACK MIDI and not many apps support this yet.

Another light weight sequencer which could run well on the Pandora is Dino

http://dino.nongnu.org/

Not tried it yet, but the interface looks pretty nice to me and it already seems to have GUI curve/ automation editing of MIDI data

As for old skool trackers being too tricky/ not intuitive enough, I think this is exactly the problem reshaked is being created to deal with and could well end up being a top Pandora music app. Its not usable yet though.

Running Atari ST sequencers under emulation is another very good idea though, as the P's screen is good enough to handle the STs hi-res mode and I'm pretty sure that Hatari would have no probs emulating the MIDI ports via some Linux USB MIDI support. I self-compiled Hatari for the Zaurus with no problems and it was full speed emulation without any overclocking (~400Mhz ARM9)

http://hatari.sourceforge.net/

 

[Babrios]

@kaimerra
using Pandora as an instrument/soundgenerator instead of a laptop sounds quite "daring".
using it as a sequencer driving other gear - ok.
using it as a composers sketchbook (sequencer driving an onboard sample based soundgenerator of some sort) - ok.
... but as a substitute for a fast recent daw-laptop, for live performances??? The Pandora is powerful for what it is, but that does not mean it can do everything a laptop can.
...and how is the laptop too clunky, when you have to bring your keyboard anyway? The most reliable setup for live performances imho would be completely based on real gear, however.

@danboid

just had a look at the non-sequencer website, interesting, though the gui seems to take up some space. their other project, the daw, looks good too.

the dino gui seems alot more suitable for smaller screens, but it has switched to jack midi too.

was supprised how the hatari has improved since last time I looked. it's only lacking that midi driver.
and then the timing would have to be tested. i tried using some amiga midi apps on uae and the tempo kept changing all the time, unusable. tried Atari midi apps on steem, and bingo, everything dead accurate.
would be interesting to see how hatari performs there, but it can only be tested when it supports midi.
hopefully a capable developer does us the favour.

In the meantime you can have a look at some atari midi apps at tims place (a treasurebox you might know already):
http://tamw.atari-users.net/timidi.htm

90% of them are free and run well in steem:
http://steem.atari.st/

U are right, the atari guis are made to measure for the Pandora, thats actually a very strong and important point. The linux apps would need, in most cases, a Pandora optimized gui.

 

[Julius]

Has Aldrin been mentioned?

http://trac.zeitherrschaft.org/aldrin/wiki

 

[kaimerra]

@kaimerra
using Pandora as an instrument/soundgenerator instead of a laptop sounds quite "daring".
using it as a sequencer driving other gear - ok.
using it as a composers sketchbook (sequencer driving an onboard sample based soundgenerator of some sort) - ok.
... but as a substitute for a fast recent daw-laptop, for live performances??? The Pandora is powerful for what it is, but that does not mean it can do everything a laptop can.
...and how is the laptop too clunky, when you have to bring your keyboard anyway? The most reliable setup for live performances imho would be completely based on real gear, however.



Well, considering that 75% of what I do is just play sound effects/samples. I would like to use a B4 organ patch if possible but isn't nessecary. The other 25% is sampled instruments, so systhesis on the fly is low. Also, I am doing this now on a old P3 900MHz thinkpad that is probaly slower than the Pandora anyway. I am always worried that the hard drive is going to die from getting traveled around to practice, shows etc. The reliability of running samples off the SD cards is a bit more reassuring. I don't expect the Pandora to be a DAW, more of a sound effects/sample box.

 

[Babrios]

"effects/sample box" sounds more reasonable than what I assumed reading your previous post.
though u can expect the performance of the cortex 8 to be lower than your 900mhz p3.
from what I gathered, it should be more in the region of a 500mhz pentium3, which is a lot for such a small low power processor.
cortex 8 does 2 dmips/mhz.
i suppose direct comparison is difficult sometimes, since there are some things arm processors seem to handle with lower specs than a pentium would need (like emulation). well, and in some other cases a p3 might have the edge, depends on the app and the level of optimization.

@julius
the aldrin looks very promising. imho absolutely one of the best candidates to be tested so far. esp. since it has inbuilt sound capabilities, saves the bother running an instrument in parallel and channeling the midi into it.

 

[danboid]

@Babrios

Yes, you're right about Dino being JACK MIDI too.

Specimen already supports JACK MIDI, ingen does too supposedly and you can get JACK MIDI patches for zynaddsubfx from the gentoo pro-audio overlay but they're not in the official svn tree

Of course, all these would require we got JACK running on the Cortex acceptably. There has been talk about embedded high-end audio on the Linux Audio Developers ml recently

http://lalists.stanford.edu/lad/2008/08/

Pandora isn't really going to be able to hack running lots of chunky softsynths of course, but we'll be able to get a good MIDI sequencer and sample playback setup going one way or another

 

[Seltech]

Have NXP speakers been considered for the built-in speakers? These speakers are used in hundreds of millions of mobile phones and have basically the best audio quality for their size. (NXP is a spinoff of Philips Electronics - speaker website www.pssvie.com)

 

[Ravnos]

QUOTE
http://jazzplusplus.sourceforge.net/ <-scorewriting style if I'm not mistaken.

Uh, I don't think so... I was talking about something that looks like this; something that you could actually print out later and give to a musician.


Would Denemo fit the bill? It runs on the N800, so it can probably run on the Pandora. I don't know if it's as full featured as you would like, but odds are good that it can be made to run on the Pandora.

 

[Babrios]

Pandora isn't really going to be able to hack running lots of chunky softsynths of course, but we'll be able to get a good MIDI sequencer and sample playback setup going one way or another

I sincerely hope, the atari st emu variant proofs to be possible and leaves enough power for a sample player to run in parallel. Or if it wont, somebody comes along and codes arm-assembler modifications into the emu, making it work. I might sound a bit obsessed with it, but ... (well, I actually am).
For my home setup I recently got me an atari mega ste again, and it has done miracles to my creativity. No more limited to tedious cut and paste sessions, the midi mangling in the atari apps is so much quicker and feature rich.
The simple looking guis offer a kind of depth one would not expect at first sight. After getting used to it, it feels quite "cosy" to work with. Of course there are all those other atari apps besides midi which would be very fitting for the Ps screensize.
Like notation, text processing, editors, databases etc, the whole lot.

 

[sold]

I was wondering if it would be possible to use something like the roland gk-3 divided pickup for guitar (midi pickup) and the gi-20 midi interface through usb with Pandora? If the pandora could be used as a midi synth or sound module for live performance, it would totally fill another gap for alot of people

 

[Pleng]

I was wondering if it would be possible to use something like the roland gk-3 divided pickup for guitar (midi pickup) and the gi-20 midi interface through usb with Pandora? If the pandora could be used as a midi synth or sound module for live performance, it would totally fill another gap for alot of people

I highly doubt that you'll be able to hook up the GI-20 via the USB port as this would need Roland to either write a Linux driver or release the specs for the unit (hint: neither will happen). You'd need to get a USB midi adapter (one which had drivers available for the Pandora) and connect the GI-20 to the MIDI adapter.

This is, of course, assuming that software is written to take advantage of MIDI equipment.

I, personally, would like to see an adapter which take the output directly from the GK pickup and allows you to record the audio of each string individually for some hoopy effects processing.

 

[sold]

You mean something like this? http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Uno-main.html

And for drivers: http://usb-midi-fw.sourceforge.net/

At first glance these look like a working solution. Gotta read up some more later, too tired now. Do you think these may work? Also, in regards to using the gk-3 directly, I'm not certain, but i dont think it will work that way. I hope I'm wrong cause if it were possible to use the pandora (or even an eee pc, I already got the 701 4G) with a midi to usb device and the gk-3 and the gk-3b I'd be stoked.