Music-making Software (daws, Sequencers, Recorders Etc) For Pandora

[cobaltage]

I know only a little about this, but didn't the Amiga have a lot of the early digital music software, like trackers, the original Cubase, etc.?

 

[Babrios]

On the PC with winuae, I never got any Amiga midi app running with reliable timing, it speeded up and slowed down randomly. Would be surprised, if that turned out to be different on the pandora. Did not try pure trackers, but believe it would be similar. The standard Amiga without extra hardware only supported 8bit soundfiles, btw. IMHO, running a sample player along with a midi soft would give better results. The Atari is easier to emulate(leaves more juice for the sample player) and has a far better selection of midi apps. (Initial Cubase was on Atari, not the Amiga, afaik. Some good midi app got ported to Amiga, like DR. T's KCS. Thatone still clearly beats any midi app today. Shame Notator only worked with a dongle and is of no use for emulation. The best music app initially developed for the Amiga was "Bars and Pipes", imho.)
If the atari-emu/sample player combo existed and performed well on the pandora, it could become a huge selling point. I know quite a few ppl(atari-midi-afficionados), who would buy a pandora only because of that!!

 

[torpor]

Just get SEQ24 and ZYNADDSUBFX ported, and we're set.

 

[sold]

Anyone know if there are any standalone VST host programs that would work on Pandora?

It would be awesome to be able to plug in a midi foot switch and a guitar or bass (or anything really) through a usb soundcard and turn the pandora into the ultimate amp modeling and effects unit

 

[maddis]

Anyone know if there are any standalone VST host programs that would work on Pandora?
It would be awesome to be able to plug in a midi foot switch and a guitar or bass (or anything really) through a usb soundcard and turn the pandora into the ultimate amp modeling and effects unit

This is a very good question. I am really hopping so. I use mini host by toby bear productions (for windows) along with svhost. It may be worth emailng the authors especially toby as i know this is donation ware and if enough people were willing to donate i am sure he would port. I would also take a look in kv audio. Its a great resource for vst instruments/effects/sepuencers etc. The site also gives you the platform everything runs on

 

[dflemstr]

Anyone know if there are any standalone VST host programs that would work on Pandora?

This won't be a problem. If you can get hold of a compatible sound card (all compatible sound cards for linux listed here: www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Main), then you WILL have VST support. Many apps already mentioned support it, and I think that JACK (the JACK audio connection kit) supports it natively (or maybe I'm blabbering).

 

[maddis]

Just found these programs on KVR Audio with regards to the standalone host question (ideal for live performances)

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/3091.html
http://www.kvraudio.com/get/1328.html

This is something i am definitely going to dig into when i get my Pandora. (hey i have a Roland GR20 and this would alow me to play vsts's of my guitar, on the go!...)

Here's a list of Linux sequencers/hosts currently available:

http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php?mode=resul...soft=h&type[]=0&f=0&fe=vst&linux=1&free=1&com=1&un=1&sf=0&receptor=&de=0&sort=1&rpp=15

I also stumbled across this article web page which is really useful:

http://quicktoots.linuxaudio.org/toots/vst-plugins/

 

[n0ahg]

Won't these only work on an intel processor?

 

[dflemstr]

Won't these only work on an intel processor?

They will need a recompile like everything else. All the software VST plugins of course also have to be recompiled.

 

[n0ahg]

I thought most of the 'good' plugins were binary only. Perhaps I'll have to look again ;-)

 

[torpor]

I thought most of the 'good' plugins were binary only. Perhaps I'll have to look again ;-)

VST on Pandora isn't going to work very well unless a proper from-source port is done, and even then there are no guarantees .. A lot of times, VST's use Intel-specific code generation to get performance tricks done, and so on .. Emulating an x86 isn't something we are going to want our andora1: to do very much .. better instead to have some pure native code doing the job. So its better to not focus on VST side of things for Linux audio and use some of the other, much better tools that are very easy to use on Linux. VST is for weanies, anyway ..

Instead of leaning on your previous VST/plugin brainwashing (face it, you maybe don't know about the other really powerful tools on Linux because VST plugins rule the market right now), you should think about Puredata, MAX/MSP, chuck, CSound, Keykit, LMMS, dssi, etc. Not to mention the standalone synth packages that are a lot more friendly for our Pandora efforts due to the fact that they're standalone, and thus easier to port without requiring wrappers/plugin host environments, etc. I'm thinking Zynaddsubfx (an excellent synthesizer), asynth, omsynth, etc.

Now, just because VST plugins aren't going to be too easy to get going (I'm not saying impossible, just not easy) it doesn't mean the Pandora can't be used to do very interesting music-making tasks .. I envision my Pandora running seq24 (for MIDI sequencing), and seq24 having routing configuration going out to 3 or 4 other standalone synths that are running at the same time, like an instance of Zynaddsubfx, an instance of amsynth, omsynth, and so on .. and being able to do a full track with 3 or 4 synths running through seq24 at the same time. Very feasible.

And of course we will start to see easy ports of other interesting music-making environments too, I'm sure .. as soon as we get Puredata onboard, for example, we have access to an entire universe of very, very useful Puredata patches to jam with. I'm particularly looking forward to being able to run at least a few of these sorts of things:

CODE


http://footils.org/tut/pddrums/pddrums.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rG6xTXmHxc

http://obiwannabe.co.uk/html/compositions/compositions.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw40VnBm0yQ

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug06/articles/puredata2_0806.htm




Maybe we can get the RjDj (of iPhone fame) system running as well, in which case we'll have all that great stuff to deal with too - RjDj is just a wrapper around some highly interesting PD patches, btw. So we can see how well Puredata is capable of delivering the goods in the audio-processing department ..

 

[PoisonedV]

max/msp on the pandora is pretty rediculous. also, you slag off VST's because other things are better, but then you list a daw and a bunch of sound processing systems? i think appeal for many people of vsts is plug and play, so i'm not sure its really an alternative. they serve different purposes. regardless of whether or not they're true 'alternatives' i am similarly excited for pure data (which i also run on my gp2x) and max/msp and similar software. i think with a combination or a fine tuning of these it could definitely be a great little sequencer or processor.

 

[sold]

@torpor

As far as my experience goes, stuff like Amplitubes' bass and guitar effects and amp models are great, and I cannot seem to find any replacements. There are other good VST packages out there as well.

I see no alternatives to what has apparently become the industry standard. And it may just be that its an industry standard for a good reason.

What is in your opinion better exactly? Could you provide me with an example or a link or something?

 

[torpor]

@torpor
As far as my experience goes, stuff like Amplitubes' bass and guitar effects and amp models are great, and I cannot seem to find any replacements. There are other good VST packages out there as well.

Sure there are, but VST's will not run easily on the Pandora without recompilation, which requires source, and even then there are no guarantee's ..

Better to instead focus on *new* stuff that the Pandora can do for Audio processing ..

QUOTE

I see no alternatives to what has apparently become the industry standard. And it may just be that its an industry standard for a good reason.
What is in your opinion better exactly? Could you provide me with an example or a link or something?



I worked for years in the Pro Audio world, and have written plugins using CoreAudio, VST, heck .. even for ProTools/Digi TDM .. I would say that sure, VST's are the 'standard' inasmuch as they are the most widely accepted means of distributing plugins for audio systems, but from my perspective new plugin development on the Pandora should focus on Chuck or Puredata .. this gives us a cross-platform solution, and the Chuck/PD engines can then be further optimized to deliver better performance across the whole range.

We won't get VST's on Pandora easily, and I don't think Amplitube is going to be doing a port to Pandora unless someone gives them a very, very good reason .. so I would say, investigate the alternatives out there which are not architecture-dependent, like .. Chuck, PD, CSound, etc.

 

[Babrios]

I think some of you are expecting way too much of the little pandora.
A decent sequencer driving a software sampler, ok.
Using it like a composers notebook to create some midi for later production on a system that can handle all the shit, allright.
But to fantasize the little gaming handheld into a full blown music workstation with several synths and effects is ,imho, not very realistic.

 

[PoisonedV]

I think some of you are expecting way too much of the little pandora.
A decent sequencer driving a software sampler, ok.
Using it like a composers notebook to create some midi for later production on a system that can handle all the shit, allright.
But to fantasize the little gaming handheld into a full blown music workstation with several synths and effects is ,imho, not very realistic.

Why is that not realistic? It seems equally realistic

 

[Loonie]

Anyone who doubts that a platform like the Pandora can handle respectable music production duties should check out BhajisLoops for PalmOS.

 

[Babrios]

Of course something like BhajisLoops for PalmOS can easily be done on the pandora. I suppose the pandora can do quite a bit better than that. I had fun using syntrax and midiwriter pro on my SE p910i, which has a much slower arm-processor in it than the pandora. But that is what I call a "composers notebook". (BTW, I don't mean laptop here, rather comparing it with the papery thing, maybe sketchbook would have been a better word). With that you could work on a few ideas, doing the real production later on a more capable hardware.

What I meant is, that some imaginations here seem to run wild with vst workstation apps doing stuff like in a real production environment on a laptop, with several instances of synths and effects running RT and whatnot. Did not mean to piss on your bonfire, only suggested not to hang expectations too high.

A sequencer driving a sampler however seems doable to me, even with some bred and butter effects like reverb, distortion, cross delay etc., sample based stuff is lower on resources than RT-synths.
If we are lucky, we might get the better Atari-ST-Emu, I mentioned, and have tons of very sophisticated midi sequencers to choose from. That would go very well with the Pandoras screen resolution too. Not sure, the emulation would leave enough resources for the sample player to run in parallel, though.

We will have to see.

 

[sold]

No-one is expecting a full featured DAW or even a vst host app to surface, but some people are interested in the audio capabilities of pandora and are asking the question so people better in the know can answer. It's just a point of interest in this discussion for some people.

 

[torpor]

For sure, the Pandora has more DSP and calculation power in it than most of the professional gear in your average 19" rack, so anyone saying that the Pandora can't be taken seriously as a hardware platform for new musical apps development hasn't written much DSP code, lol ..

No question about it: we can build softsynths for the Pandora that will kick serious ass in the studio. Plus we already have a vast library to start with in the porting effort .. so yeah, I think an era of Pandora-using musicians is upon us, or will be as soon as the Big Ship Date occurs ..