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

[LineOf7s]

I am a lil surprised that in all this talk about alternatives and "source available" plugins and whatnot no-one has even yet mentioned LADSPA (http://www.ladspa.org) as a Linux plugin alternative.

I am not suggesting any LADSPA plugin will do anything that anyone in particular might want, but for the sake of posterity if nothing else it has surely got to get mentioned in this context.


[edit]
(Oh, and of course I meant to include DSSI (http://dssi.sourceforge.net) in that as well.)

 

[cobaltage]

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.

I think the most challenging aspect of music apps on the Pandora is actually screen size. It is big enough for a lot of things (most music hardware is deficient in the visual feedback area as it is). But anything like a DAW will start getting crowded for screen space.

But the DSP should be powerful enough for all sorts of things.

 

[ldesnogu]

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 ..

At first, I thought you were talking seriously

I wonder what kind of DSP one can find in professional gear these days. I guess these are standard DSP but many of them?

This reminds me of an old story. I was visiting an exhibition years ago. And there was this guy explaining seriously his AtariST was more powerful than a Fairlight; I am sure he really trusted his own bullshit, which made him pathetic rather than funny

 

[teppic]

I think the most challenging aspect of music apps on the Pandora is actually screen size. It is big enough for a lot of things (most music hardware is deficient in the visual feedback area as it is). But anything like a DAW will start getting crowded for screen space.

Not necessarily... Trackers are really well suited for this actually. Most trackers will work very well on 800x480, but also input will work great as it's mostly keyboard-based.

 

[eksasol]

I've got to say that that LMMS looks pretty damn sexual...

W00.

that's the first time i heard someone describing a software as 'sexual'.

How will one be inputing outside signal into the pandora though, to really make it a worth while portable recorder. Does the pandora have line in? There are universal usb soundcard, but they are not very high quality. Don't know of any portable recording interface with Linux support. Would be nice to do this:
Condensor mic -> E-MU / M-Audio portable interface -> Pandora. But no driver so that wont happen.

 

[cobaltage]

I actually am not at all familiar with trackers. They dont really make sense to me, exactly. I played with the one for the Nintendo DS (Nitrotracker I think) but I couldnt get into the interface. Of course Nitrotracker is probably not the best way of figuring that sort of thing out.

AFAIK, the audio plug on the Pandora supports stereo out and mic in. But I was wondering if there is a generic USB audio device driver for Linux like there is for Windows.

 

[Babrios]

I wonder what kind of DSP one can find in professional gear these days. I guess these are standard DSP but many of them?

There are the sharc dsp's in creamware/sonic-core hardware, there is protools, uad, tc-powercore.
You can stack those cards and have whole dsp-farms. The real quality pro-stuff still runs on dsp's.

This reminds me of an old story. I was visiting an exhibition years ago. And there was this guy explaining seriously his AtariST was more powerful than a Fairlight; I am sure he really trusted his own bullshit, which made him pathetic rather than funny

R U sure, U did not misunderstand what he said? Maybe he was comparing the creative potential of midi sequencers on the Atari ST with the midi sequencer software in the fairlight system? If so, he was actually right. As far as pure midi sequencing goes, the Atari still beats everything.

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 ..

If U think you can amaze me, please do. Would be very pleased to be wrong about the pandoras potential in the Music-making department.

 

[ldesnogu]

This reminds me of an old story. I was visiting an exhibition years ago. And there was this guy explaining seriously his AtariST was more powerful than a Fairlight; I am sure he really trusted his own bullshit, which made him pathetic rather than funny

R U sure, U did not misunderstand what he said? Maybe he was comparing the creative potential of midi sequencers on the Atari ST with the midi sequencer software in the fairlight system? If so, he was actually right. As far as pure midi sequencing goes, the Atari still beats everything.
Oh yes, I'm alas sure: he was talking about the incredible 8-bit sample replay capability of the ST (which was a crazy hack of the AY8910 (or the Yamaha equivalent chip)). That was stupid since at the same time the new CMI were out and they were using several 68000 and 16-bit (at last) samples.

QUOTE

...

If U think you can amaze me, please do. Would be very pleased to be wrong about the pandoras potential in the Music-making department.

I'm sure he was ironic

 

[torpor]

At first, I thought you were talking seriously

When it comes to turning the Pandora into a music-making machine, I am *quite* serious. I used to work in the music-devices business, for a famous synth company, and have done projects for some of the major synth mfr's as well .. I won't name-drop, but just so you know, I know whats inside the box of some *quite* popular gear, and it is very comparable to what the Pandora has inside ..

QUOTE

I wonder what kind of DSP one can find in professional gear these days. I guess these are standard DSP but many of them?



Motorola 56k-series DSP's are used in a lot of synths, as are SHARC's and so on .. and some synths just use a pretty slow Mot 68k-based processor, even.

Yamaha custom-design their own chips, which means we don't have a lot of details about the internals, but for sure they're not bigger than the Pandora in terms of MIPS and performance for Audio. Audio doesn't actually require a super-fast CPU if *the only thing the CPU is going to be doing is Audio*. Its only because of the bloat and baggage that PC's come with that the faster CPU's are "associated" with Audio performance in the market. You can do very amazing things with much, much slower CPU's, if those CPU's are not running Windows ..

And one of the reasons that "Pro" audio gear still uses older DSP's is that these DSP's are actually pretty cheap, and you get a *lot* of profit from selling a system for $2000 that costs $150 in parts. Mot 56k DSP's can be had for <$10, btw. That TI Polar everyone is spending thousands for, cost less than the Pandora, retail, to make.

QUOTE

This reminds me of an old story. I was visiting an exhibition years ago. And there was this guy explaining seriously his AtariST was more powerful than a Fairlight; I am sure he really trusted his own bullshit, which made him pathetic rather than funny



Well maybe what he meant was that he can accomplish the same sorts of things as a Fairlight with his AtarST, and not have to pay an arm and a leg for it. I had access to a Fairlight once, for a recording project .. replaced it with a Creative-Labs SoundBlaster AWE32 sound card, heh heh, for which I started samplelibrary.net, way back in the day ..

 

[ldesnogu]

Motorola 56k-series DSP's are used in a lot of synths, as are SHARC's and so on .. and some synths just use a pretty slow Mot 68k-based processor, even.

56k were thought from the ground up for high-quality sound and can do 24-bit arithmetic up to 56-bit for MACs. SHARC uses floating-point. The m68k is surely used as a controller so it doesn't count
The c64x+ doesn't play in the same league, or considerable efforts would have to be made to reach similar accuracy and speed would suffer...
BTW TI sells c67 (floating-point DSP) for their high-performance audio DSP.

QUOTE
Audio doesn't actually require a super-fast CPU if *the only thing the CPU is going to be doing is Audio*. Its only because of the bloat and baggage that PC's come with that the faster CPU's are "associated" with Audio performance in the market. You can do very amazing things with much, much slower CPU's, if those CPU's are not running Windows ..

I disagree if we are talking about softsynth. Very powerful, versatile and high-quality softsynths require a huge amount of CPU power, which the Pandora certainly doesn't have. Granted you'll be able to get Rebirth or ds-10 like things, but I doubt you'll be able to run in real-time all of the csound things on can find on the web for instance

 

[nappingcracker]

"All" someone needs to do is set up low resolution themes / skins for LMMS and Hydrogen.

Those two programs are way ahead of any of the DS audio sequencers / beats machines in both openness, available kits / samples, and should be available for ARM shortly after the next Ubuntu release (say what you will about Ubuntu on the open pandora, their support of ARM is going to bring a HUGE number of applications to the platform, easy as 1 2 3).

Set up a better layout for LMMS and you'll have a killer portable beats editor. That project needs some UI love.

 

[Loonie]

I actually am not at all familiar with trackers. They dont really make sense to me, exactly. I played with the one for the Nintendo DS (Nitrotracker I think) but I couldnt get into the interface.

I have to agree. I'm a piano roll kinda guy. I just cannot visualize hex as being notes, and that's a killer in musical productivity for me. Screen size is no problem. If a respectable piano roll-based sequencer can be created using the 320x480 resolution of the Palm screen (in fact bhajis loops even works on 320x320), the Pandora's screen is sure as hell not going to be a problem.

I understand that some of these packages are designed to use screen real estate, but there's likely not much that a little theme reworking couldn't solve.

Much as I loved my early music sequencing days of the Atari ST with Cubase, running a software sequencer on an emulated platform isn't a recipe for success on the portable sequencing front, especially from efficiency/ timing points of view; critical to music software in general. Not to mention the fact that you'd also have to be running software synths in addition, which themselves would probably need some nasty hack to connect them with whatever platform was being emulated.

 

[torpor]

56k were thought from the ground up for high-quality sound and can do 24-bit arithmetic up to 56-bit for MACs. SHARC uses floating-point. The m68k is surely used as a controller so it doesn't count


You might be surprised to find that the m68k is actually used for sound processing in a lot of pro gear, yo .. Sony, I'm looking at you.

QUOTE

The c64x+ doesn't play in the same league, or considerable efforts would have to be made to reach similar accuracy and speed would suffer...
BTW TI sells c67 (floating-point DSP) for their high-performance audio DSP.

The c64x+ARM core is going to be *plenty* for some hot softsynth love, don't worry.

QUOTE

I disagree if we are talking about softsynth. Very powerful, versatile and high-quality softsynths require a huge amount of CPU power, which the Pandora certainly doesn't have.


We can argue about this forever, but one of the reasons such huge amounts of CPU power are needed for softsynths is because of the OS and other overhead (host environment) imposed on the algorithm. Put the algorithm on a dedicated controller with nothing but input/output happening around it, and you won't need multi-Ghz CPU's just to get good things done... After all, a lot of classic synths out there in the hardware world run on much, much slower, much more limited hardware, and still get a fantastic sound ..

QUOTE
Granted you'll be able to get Rebirth or ds-10 like things, but I doubt you'll be able to run in real-time all of the csound things on can find on the web for instance



I'll be happy with Chuck and Puredata, personally .. as well as the opportunity to develop some new things from scratch in either Assembly or C ..

 

[gruso]

I like reading this thread.

I'm hoping to pick up an Atari ST this weekend. I'm running (well, learning) Ableton on my Vista box, and it's an awesome piece of software, but I really want to strip it back to basics and learn old school sequencing with Cubase. I've got a MIDI keyboard already, and maybe I'll pick up a cheap old sampler for laughs too.

 

[ldesnogu]

The c64x+ARM core is going to be *plenty* for some hot softsynth love, don't worry.

Yes to make funny softsynth no problem, but for really advanced stuff, I don't agree
QUOTE
We can argue about this forever, but one of the reasons such huge amounts of CPU power are needed for softsynths is because of the OS and other overhead (host environment) imposed on the algorithm. Put the algorithm on a dedicated controller with nothing but input/output happening around it, and you won't need multi-Ghz CPU's just to get good things done... After all, a lot of classic synths out there in the hardware world run on much, much slower, much more limited hardware, and still get a fantastic sound ..

Sorry you are completely wrong. Run csound with oprofile on your PC and see how much time is spent in the OS. Zero or close to.
Again fantastic sound does not equal to powerful softsynth.

QUOTE
QUOTE
Granted you'll be able to get Rebirth or ds-10 like things, but I doubt you'll be able to run in real-time all of the csound things on can find on the web for instance

I'll be happy with Chuck and Puredata, personally .. as well as the opportunity to develop some new things from scratch in either Assembly or C ..
You'll have fun then: they both use floating-point numbers so the DSP is no option...

Don't get me wrong, I agree one can have fun with softsynth on the Pandora. But saying it will be powerful enough to reach the level of advanced softsynth is very wrong IMHO, CPU power matters and your PC has much more power.

 

[torpor]

QUOTE

Yes to make funny softsynth no problem, but for really advanced stuff, I don't agree



Access Virus C == ~100mhz DSP. Just sayin' ..

 

[ldesnogu]

QUOTE

Yes to make funny softsynth no problem, but for really advanced stuff, I don't agree

Access Virus C == ~100mhz DSP. Just sayin' ..

This is using one Motorola 56k variant, isn't it? And this has 24-bit -> 56-bit for MACs which the c64x+ lacks and would need to kind of simulate to reach the same level of accuracy.

And again sorry this doesn't qualify as powerful softsynth in my mind as it isn't as customizable as full-fledged ones

 

[SuperRoach]

cobaltage mentioned that the pandora has a mic-in ... I totally didn't realise, but that is awesome if true! Is it a general purpose port? in other words, can the amp be disabled to allow it to become a line-in style input for a mixing board input.
It'd be a dream come true to have this connected up as an backup recorder or even better, a shoutcast streamer

 

[kin]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/modplug/

Nice and easy tracker! (openMPT)

 

[Babrios]

Much as I loved my early music sequencing days of the Atari ST with Cubase, running a software sequencer on an emulated platform isn't a recipe for success on the portable sequencing front, especially from efficiency/ timing points of view; critical to music software in general. Not to mention the fact that you'd also have to be running software synths in addition, which themselves would probably need some nasty hack to connect them with whatever platform was being emulated.

You're right and I'm aware of those disadvantages running sequencer apps on an emulator.
I'm not saying it would be the best solution for composing on the pandora in general, but I just love fiddling with those atari midi apps, and the pandora might feel just right for that. Piping the midi into a gm-midi sample player engine would be enough for what I have in mind, no need for synths and effects there. No idea, if the pandora is good enough for that, though. Well, still can do all that on my laptop.

BTW, it's only the atari midi apps that interests me, not the music making on the pandora as such.
Would not even want to do the producing with all the works on a tiny device like the pandora, even if it was possible. For that, I very much prefer working with a desktop pc or a laptop anyway.