I’ve been taking advantage of this little schedule break after Norwescon to try to upgrade my DAW from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, because support for 10.04 LTS is going away this month, and also because there are a lot of fixes I need in later versions of Jack and Ardour, and Jack setup and building is so strange that even the author group says DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

I SAID NO SILVER M&Ms IN THE MIX!

It has been an insane nightmare. Had I not been working against a new hard drive onto which I had cloned my old setup, I would’ve been brutally screwed. Did you know 12.04 just bricks some machines – like, send-it-back-to-manufacturer brick them – at startup? Did you know 12.04 upgrade can and will render your machine unbootable? (That happened to me through the GUI; I had to re-image the drive. Also? The install disc for 12.04? I never even get to the first setup dialogue. Hangs.) Did you know that if you try to do a stepwise upgrade as per the instructions here that the tool you use to do it is hardcoded to look in the wrong place for the upgrade files, and that this bug is known and supposedly fixed but still happens to me?

Shall I go on? Because I can. This is why I smashed an Ubuntu install CD yesterday out of frustration and rage. (See above.)

Anyway, I eventually got the server upgrade path to work – it was literally the last route available, but it got me there, mostly. After putting my machine in a state which would leave it unbootable, it had the decency not to force a reboot, and after a few hours, I fixed it. This is also a known bug. If you upgrade in the GUI, you’re just pooched. As I was, except I was working off a new image, my original drives untouched, so I could start over.

Even with all of the above, I’d currently be dead in the water again(!), except the 3.1.5 kernel I installed myself to work around a combination of kernel bug and ill-behaved USB external sound hardware which enumerates its own hardware incorrectly(!) is booting fine, and running fine, under 12.04. So I’m actually up and running! As of around 2am this morning.

However, the kernel the installer wants to install is 3.2.0-39, and it panics at startup. That’s a later version, and I’m worried that this might bite me in the ass somewhere.

Will it? Anybody know? Will 12.04 be stable under a 3.1.5 kernel?

3.2.0-39 doesn’t even get loaded. Here, see if you have any ideas:

Starting up...
[0.929456] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)
[0.929507] Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.2.0-39-generic #62-Ubuntu
[0.929552] Call Trace:
[0.929594] [<c1561988>] fukkit I'm not typing all this in. printk, panic, mount_block_root, ? sys_mknod, mount_root, prepare_namespace, ?sys_access, kernel_init, ? start_kernel, kernel_thread_helper.

The 3.1.5 kernel (same drive, same directory, same install, etc) launches fine.

So even if I get this working completely, I’ll be looking at a new distribution next time. This is obscene. The fact that pretty much everything I ran into – once I got the drive cloned, where I hit other problems, such as grub insisting that I had no hard drives after booting from one of them and mounting three – is known, and that the core dev team is basically okay with that tells me I’m kind of done with Ubuntu.

Mageia has been recommended highly. So has Mint, but I was later told Mint is just Ubuntu with a different GUI.

Got anything to declare?

Yeah. Don’t install Ubuntu.

PLAN 34!

http://www.luth.org/plans/instrument_plans.html#plan34

This is not what I’m actually trying to do, but not completely different either. Swap the guitar stick with a bass stick, move the harp strings below the bass and have them going higher in pitch, not lower. BUT IT COULD BE DONE.

The ghost of Admiral Shack continues to fail me.

I thought I’d already choked this guy to death.

I mean honestly, how do you even get here? In an adaptor, I mean. With a cable it’d be easy, but adaptors are solid pieces of shaped metal. I didn’t even cheat to make this happen.

You are in command now, Admiral Monoprice!

place your bets

I’m going to end up walking off the bridge in silent rage again, aren’t I?

I wanted to have a second on-air sign for inside the studio, so I could see whether the signs were on or off an keep track more easily. The second was a duplication of the first, the one that I posted about already.

But I’ve had problems with minions (particularly Minion Paul) coming to the door and being afraid to enter or knock because there’s no sign out there. With a second controller already being in place, it’s really quite simple to make a third, hanging off the same controller, so I did. But being out of LEDs, I made a different kind this time.

Bento compartment box plus…

hee hee hee hee hee

I love my light-dotted I. It’s silly, but I love it so. 😀

Do you think there’re enough hipsters on Etsy to buy the ones I make out of cassette cases? The bento box ones probably aren’t retro enough, but the cassette case ones, maybe. What do you think?

[poll id=”25″]

You have failed me for the last time, Admiral Shack

Thanks to everybody who threw me pointers after Monday’s post on remote keyboard controls for Ardour. THE WINNERS ARE YOU! Also a winner is me, particularly thanks to If on Tumblr letting me know about OCS, a control protocol for sound software. Ardour supports it! Ardour was even an early adopter…

…which means they do everything differently to everyone else, which makes it L33T HAX TIEMS! Or, well, flaily hax tiems, to all honesty. So, in TouchOCS, I made a thing:

Devices!

…that also works on iPad…

BIGGER devices!

…and since TouchOSC exists on Android, it should work there too.

TouchOSC doesn’t want to talk the flavour of OSC that Ardour speaks, so it talks to a minor variation on this PureData script which translates it to Ardour’s dialect. So far all I can get working are transport controls, but that’s what I really need anyway. But look, it works!

If I have time I’ll learn more about PureData and add more commands. There are ways around the limitations of TouchOSC, they just aren’t accounted for in the script I pulled down off ardour.org.

Here’s the TouchOSC panel data file for the control surface in the pictures. Consider it Creative Commons Open Source yadayada go play with it. It’ll work with the stock PureData script I linked above, modulo the edits you have to make to have PureData running on your machine.

ALSO! You guys sent int two other good DIY toolkit pointers. They’re good for making haxy special controllers and I might yet use them for something else. First, lj:cdk pointed out that Ultimarc makes a bunch of interesting controller parts. Very cool stuff, lots of options for building. And second, an even more interesting device appears courtesy If, who pointed me at Makey Makey, an interface so flexible you can literally connect a banana and use it as a control toggle.

Obviously someone needs to use a banana to drive Fruit Ninja.

Thanks again to everybody who threw out ideas and suggestions!

Criminal Studios’ workstation desk has had a usability problem.

Ardour, my digital audio workstation (DAW) software, has an editor view and a mixer view. Both are really useful for different things, and Ardour will happily display both at once. But both want lots of screen space, making you toggle between them, which is a pain in the ass. Avoiding that requires huge tracts of land, and those big monitors are spendy.

Last week, I realised I could cheat. First, Linux, Windows, and OS X all support multimonitor/multicard displays. Second, for the last year or so, everybody’s been dumping 4:3-ratio LCDs, even newish ones in good shape; nobody wants them. Pretty good ones go for $20ish; I spent $16. Third, old-school 4:3 ATI Rage cards are $15, new in box.

Combine these facts, and $31 buys you:

Huge Tracts of Land

The blue field on the left display is part of the background graphic, made by modifying a standard Ubuntu Studio desktop. There’s no actual special functionality; it’s organisational notation. “Files left here need sorted.”

2560×1024, aw yeah

(Click on either to enlarge.)

By themselves, neither display is good, by any modern definition. I mean, lol 17″ 4:3 LCDs. Would you want to play games on this? Hell to the no. FPS would be wretched, you have this screen divisor bar where the monitors meet…

…but that’s totally irrelevant.

All you need for a DAW is to match screen resolutions and have enough oomph to draw sound level metres moving. That’s about the same graphics power as you need for something like, oh, Word. Getting that functionality cost, I repeat, thirty-one dollars.

It’d’ve been $16 if the old graphics card sitting in the parts box hadn’t been the wrong slot type. Do you have an old PCI graphics card sitting around? Thought so.

After all of two days in this configuration, the usability difference is tremendous and obvious. Being able to have all this extra data in view at the same time is really useful when recording other people, and there’s actually a lot less mousing even as I do more things, because I’m not having to change views and move windows around to get to tools.

It’s so useful, I’ve decided to shell out another $44 for a cheap dual-monitor bracket. But you don’t need that; you can just sit the monitors on boxes to get them to the right height. But I need screen mobility.

See, the studio desk is double-sided. I set things up on the outer side when I’m recording myself or rehearsing. It’s for best access to the DAW controls from the recording floor:

Note location of chair and keyboard; recording floor is to the right.

When recording others, I set up on the opposite, further side, so I’m out of the way, and can see everything they’re doing:

Flipped about

Needing to move the monitors every couple of days? That’s worth a pair of monitor arms. If you don’t have that, don’t bother.

This situation won’t be last forever, because all the good old 4:3 monitors will go away, or get old, or become rare enough to be more expensive. But for the time being, it’s pretty cool. And dirt cheap, so you can spend your money on things that matter.

Like microphones.

You have, of course, heard of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, yes? If not, you’ve heard their work, assuming you’ve watched much television from the BBC, pioneers of electronic music, of noisemusic, of textured sound, of sequencing – absolutely amazing work. They’re probably best known for the Doctor Who theme, in North America, but that’s only one small part of their legacy.

There’s a lovely documentary called The Alchemists of Sound, about the Workshop. (Thanks to Paul Johnson for referring it and providing the YouTube link.) It’s totally worth your time if you’re interested at all in these early electronic and noisemusic sounds and how they were made.

(Parts two and three.)

In Part II, there’s a demonstration of looping – using, you know, actual loops of magnetic audio tape – and live-synching of components across four tape machines. Delia Derbyshire, one of the pioneers of the shop, takes you through it. Hard. Core.

There’s been a bit of a revival in oldschool sounds like these, too. Really, it’s a direct parallel to chiptunes. BoingBoing has an article you may enjoy up on hauntology, the art of retrofuturist music, as specifically applied to pre-8-bit electronica revival.

Enjoy!

You may and may not recall that I built a little optical theremin.

Basically, I’ve been trying to develop an electronic instrument project that could be built, in a workshop environment, at nwcMUSIC at Norwescon. It had to be really simple, but functional. And I can – what you can see in this picture totally works! It could be simplified further just by swapping those three resistors with one of similar value.

But the output is really, really quiet. Sure, I could – and did – add a matching impedance stage and hook it up to my amp, and that worked, but we can’t do that in a workshop.

So I wanted to add a pure amplification stage, using an amplifying transistor. I hooked all that up and: silence. After a few minutes, I realised that I was attempting to amplify a signal with a lower-power source than what I had to begin with. That won’t work.

And I could fix it, either by adding an impedence-matching voltage transformer (complexity rating no) or a second power stage, but it would take it well above my complexity limit for a one-hour workshop.

That won’t work either

So then I thought, “all these components are rated 40v, let’s just double the input power to 18v and see what happens.” And what happens is fire.

Or, at least, a surprisingly enthusiastic outbreak of magic blue smoke. And now nothing works, and now the little battery-powered air filter I built is running.

And that’s why there’s no DIY project today.

See you next week. XD

We’re heading up to Vancouver tomorrow for VCON! We’ll be there for the weekend, hitting Chapters and Siegel’s Bagels and picking up some desperately-overdue cider rations and kicking around town. Mmm, Growers, how I miss thee. If you’re around, yell!

Also, there’s an exciting special event coming up here next week; you’ll want to read about it. More on that below the fold.

Right now, let’s talk Digital Audio Workstations.

First, what are they? Simply put, Digital Audio Workstations are software implementations of the physical hardware you’d use in a large recording studio to record your music. They include virtual mixing board, virtual patchboard, virtual tape recorder, virtual cables, virtual effects plug-ins, virtual equalisation – and depending on the package, even more.

The goal is simple. If you can do it on one of these:

I’ll be in my bunk

…then you should be able to do it in your digital audio workstation (or DAW) software.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as basic recording. Were it, you could get a little digital recorder and be done. What that giant hunk of hardware – or your software DAW – gives you is the ability to record several tracks of sound, separately or all at once.

A DAW lets you play those tracks mixed together in a synchronised fashion, move and edit your recorded sounds, adjust their levels (both relative to each other and in absolute terms), adjust equalisation, add effects such as reverb or distortion or overdrive or whatever you have plugins for, and so on.

Some DAWs include integrated MIDI support; some include sequencers as a core component. Some even support remote boards that give you all those sliders and knobs, so you don’t have to use the mouse or keyboard so much. Those are cool, and easier to use in some important ways, if less portable.

But at the most basic level, you have recording, editing, mixing, and playback. At the most basic level, you have GarageBand.

I will not be in my bunk.

Now, I’m not mocking GarageBand. GarageBand is a great introduction to concept, and surprisingly capable. It makes a whole bunch of tasks really easy, has integrated MIDI support, and includes a bunch of virtual MIDI instruments.

While from a features standpoint it’s pretty limited, and while it handles tracks in a way that implies they’re less generic than they are by naming them after instruments and making them sticky in weird ways which might confuse you later, it’s still a great first experience.

If you just want to get the idea with GarageBand before tackling something more complex? Go right ahead. Because I am not going to lie to you: the learning curve on the more advanced DAWs can be brutal. Particularly on the free/open source ones.

So, what’s out there? Well, if you have the money, and a Mac, I hear great things about Logic Pro. For both Mac and PC you have Pro Tools, which is called an industry standard because it is one. Pro Tools Express is free with some hardware purchases – but it’s also limited enough that I wouldn’t use it myself. Reaper, for Mac and Windows, has fans in the professional community. (And as Tom Smith noted last week, IK Software is having a big sale right now. This is relevant to your interests.)

But we’re about dirtball DIY. Let’s talk building your own kit, and doing it the cheapest way.

There are really two topics here: hardware and software. We’re already talking software, so let’s carry on.

The cheapest route, in dollar terms, is always open source. Linux is free software. You may have to be able to do a lot of internals work – no, that’s not fair; you’d better be ready to rip its guts out – but you can do it.

Afraid? You will be. You will. be.

Audacity is a relatively-simple open-source DAW. It runs on Windows, OS X, Linux, and some Unix OSes, not that you’re likely to run into those. It’s easier to set up and it works. I ran into its limitations in the first hour, but that’s because I already had aggressive goals; it’s the GarageBand of the open source world.

Ardour is my workhorse, and it is a monster. It runs atop specialised sound server software called JACK, and runs on OS X and Linux. If you run it on Linux, you’ll have to grab PulseAudio by the throat, slice off its head, and salt the ground on which it dies. This will not be easy in some Linux variants (Ubuntu, I’m glaring hatefully in your direction) but it must be done. Ardour is monstrously frustrating (at times), is possibly the most difficult to learn software I’ve ever used outside of 3D modelling…

…and it can do anything. But it will make you cry getting there.

MusE has a fair bit of traction in electronica, because it’s really a sequencer. But it also has DAW capabilities, and the stated intent is to expand into the DAW arena. It’s Linux-only. If you anticipate a lot of sequencer use, and have relatively light physical instrument requirements, give it a look.

Rosegarden started out as MIDI and composition software, and that’s still where its heart is. But, as with MusE, it’s headed into DAW territory and added at least some of the basics of the functionality. If you like sheet music composition and MIDI, you may want Rosegarden.

So, what about the hardware? I’ll approach this from the idea that you’re building a new box for this, or upgrading an old one substantially. If you’re not, well, skim this anyway.

Screw you, Best Buy

Here are things not to care about: what the case looks like. How cool anything on the motherboard sounds. (We already talked about external sound interfaces; if you skipped it, go read up.) The graphics card. You’re not doing video: you do not care.

What you do care about: fan noise. Bus throughput, on the hard drive side and on the USB chain side. (I’m assuming you’re on USB and not FireWire or Thunderbolt, mostly because that’s where we are in the technology curve right now.) Raw CPU power. Lots and lots of RAM. If you want to spend some money, throwing some dosh at an SSD drive is not misallocated funds.

Basically, you want to build a lean box dedicated to math – because math drives your virtual effects – and moving audio data around, and nothing else. Every other toy, every other frob, adds interrupts and takes CPU and bus time away from what you’re doing with audio. Rip that shit out.

One particular task you’ll want to figure out is probing your USB bus for onboard devices. A lot of motherboards will share device assignments between on-motherboard equipment and external USB ports. This is technically correct – the best kind of correct – but in high-demand applications results in more interrupts on the bus and slower throughput. This can and in my case did result in higher latency and buffer overruns. Find and use ports which are unshared for your external audio card.

Also, for Linux in particular, you may find that wireless internet will be a problem. It’ll work, but will interoperate badly with your realtime kernel, hammering you with interrupts and popping you out of realtime mode.

Some people ditch networking entirely. If that’s not okay, go wired. If you must go wireless, get an external wireless bridge and connect it via ethernet cable to your wired (and realtime-kernel-compliant) ethernet card. This will solve many weird network problems.

But I said we’d talk about hardware, dammit! So okay! Where do you get performance hardware for cheap?

Well, you shop around, of course. Check your local parts stores, but the cheapest route I’ve found is to get a copy of CPU magazine’s motherboard roundup issue – preferably the last couple of years’ worth – and to go the gaming kit-out sites.

Yes, I know, I just talked about case mods and all that: don’t care. You don’t go for the frills: you go there for the motherboard clearance sales, because last year’s gaming l33tness is this year’s dogshit, as far as they’re concerned, and they just want it gone.

As a result – the fire-breathing motherboard inside my DAW? 75% off retail. The CPU, 60% off. The RAM, sadly, not as much, but still: bargains are to be had, and I had them.

When browsing, though, choose wisely! Look over the supported hardware list for your operating system and DAW and follow them. The last thing you want to be doing is tracking down some obscure kernel bug and finding that it’s only fixed in a downstream revision your distribution doesn’t even support yet, so you end up installing a custom kernel configuration and doing haxx0r insanity, not that I know anything about that.

Fuck yeah, meme baby. Fuck yeah.

And that’s an overview! Believe it or not, that is an overview; there are an endless series of twisty passages you can run down on this topic, all alike. I’d browse a little, pick one, and dive in.

If you’ve already built a DAW, what do you use, and why? What problems did you hit that I haven’t covered? Is anybody out there using Thunderbolt yet? Share your experiences!

Finally, I teased an announcement up top. It’s super awesome. Get this:

NEXT WEEK, we have a special event! We’ll be kicking off a series of monthly guest DIY posts with one from JEFF BOHNHOFF.

You may know Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff from their YouTube hit, Midichlorian Rhapsody, or some of their many albums and awards. Jeff and Maya also built Mystic Fig Studios, and Jeff has engineered and recorded literally dozens of albums in his 30-year musical career.

And next week, Jeff will be stopping by here, to talk about DIY sound control in your home studio. We’re thrilled to have him, and YOU WILL WANT TO READ THIS, if you have any DIY recording interest at all.

Until then – see you in Vancouver!

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio.