Where is skullnotions (Dave)?

Great to see some live jamming happening. I remember pre computer days when I used to jam with one of my long time friends and he used to programme drum tracks for us to play acoustic guitars to. I can remember the software he used, it was called bars & pipes, later he got cakewalk and still uses it today. I still set aside guitar practice time away from the computer because it's so easy to get so wrapped up in software programming that you can easily neglect actually playing music. It's great that we have so many users that have a great deal of software experience because the choice we have is massive and you could spend all your time learning how to use it. One of the things I love the most about music creation is that the only limit is our own imagination. Cheers! Dave.

Hi Pablo, I guess I should be more clear about JACK, it is the qjackctl that I am not used to nor sure about. And, the angst is mostly centered on the connect window. I am quite certain it has more to do with me than it though. The learning curve can at times be daunting, particularly when I am having to unlearn things I do in Windows. I have downloaded patchage and will be taking a look at it too. Thanks, James

Hi James :) I also have just begun making music with an old friend of mine. He writes the lyrics and sings. I write some rhythms in hydrogen, play the guitar with some virtual amp and we have a lot of fun. We meet at the living room so we can't have drums or big amps. It is cool you met this old friend to make music again, after so many years! You say you are not sure you like jack... what part of jack you don't like? I mean, jack is the sound server which makes possible to work with lots of applications together, connect them to each other, connect them to the audio card... in a super-flexible way and with very low latency. Linux doesn't have an all-in-one app but has Jack, which is even better, imho. (Admittedly, I have never tried to make music in Windows as I do now in Linux) Take a look at patchage for easily connect jack-aware applications. I do admit that the connect window of qjackctl is a PITA. See the applications forum for an introduction. Happy playing! Hi Dave! Cheers! Pablo.

Hi, I am presently working with a buddy of mine who I last saw in high school, Class of 76, when we played in jazz band. He a drummer and me the guitarist. I just sent him tracks to put down some drums yesterday over the Internet. It is really weird but I have not seen him for 33 years but we are now working together again. I have come close to getting Ardour 3 beta running but there is a glitch somewhere that I do not understand during install. It configures fine but won't build right. I do the build and open it, the configure window pops up but when I go, nothing happens. The Konsole window says that the canvas is broken. I know that means something. I have a lot of work to do on figuring out how to mixdown, it is so different than Windows. I am still getting used to Jack and am not sure I even like it. However, I am getting along quite nicely with Ardour 2.8 thus far though I have only scratched the surface. I am interested in the testing and all insofar as it gets me up and running quicker. Thanks for all your input and support. (I am curious about using PDK though to build a custom, barebones DAW). Hmmm..... James

Hi James, I'm still here and fully engrossed in kernel testing. Up to patch-2.6.29.4-rt15 There's some good threads and posts running at the minute and the demo's users are creating on 64studio are impressive. The topics that I've noticed concern very valid points and it's great to see users experimenting with hardy variations upgraded with 64studio meta-packages. There's not many linux audio distros that have a testing team like ours and it's great to follow the developments. The 64studio alpha\beta roots lie in 2.1 dist-upgraded to hardy. A great journey. I've watched you try the various hardy installs on your new system and I agree with your conclusions, let's hope the next image release sees a fix for this issue. Sidux is gone now here and my partitions are all devoted to 64studio testing except one which has ubuntustudio jaunty and I think this will also be gone soon. PDK is probably my favourite software on 64studio and I see there's more interest developing and rightly so. Sadly it's broken at the minute but I've made the other team members aware and am waiting for a fix. The possibilities of image creation are endless when using PDK. You can create a minimal install image or a full blown 64studio clone. One post raised a good point regarding keeping the present kernel and I agree, but there's issues to be sorted. The 2.6.21 kernel is old now and new hardware has problems, 2.6.26 is a good kernel but will also go the same way with regard to new hardware. The beta3-2 default kernel is one of the best I've used but needs a few minor alterations to suit our users needs. This should be straightforward as the changes are not massive, however making these small changes is completely changing the kernels character. Quentin is doing the best work at the minute, his 64bit kernel is working great. You would think converting and creating an i386 version would be straightforward but alas this is not what I'm finding. I've gone right back to my original blueprint and at this point have five different 2.6.29 .configs from various distros\sources and am slowly comparing each one to the original (beta3) and Quentins 64bit config. It's very interesting but very slow work. Once I'm happy with the result I'll post a howto for users to configure\build their own custom version. It's good to see you've got your kernel-rt up and running and I think you'll find yourself hooked to kernel building one you get the first couple under your belt. Any audio distro is only as good as it's kernel so the time you're devoting is well spent. Your next step could be to patch the source and try configuring\building with this method. Once you have a working blueprint you can use make oldconfig and streamline the next build to suit your hardware, which reduces the build time a great deal. Building for a distro is different because you have to take into consideration a broad spectrum of hardware\drivers. Keep up the good work and have fun creating your music:) Cheers! Dave.