On Wed, 2009-12-23 at 11:46 +0100, Martin Tarenskeen wrote: I really hope so. Get as many packages as possible properly orchestrated and create a good scene where both developers and musicians can find what they need. :-) I can fully understand the need for getting apps over to the more well-known fedora repos before anything else, but at least to me it looks like there are so many packages now that it may be time to look at the rest. Create a 'home' for something that may grow into a separate spin some day. Forums/wiki? At least some informational pages that are current with respect to supported fedora releases. I did, and there were lots of talk about installing ccrma low-tatency kernels and other mods to fedora 7 to 10. Nothing about 11 or 12. Again, no links to repos for 11 and 12. I feel pretty safe installing packages from rpmfusion. Not so sure about installing packages from a ccrma F10 repo on my work laptop... I'll have a look at the lists. When I didn't find any info for Fedora 12 on the web pages I kind of stumbled on to look elsewhere. Perhaps that was a mistake. Pulseaudio has changed a bit since F10 hasn't it? Again, I would like to see how bits fit together in the supported Fedora releases. That would make it less likely for newcomers to [beep] up ther config completely trying to follow outdated guides... I have 3 kids with guitars. I have a keyboard somewhere. I need to learn how to set up the software for them :-D Move over Jonas Brothers... The future is getting ready. birger

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 5:08 AM, birger wrote: Hi, Martin gave a good summary. Let me add my 2 cents into the subject. (Well it will be more like 10 cents :)) * The documentation is possibly what we lack most for the time being. Feel free to help us out if you have time and will to do so. We have started a page in the Fedora wiki a while ago https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AudioCreation for listing our audio creation type software (Fedora only) but yet it needs a lot more work. * PlanetCCRMA is ready for F-11 and F-12. See for instance: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/12/... http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/12/... You probably need the planetccrma-repo package from that repo. (Be careful about the architecture) * Install the multimedia-menus package yum install multimedia-menus This is new for Fedora 12. It will create submenus in your Multimedia (Sound&Video in Gnome) menu and sort audio/video related applications so you can find things easier. * For guitarix, after you filed the bug, I saw that the application looks for qjackctl and if it is missing it looks for a ~/.jackdrc file in your home directory. If it cannot find either of them, it fails. The ~/.jackdrc is always there when you have a working jack setup. I didn't think about the case where someone would start guitarix on a fresh installation, which hasn't run jackd yet. I will let upstream developer know about the issue. Normally, guitarix shouldn't need qjackctl. But I'll add that dependency today. * Check out the updates-testing repository frequently. New updates usually go there first. Typically they stay there for 2 weeks and if no bugs are reported they go to stable. For example, Martin is a very good tester and I appreciate his contributions. But of course, having more testers won't hurt :) * Pulseaudio is pain. As a Fedora developer, normally I shouldn't recommend anything about not using it. But it is pain, at least for me. It blew up my harddrive at some point and I stopped using it since. Although pulseaudio is supposed to play nice with jack these days, I am not planning to support it myself. As audio creation people, we want control over our sound hardware. Hiding many of the sound card's controls is a "feature" of pulseaudio for the sake of simplicity. And this is against my use case. At the end of the day, it is your choice what sound servers you want to use. I just want you to know that one of the primary audio creation packagers of Fedora does not have time and will to support pulseaudio. * Look at /usr/share/doc/jack-audio-connection-kit-0.118.0/README.Fedora Part of it is obsolete information by now. But it will get you started. Make sure you add your user to the correct groups * For tuxguitar, please try the version from updates-testing. It should sort things out. There are many independent ways to get good sound out of it. In the version in updates-testing, I made it default to fluidsynth/fluid soundfont combination. It is supposed to work out of the box now. (Alternatively, you can use gervill (java sound API), or forward the midi output of tuxguitar to qjackctl, and connect it to qsynth... There are still more ways to do it.) * qjackctl and qsynth are your friends. * For recording&mixing, ardour is still the best in my opinion. And we have a bunch of lv2 and ladspa plugins for sound effects. For drumming, I primarily use hydrogen. And with jack, you can hook up every application that uses jack to each other rather easily. Push the Connect button on qjackctl. * As Martin said, PlanetCCRMA list is a good list to subscribe. It is a lot more active than this one. And we have Fernando, the Great there :) Unfortunately, I am leaving tomorrow, and I will be away for a break until mid January. You folks will probably not hear from me during this period. I have a couple updates that I will push to the testing today. And they will stay there until I get back. I don't want to push something broken into stable because I won't have time to fix it. I hope you figure your way out by the time I am back. Cheers and welcome, Orcan

On Wed, 2009-12-23 at 14:15 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote: A lot of work on it has happened and it is getting better, but (sorry, no personal attack to the very busy developers meant here) there seems to be some sort of reality negation field surrounding it when more advanced users miss features that were there before. The need is there, apparently there are not enough of us (users that need better control of the audio configuration through the alsa mixer - default answer is "use alsamixer") to make any difference. In fc12 it does play nice with a properly packaged jack so that is very good (in fc11 that only happens if you use the Planet CCRMA jackd as it has a perl wrapper script that deals with pulse properly - bugs in pulse make the dbus interface not work when trying to release the card). Maybe in time... -- Fernando

On Sun, 2009-12-27 at 11:15 -0800, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: I guess it's like a lot of open source projects; If you want to see features that are wanted only by a fraction of the community you have to make it happen yourself. In some way or another. Code it yourself, or advocate it until some developer does it for you. The best is of course to show how it integrates with something a bigger userbase wants so the core developers of the project do it. For pulseaudio there are some confusing dependencies on alsa tools when you step outside the very narrow track. I certainly hope some more advanced options will get built into pulse tools. On the other hand, F12 has become extremely user friendly for stuff like adding a USB headset, bluetooth headset, USB speakers and so on. For ordinary users it has the smoothest handling of such devices I have ever seen. That is the main focus for pulse. Have you ever tried adding a bluetooth headset to vista? I would like to know more about how to set up pulse and jack properly on F12. The definitive guide to what can be done and how well it works. :-) At the moment I stop everything that uses sound, then start jack and let it take over my soundcard. Pulse gets switched to a USB headset that jack doesn't want to see. This way pulse apps and jack apps seem to coexist nicely. With pulseaudio-module-jack I guess I could integrate them and let either one own the hardware and the other one plug in. Letting pulseaudio own the hardware and use it as a sink for jack sounds like the easiest solution. Perhaps jack will be able to use my USB headset that way. Will this kind of setup hurt latency badly? birger

On Sun, 2009-12-27 at 18:51 -0800, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: pulse ought to follow the general gnome guidelines. simple user interface as today, but add all the advanced bells and whistles in a manner that most users won't even see. :-) How to make that happen? Obviously the mindset of pulse developers has to be turned around a bit, and that is rather difficult. One method that has worked for me earlier is to show the right people at Red Hat that there is a need for a certain change in Fedora as it would benefit RHEL from a business standpoint. I cannot see how that can be applied to audio, but perhaps someone here can come up with a nice tactic? Sorry, I didn't explain that well enough. I switch pulse to the USB headset on purpose to keep sound working in the pulse apps. As you noted, there is no sound from pulse apps otherwise as long as jack owns the audio hardware. I have installed the module. No new jacks that I can see immediately. I'll try a reboot and then play around a little bit. I anticipate a slow day at work. :-) birger

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 8:41 AM, birger wrote: In a sense, it is good to have a beginner's documentation written by a beginner. As there are certain things which you only do once when you install a new system, it is easy for many of us to forget some of these steps for the documentation Thanks, Orcan

On Sun, 2009-12-27 at 11:11 -0800, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: That explains a lot. In hindsight it is of course easy to recommend that the reason for omitting F11 should have been mentioned on that page so the project didn't seem like it had been without maintenance for 6 months. There are always a lot of dead or dying branches in the open source world and it is very easy to dismiss anything that looks stale and just search elsewhere. But then of course "Hindsight is foresight that happens too late". It isn't easy to see that when you work on the project and know it's alive. :-) birger