Posts Tagged ‘Linux’

SuperCollider on Ubuntu Studio: Success!

{ Sep 27, 2008 @ 8:00 pm } · { Linux, Pure Data, SuperCollider, Ubuntu Studio }
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After some sessions using JACK to route audio from SuperCollider and other programs to effects, I must say that I’ve really enjoyed using Ubuntu Studio. Setting up JACK’s sound driver parameters was the main hurdle, but the Ubuntu documentation site helped me out for the umpteenth time. I used the settings in that how-to guide as a starting point, increasing the Period and Buffer sizes until I got no XRUNS, accommodating my sound hardware at a respectably low latency.

If you want to use SuperCollider, PureData, or similar software on Linux, I strongly recommend using a generic i386 installer, as opposed to a 64-bit kernel, even if your CPU can handle 64 bits. SC’s client will not run on a 64-bit system, Pd seems to have array bugs, the Flash player may not work, and some other sound software has issues with the amd64 distros. I actually went with the amd64 Ubuntu Studio release before giving up and re-installing with 32 bits. (As an alternative, you can run these programs in a 32-bit chroot, but this will probably entail long-term maintenance/upgrade difficulties in exchange for the near-nonexistent benefit of running a 64-bit OS. I could not justify the time and compatibility problems.) Once I installed the 32-bit version of Ubuntu and the Hardy SuperCollider packages, I was ready to go, with even the internal server functions working.

One facility of JACK is the ability to route each program’s inputs and outputs to each other, much like a patch bay. With all of the audio processing tools, including LADSPA plug-ins, that come pre-installed in Ubuntu Studio, I had quite a bit of toys at my disposal. Routing the outs from SC to FreqTweak produced some particularly interesting sounds suitable for real-time manipulation.

I’ll post some audio files soon to share results.

Unbuntu Studio install

{ Sep 23, 2008 @ 11:20 am } · { Linux, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Studio }
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So, after having a little time to audition Ubuntu, I decided to resize a Windows partition and install Ubuntu Studio. (I actually used the Ubuntu installer to re-partition, after some frustration with abortive efforts to create a GParted LiveUSB. Using the Ubuntu installer went off surprisingly well and easy, and, thankfully, I didn’t lose any data on the NTFS partition that donated the space.)

The installer for Studio is not nearly as slick as the Ubuntu install. It’s a text-based installer, which looks positively retro these days; as a former Slackware user, I was actually amused by this, at first.

I also had a serious problem. The Ubuntu Studio installer choked at the “scanning the mirror” stage. I waited an hour before going to bed, assuming it was working with no indication of progress. When I woke up this morning, it was still stuck at the same point. After reading a forum post about one user’s similar problem on an older release of Ubuntu, I switched to another virtual terminal and killed the installer processes (the last 3). This caused the installer to get back on track, asking what general sets of packages I’d like to install. Eventually, the install completed without further incident.

I had previously tried installing a number of the Ubuntu Studio packages, including the realtime Linux kernel, on my Ubuntu install under Wubi. Disk space quickly became an issue; though a virtual disk was in use, it seemed non-trivial to resize it, and moving /usr to a new virtual partition seems to have failed. I was not particularly impressed at the cryptic failure messages from Synaptic; I imagine a newbie would be positively bewildered. More graceful and obvious errors would go a long way here. On the other hand, I did create a fairly small virtual partition (only 5G) in the first place.

An adventure in Wubi

{ Sep 21, 2008 @ 4:16 pm } · { Generative Music, Pure Data }
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I’ve been learning ActionScript 3 lately. It looks like Flash 10 (Astro)will have some interesting new support for doing sound synthesis that should be an improvement over the current hacks using the BitmapData class, so I’ll be on the lookout for that. At this point, I haven’t had a lot of time to work on any generative music algorithms in Flash, but I’m hoping that will change soon.

It seems that the wikified documentation for Pd objects that I posted about long ago, Pdpedia, may have never gotten very far off the ground. I believe I stumbled across it months ago, but now I can elicit nothing but an error from the staging server. Maybe this is a temporary situation. If you know otherwise, feel free to enlighten me.

I’ve been wanting to install Linux for some time, especially since I was a bit frustrated with the incomplete state of the SuperCollider port for Windows (Psycollider). I also just enjoy playing with Linux; I keep a headless web dev sever running Debian, but I have used Linux little on the desktop, at least for the last several years. The problem was that I had no free partitions on my desktop’s HD, and I didn’t want to resize any existing NTFS partitions. Then I found Wubi, which will install Ubuntu using a file on a Windows drive as its filesystem. This was remarkably easy, once I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO for the amd64 platform and dropped it in the same folder as the Wubi installer.

Once I had Ubuntu configured reasonably well, I started installing packages from the Ubuntu Studio project.

I’m still waiting for that to download and install, but I found that there is a port of the SuperCollider server for AMD64 in the form of a debian package. I have a wedding to attend today, but I’ll be installing that tonight. Hopefully I can get all the bells and whistles working, and perhaps play with puredata, Chuck, or Csound, too.

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