Working with computer sound

Windows have an impressive set of free and shareware programs.

• Windows has a built-in sound recorder (  Start menu, Programs, then Accessories, Entertainment and, finally, Sound Recorder.)
   
• To record and edit MP3 files you can use Audacity. 

  Audacity is the most well-known of the Linux audio editors. One reason is that it has been ported to both the Mac (OS X) and Windows. When podcasting first began to be a big thing, this app was something that people could point at that would get the job done and was free.

  It has a simple but attractive interface and pretty much everything you can do is intuitively obvious for anyone who has even a slight knowledge of what is going on.

  As is quite usual for editors, there are also recording facilities and the number of tracks that can be handled will be determined by your soundcard. It is worth saying here that the Big Guy, as far as recording is concerned, is Ardour. Check it out if you have ambitious schemes in mind.

• To record streaming audio you can use Total Recorder. Total recorder saves any kind of audio files (RealAudio, MP3, Windows Media Player), streaming to your computer from a source such as an online radio station. (Shareware/Windows).

  Note: on Windows XP it disables USB headset.

There is an extensive amount of free audio software available on the Linux platform which is both mature and sophisticated. In fact, Linux has all the tools needed to be a serious contender in music production without a user having to venture into the commercial software world.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 42 high quality Linux audio applications, covering a broad range of different uses. Most of the titles included here are desktop applications sporting an attractive front-end, although we have not forgotten console software.

There are also audio programming languages including the impressive Csound. Commercial software includes  Transcribe! (transcribe recorded music), MuSing (rhythm maker), energyXT2 (music production)

It's worth mentioning that there are a some Linux distributions that specialize in multimedia and digital content creation platforms. These include Ubuntu Studio. Besides packaging and configuring audio applications, these distros also typically feature a kernel that has been modified for intensive audio work, helping to reduce audio latency.

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20071127 : John Littler ( John Littler, Nov 27, 2007 )
• 20071127 : In Line (LADSPA-JACK) ( )
• 20071127 : Audacity - Most Used ( )
• 20071127 : Snd - The Grandad ( )
• 20071127 : Sweep - Tricks ( )
• 20071127 : Traverso - Context ( )
• 190728 : youtube-dl 2008.03.21 by rg3 - ( youtube-dl 2008.03.21 , )
• 190728 : Bloggers banish the keyboard by Maija Palmer ( Bloggers banish the keyboard , )
• 190728 : Asunder 1.0 by Andrew Smith - Wed, Dec 19th 2007 11:23 PDT ( Asunder 1.0 , )

Old News ;-)

[Nov 27, 2007] Linux Audio Editors: An Overview by John Littler

If you're not familiar with the area of Linux audio editors, you might be totally amazed at just how many there are. Clearly, writing these has scratched more than a few itches and more than one has earned grades as a class project.

It's not too hard to figure out why the area has been popular. For one thing, mangling sounds is fun, and for another, there is endless scope for playing with DSP algorithms. You can do that these days without writing a whole editor, but we'll get to that in a moment.

First of all, what is an audio editor, or better, an audio file editor, and what are they used for?

When audio is recorded on a computer, the information is stored in one of a number of formats-most commonly WAV or AIF on Macs. Both are uncompressed and have various options concerning quality and file size (higher quality = bigger file size), which needn't concern us here. There are also compressed formats that, by means of different algorithms, make the file sizes much smaller. Two well-known examples include MP3 and Ogg, which are lossy (information is discarded in the same sort of way as with the picture format, JPG), and a newer one, FLAC, which is not.

This information can be (and usually is!) depicted as a time/amplitude graph, where time runs along the horizontal axis and the frequency and amplitude (loudness) is mapped vertically. This presents pretty pictures of sound that you most likely have already seen and are intuitively easy to read.

Basics of Editor Actions

We use audio editors to perform a number of tasks, the simplest of which is a cut. If, for example, a file is too long, we highlight the area we want to remove by using the mouse and then we, typically, go to Edit and Cut in whatever app we're in, and zap it.

Let's look at the real-life situation of a podcast to see what sorts of things we might do. Let's say we've recorded an interview over the phone that we want to add some music bits to later.

As usual with phone recordings, we might have to deal with noises on the line, volume irregularities, and the usual interview problems of ums, ahs, and thinking gaps. Exactly what you do with these is an editorial choice, and I won't say more other than that making absolutely everything punchy is found by many thinking people to be nauseating.

After a run-through, the first thing that might be done is the pruning. Here it pays to know about destructive and non-destructive editing. The first operates on your primary file and any cuts you make are gone forever. The second method copies everything as its title suggests. Making copies of your own with destructive editors is easy to do though-you just have to remember.

The next thing to do might be attending to noise levels. Quite frequently this will entail just judging whether bits are usable or not, as denoisers often require a little luck.

How about levels generally? Here the normalizer is beloved of quite a few people, but the real answer, quite often, is careful and time consuming fiddling about with areas of the file.

Finally, you might want to export the file in a different format from the one you started with.

In this sort of straightforwardish case, we haven't played at all with another aspect of editors-adding effects.

Effects

Effects are fun and sometimes even useful. In the podcast example above, for example, we might have added a touch of reverb to give the voices a little extra life.

There are many, many, different kinds of effects and within kinds there are different approaches and results. In the field of electronic music making, files might be prepared for looping, or other use, by mangling them substantially. For example, if you use the Linux app Loopdub to play loops, there are limited facilities for live file mangling, so they need to be prepared beforehand.

In App

In the old days, if you wanted to write code for effects, it needed to be in the body of the app. These days, there is JACK, an audio interconnection kit, and LADSPA, a plugin format, so you can write and use effects where this system is relevant and possible.

In Line (LADSPA-JACK)

Live editing is a different area that is used mostly by musicians. For example, one might use Csound to generate sounds which are sent to the JACK tunnel and a series of LADSPA effects. All of this might then be routed (and recorded) by the HDR app, Ardour.

In this sort of way, JACK-capable editors can be used to at least add effects in real time. Mostly though, we don't want to do that.

Some Editors

Earlier, I said there were an amazing number of Linux audio editors out there and there are, but here I'm going to look at a representative sample.

Audacity - Most Used

Audacity is the most well-known of the Linux audio editors. One reason is that it has been ported to both the Mac (OS X) and Windows. When podcasting first began to be a big thing, this app was something that people could point at that would get the job done and was free.

It has a simple but attractive interface and pretty much everything you can do is intuitively obvious for anyone who has even a slight knowledge of what is going on.

As is quite usual for editors, there are also recording facilities and the number of tracks that can be handled will be determined by your soundcard. It is worth saying here that the Big Guy, as far as recording is concerned, is Ardour. Check it out if you have ambitious schemes in mind.

Snd - The Grandad

Snd is the editor with the longest history and was, for a while, nearly the only one capable of sophisticated transformations.

The original idea was that its construction would be modelled on emacs in that it could be infinitely extensible using scripting languages. It is exactly that and could suit DSP experimenters who have a certain sort of comp sci background or who have those tendencies!

In any case, this is a well-respected piece of software that is still being added to.

Sweep - Tricks

In addition to the usual editing tasks, Sweep can also be used as a performance tool. A feature of high-end commercial editors, such as Sountrack Pro is the ability to hear samples as you move around in the file, without having to hit the play button. This is useful while editing, but the Sweep team has given this idea the name of Scrubby with the further idea that it will be used for digital DJing. In fact, there are other performance tools in Sweep, such as the ability to play many loops and control the play with the computer keyboard. I haven't seen anyone using it in performance, yet but maybe mentioning this aspect here will get more people interested.

If you're interested and will be in Europe in March/April 2008, maybe you should check out Bleepfest, which I have something to do with. A footnote here is that Linux based musicians have been actively encouraged to take part (three events so far, in London and Berlin with the next most likely in Paris), but it is has been a 99.9 percent Mac affair so far.

Traverso - Context

Traverso aims to be a complete digital audio workstation (DAW) but has significant editing skills and is the newest of the projects listed here. It is also available for Mac OS X and Windows.

It is interesting in a few ways. For a start, the Unix way is to have many interconnected small tools rather than enormous apps that do everything. Ardour, for example, purposely has less in the way of editing capability precisely because they are following this philosophy. Traverso is taking a different tack as they feel that it is easier for people to download, install, and learn one app, than it is to discover and learn a whole collection of apps.

Another thing the developers were interested in was the area of menus, and they have made efforts to extend commands by using the mouse in conjunction with the keyboard. This approach can potentially both enrich and speed up the user experience but won't be loved by everyone.

Conclusion

There is a rich amount of choice available in this sector. Perhaps you can find something that not only suits your needs but also leads you off to some interesting new places.

John Littler is chief gopher for Mstation.org.

---

Return to ONLamp.

Have you ever tried editing audio under Linux? How does it compare to the Mac, the 'leader' in audio editing tools?
You must be logged in to the O'Reilly Network to post a talkback.

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• linux audio editor with unique tricks (LPC anal/synthesis)
  2007-11-29 13:01:40 josquin
  

  MixViews:
  Linux audio editor with unique tricks: (LPC analysis/resynthesis & other analysis methods)
  http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~doug/htmls/MiXViews.html
  njoy

• ardour

  2007-11-27 17:55:23 treoubo
  

  http://ardour.org/

• You forgot about Jokosher!

  2007-11-27 07:37:15 beranger5ca [Reply | View]
  

  There is also Jokosher, see http://www.jokosher.org/

youtube-dl 2008.03.21 by rg3 -

Mar 21st 2008

About: youtube-dl is a small command-line program for downloading videos from YouTube.com.

Changes: This release adds the -f or --format option to be able to specify any value for the URL "fmt" parameter.

Bloggers banish the keyboard by Maija Palmer

Bloggers banish the keyboard

Published: January 6 2008 17:08 | Last updated: January 6 2008 17:08

The Consumer Electronics Show, a technology conference that kicks off today in Las Vegas, is a stressful place for bloggers.

Thousands of journalists and commentators battle it out for limited space in the media centre. Some are contorted over minuscule portable keyboards, typing furiously in order to be the first to update their web pages with news.

This year, however, some bloggers will be trying out a new speech recognition tool that may help them beat the competition. Voice blogging software allows its users to dictate their entries into a mobile phone. These are then converted into text automatically and posted directly to a website – no hands or keyboards needed.

Ricky Cadden, who writes the SymbianGuru.com mobile technology blog, used the software – which is produced by UK company SpinVox – while covering the Nokia World Exhibition in Amsterdam in December. He vows to use it at all future conferences.

"Rather than walk about focusing on typing updates onto a T9 keypad, I was able to keep my eyes alert while still updating my readers on what was going on. To me, this made everything 10 times easier," he writes in a post-mortem on his website.

Mr Cadden is a technology enthusiast. But in addition to early adopters such as him, voice blogging is starting to be used by athletes who want to provide blow-by-blow updates to fans and supporters.

Anna Hemmings, Britain's current world champion marathon canoeist and 2007 BBC London Sports Personality of the Year, for example, updates her blog by voice, chronicling her punishing training regime on the go.

Paul Mitson, a British driver who was due to compete in the cancelled 16-day Lisbon-to-Dakar rally race, had set up the facility so that he could update friends and family "live" while on the road.

Others are also experimenting with voice blogging for use at times when they cannot reach a computer – such as on a long drive, a remote beach holiday or when they want to capture a moment at a concert. SpinVox, a Buckinghamshire-based company, is one of the key companies offering blogging by voice.

The company started out with a focus on converting voicemail messages into text, but is now branching out into internet applications.

"The opportunity for this technology is greater than just voicemail – it can be used for speaking to the web," says James Scroggs, head of SpinVox's consumer division.

Last year, it signed a deal with LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based blogging site, to provide voice blogging technology for its 12m users. A few months after its launch, it was estimated that more than 10,000 members were using the technology.

The company says similar deals are likely to follow this year, as mobile access to the internet becomes easier and people want to update their social networking pages remotely.

Nuance Communications, a Massachusetts-based technology company, has also been promoting its speech recognition technology to bloggers for the past year, stressing that it can be three times faster than typing.

Google and Microsoft are interested too. The search engine has been running a speech recognition-based directory service in the US for the past year. A truly accurate speech recognition service has to be "trained" to recognise words spoken in many different intonations.

By donating their voice samples, those who call up the Google information service help the company create a system that could be used for a number of internet applications in the future.

Microsoft, meanwhile, bought Tellme, the California-based voice services company, in March. Tellme also runs directory services in the US, and has a voice-enabled mobile search operation.

SpinVox says it has been in discussions with both Google and Microsoft over its speech technology, but Christina Domecq, chief executive, has so far been unwilling to sell the company.

Some analysts are sceptical of the broader potential of blogging by phone. Caroline Chow, research analyst at Canalys, a technology research group, says functions such as voice-enabled navigation – asking a satellite navigation device for directions while driving – and telephone enquiry services are likely to be the main uses.

However, as voice-to-text technology increases in accuracy, she concedes that "there are many new areas to explore".

Asunder 1.0 by Andrew Smith - Wed, Dec 19th 2007 11:23 PDT

About: Asunder is a graphical audio CD ripper and encoder for Linux. You can use it to save tracks from an audio CD as WAV, MP3, OGG, and FLAC. It has CDDB support and can create M3U playlists. It's independent of any desktop environment. It can rip and encode at the same time. It aims to make CD ripping as quick and easy as possible.

Changes: This release adds Polish and Japanese translations. It adds BSD support. A serious bug that could cause encoding to stop working has been fixed. There are some usability improvements. ....

• MP3Trim
  [homepage] freeware [download] (0.21)

• WavTrim
  [homepage] freeware [download] (0.17)

• Quick Detox
  [homepage] freeware [download] (.09)

• Pops Remover
  [homepage] freeware [download] (.151)

• WavNormalizer
  [homepage] freeware [download] (0.25)

Recommended Links

• How to Record Music from a Tape to a CD
• How to Make an MP3 CD Using iTunes
• How to Record an Interview or Music Using an Editing/Recording Music Software
• How to Record Music from a Dvd Video to a Cd
• How to Convert Protected Audio Books to Mp3
• How to Download Music
• How to Convert M4P iTunes Files to MP3 With Noteburner

Audio Players / Music Managers

• Audacious Semi-lightweight audio player with a WinAmp/XMMS-like skinnable GUI
• Amarok KDE audio player offering a wealth of features, yet intuitive to use
• Banshee Music management and playback software for GNOME
• BMPx Compact media player, the successor to the Beep Media Player
• Exaile Music player aiming to be similar to KDE's Amarok, but for GTK+
• JuK Jukebox and music manager for the KDE desktop
• gmusicbrowser Jukebox for large collections of mp3/ogg/flac/mpc files
• Listen Player which helps you to organize your music collection
• Quod Libet Music management program
• Rhythmbox Integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple's iTunes
• Songbird Provides a uniquely open approach to Internet digital media network services

Music Clients for the MPD (Music Player Daemon)

• Ario GTK2 client
• GMPC Optimised to work on low end machines and over slow networks
• Sonata Lightweight GTK+ music client

Recording / Editing

• Audacity Digital audio editor
• Ardour Digital audio workstation program
• Jokosher Simple yet powerful multi-track studio
• Sweep Audio editor and live playback tool
• Traverso DAW Multitrack audio recording and editing program

Composition & Music Notation

• LilyPond Produce musical scores that are engraved with traditional layout rules
• Rosegarden Sophisticated MIDI (and audio) sequencer and notation editor
• MuseScore Graphical WYSIWYG music score typesetter

DJ Tools

• Mixxx Digital DJ system, for wave, ogg and mp3 files
• terminatorX Realtime audio synthesizer that allows you to "scratch"

Sequencers

• Breakage Intelligent drum machine designed to play complex, live breakbeat performances
• MusE Qt-based MIDI/audio sequencer
• Qtractor Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer written in C++ around the Qt4 toolkit
• LMMS Alternative to popular (but commercial) programs like FL Studio, Cubase and Logic
• Hydrogen Advanced drum machine
• Seq24 Loop based MIDI sequencer

Synthesizers & Samplers

• Fluidsynth Real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications
• Bristol Emulation package for a number of different 'classic' synthesisers
• LinuxSampler Professional grade software audio sampler
• SooperLooper Live looping sampler

Tools

• JAMin State-of-the-art realtime mastering processor
• Kid3 Edit ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags in MP3 files in an efficient way
• Sonic Visualiser Inspect and analyse the contents of music audio files
• Sound Juicer Lean CD ripper using GTK+ and GStreamer
• Streamripper Records shoutcast-compatible streams

Sound Servers / Daemons

• JACK Low-latency audio server daemon
• MPD Allows remote access for playing music and managing playlists
• PulseAudio Networked sound server project

Etc

Society

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Classic books:

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Most popular humor pages:

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