Category: free software

Posted on

Site stats, and some first news

Looking at the statistics of this website, I see the following for the past year:

awstats for lonien.de

Yes, that’s about 40,000 different visitors coming in about 200,000 times in the past year – never thought we’d get that many visitors; cool. Thank you for your interest.

News, category bad: Anita Pointer died last night, the third of the four Pointer Sisters. RIP, and thank you for everything you did, ladies. I embedded one of their songs into a forum on Wikiloops in case you want to hear a great and funky tune.

News, category good: LineageOS 20 which is equivalent to Android 13 is out. When I looked yesterday, the download images weren’t online yet, but they seem to appear right now – I saw the one for my Pixel 4a, so I can prolong its life when Google will drop the support for it in August. Maybe until then there’s even the version with microG available so that I won’t have to install the original Google services. Please do this if you own older phones, instead of throwing them away.

Like always, thanks for reading.

Posted on

djware answers a question which I get all of the time

And that question is which Linux distribution is the most recent *and* is still stable and secure. The first thing of course is to check what is meant by stable and secure, so let’s have a look and listen to the assessment of Debian Testing vs OpenSuSe Tumbleweed vs Arch Linux (Stability and Security Challenge):

https://rumble.com/embed/v16ex4a/?pub=4

Be sure to visit djware’s rumble website for the further links which were mentioned – or do it like Debian would recommend for normal users: run Debian stable, and if you *must* have some newer packages, then use their backports repository to update these. This is what I’m doing since years, just because their ‘testing’ branch is *not* meant for normal users, it’s meant for developers getting the next stable version ready for you.

Thanks to djware for your tests, and for the great explanations. And thanks to you for reading, and for watching.

Posted on

Ardour 7.2 was released

About two hours ago, the Ardour team released their latest and greatest version 7.2. I have it already, and it works very nicely, just like it always does. Here are some screenshots:

Ardour 7.2.0 “Wrong Way Up”
Ardour 7.2 on Linux with a song I’ve had in 7.1 previously
Ardour 7.2 and its mixer view. My Sonarworks plugin is on the monitor bus.
Ardour 7.2 playing back the loaded song. Notice the threads on my CPU while playing back two tracks…

Very nice. I’ll start using it, keeping the 6.9 version because of older tracks, and the 6.5 one because it came with the OS. I also have the Windows version just in case Zuleikha would like to use my XLN Audio grand piano which came as a Windows VST plugin only (and yes, I know how to load these into Linux, but won’t do it).

Oh, and in case you want to hear the song I have in my DAW here (minus my tweaks to it), it’s this one. Please give Shi and Tom a thumbs up in case you like it.

In case that maybe you have no idea what Ardour is, it’s one of the best free and open source digital audio workstations available. Please have a look at its homepage in case that sounds interesting for you.

Like always, thanks for reading.

Posted on

Using open source for music and video, by Bransby

This is a very cool video about what you can achieve using “only” open source software when creating music and videos for the tubes. The gentleman calls himself “Bransby“, and his explanation of things is about the best I’ve seen, so thanks for that, sir! Here we go:

Recording and Mixing using Open Source Software – Ubuntu, Ardour, Calf Plugins

I’ll use this for friends in Wikiloops in case they’ll ask about a howto, so thanks again for your good work and for the nice explanation, Bransby. Oh, and your song is great as well 🙂

Posted on

Looking at / listening to Ardour 7.1 on Windows

Today I’ve been looking at & listening to the new Ardour 7.1 free and open source software DAW on Windows 11. Looks and sounds awesome:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52477508304/
Ardour 7.1 on Windows 11, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

The music you see within that program is from Dan and Chris, you can listen to that one on Wikiloops if you’d like to. The program seems to work fine, so next step is to also install it on Linux 🙂

And like always, thanks for viewing, listening, and reading.

Posted on

Some phone shots from today – and some screenshots

At the moment, all three neighbours’ cats are here, and all are sleeping. Two (Wilma and Crunchy) on my bed, and one (Cookie) on the sofa. Earlier, I caught Wilma on my lap with the phone in my hands:

PXL_20221103_131652928.MP
Wilma on my lap, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

I had been trying different versions of LineageOS on an older Google Nexus 10 tablet device which we had laying around unused, and after trying some unofficial ones I decided to try the latest official build which you can get from Lineageosroms.com, which is LineageOS 13.0 – [ Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) ] as you can see here:

Screenshot

That is some years old already as well (the tablet is about 10, this image more than 4 years old), but it is still a nice compromise between speed, stability, and features. Being the equivalent of Android 6 under its hood, I could even install the Zapp app from the F-Droid store, and so now we can watch Live and/or streamed TV on it, like so:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52475045170/
News (via Zapp app, see F-Droid.org) on a 10 year old Nexus 10 device running LineageOS ‘Marshmallow’, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

I had to interrupt my activities to send Mitchie to work with the car, and when we came down to the garage I saw that some neighbour had parked a nice new Honda motorcycle right in front of their partly covered Fiat 500 and beside our car. After coming back, I took a quick pic of that as well:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52474579011/
A brand new motorcycle, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

Oh, and when looking into my blog software today I saw that I’ve got a new version of that as well:

Screenshot

So I’ll have to see what’s new, and whether any of the also new templates (2022 and 2023) are looking good…

So all photos in this article came from my Pixel 4a phone, and the screenshots from my computer. As always, thanks for reading and for viewing.

Posted on

What’s New in Ardour 7.0

I had downloaded the new Ardour 7.0 for both Linux and Windows as soon as it was released, but haven’t tried it yet (except that on Windows I installed it parallel to the 6.9 version I already had).

In case you’re interested, here’s what’s new, in about 4 minutes:

What’s New in Ardour 7.0

Maybe I’ll try it with the next song & project I’ll be “working” on 🙂

As always, thanks for watching. And thanks and congrats to the Ardour team of course.

Edit, from later the same day: as soon as I show this, there’s a new version again. See here…

Posted on

Almost…

This could almost win me over – but it didn’t; the headphone jack is missing (and as a musician, I demand near real time; sorry). So my ageing Pixel 4a (or 5a if you live somewhere where you can actually buy these) is still the far better option.