Music. Photography. Thoughts.
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:
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.
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:
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…
Terrible to read about the passing of Don T., one of the bluesiest guys I’ve ever heard on Wikiloops… he was a good friend and once even wrote a song for me. I had the honour and pleasure to play on his latest song in the ‘loops and asked him with a PM whether he would also consider to sing on it, no answers so I was thinking of him. So here you have it with a lead guitar from Carlo instead of Don singing:
Condolences to Don’s family, he truly was a wonderful guy! Rest in peace my friend…
Thanks to a friend who sent me a present lately (you know who you are), I decided to build a new PC for myself. I had built one for my wife earlier this year, and after waiting for the first reports about newer stuff like the new AMD Ryzen processor family I thought that that’s *not* the direction I wanted to go – these newer ones consume power just like Intel processors, and I wanted something a bit less power thirsty. ARM is the future (see Apple), but for normal PC builds we don’t have anything usable yet, so I decided to take more or less the same parts of the build for my wife, but in a smaller case. Here’s what I chose:
Here’s a parts list in case you’re interested:
So that would be my first Mini-ITX build, and I was really looking forward to it when the first of these parts arrived last Tuesday:
The case (and mainboard) arrived a day later:
And last Friday, I had the new machine up and running beside the old one:
Of course, building a machine and setting it up to use it are separate steps. First I thought about what I’d need or want, and after copying over my Windows 10 partition it offered me to upgrade that to Win11 more or less right away. I thought: “Why not?”, since I use that only for the Olympus (now “OM System”) raw image converter. In the end I decided for a clean installation tho – you need a Microsoft account even for the Pro version of Windows I had, so it made no difference, and I wanted to start with a more clean plate. So soon enough I was done with that, and greeted by that newer operating system:
First impressions of it are positive – in my opinion it got the looks almost like Apple does, and for its internals they borrowed many good ideas from both the BSD and also the Linux side of things. Even their Edge browser which I tried only briefly seemed to show me less ads and other annoying stuff than (Google’s) Chrome would. But ok, this ain’t the OS for surfing, not for me anyway, so on to more pleasant things…
After looking at many options like Arch, the new beta of Fedora Workstation and so on, I decided against a triple boot this time. I wanted to keep things easy and just set up for my personal use (music, photography, blogging, and so on), so except for Windows which didn’t get that much space I took about three quarter of the space on the new SSD for Debian, so here you go:
What you see is Debian stable (which is currently nicknamed “Bullseye”). In the upper right hand corner you see the processor temperature and fan speeds reported by a Gnome desktop extension called “Freon”, and under that you see that I have installed a kernel 5.18 from the Debian bullseye-backports repository, otherwise you wouldn’t see those fan speeds, and the Intel WiFi chip which is integrated into the mainboard wants a newer kernel as well – I knew that already from Mitchie’s machine where wireless and Bluetooth started working with Ubuntu 21.10 (instead of their older 20.04 LTS).
So this morning I was about ready, and short after lunch I was greeted by TEE-KWA’s pretty cover picture on Wikiloops:
Of course I also installed and tried Ardour, my Digital Audio Workstation of choice, and within it, the headphone correction by Sonarworks:
So, regarding music and photography and blogging, this more or less completes my build.
Which was, coming back to the headline of this article, just in time. I wanted to give my old machine to my brother, but alas, it gave up its ghost just after I was finished building this one. Broken heart syndrome on a CPU? Hm, that would be something new even for old timer PC doctors like me… anyway, I tried lots of things today, but it seems we’re out of luck with that one. So yeah, phew, that *was* just in time! To really ‘nail it down’ to a single not working component, I’d need to have a bench and spare parts like Jay so I could change each part and see what/who the culprit is… still sorting out if my brother – who lives in a much bigger city than we do – maybe has neighbours who are hobby PC builders with enough parts for that.
So for me, and thanks to my friend, it’s this new one from now. So cool… and by the way, 8 cores and 16 threads are way more than enough for what I do… still these machines are waiting for us most of the time, not vice versa 🙂
And like always, thanks for reading.
I reported about yesterday’s interview event, and in case you haven’t seen it, here are three hours of talks and interesting news about the upcoming version 7.0 of Ardour. Starts at 30:11 according to unfa, one of the hosts.
Enjoy…
Just as announced and expected, Linus yesterday released kernel 6.0 – see LWN or kernel.org for more.
Debian is still on a long term supported version 5.10, with latest updates to that tree from September 28th as you can see on kernel.org. If you need Debian stable with newer kernels (for new machines for instance), there’s always backports which has more current ones. That’s a supported way of keeping the stable branch a bit more current, and unlike the testing branch it includes security updates.
The Debian developers have voted upon adding non-free firmware to the Debian Installer, which will make it easier for the average user to use just the standard image to install it onto newer (or more exotic) hardware, as former DPL Steve McIntyre reports. To do so, the social contract has to be changed accordingly.
And in the upcoming release (codename “Bookworm”, no planned release date yet), Debian will switch to Pipewire as their default audio architecture, something that other distributions like Suse or Fedora have done already. I have tested Pipewire on Arch where it works just fine, there are still some quirks for pro audio, but average consumers shouldn’t have any problem with it (rather the opposite).
Debian developer Marco d’Itri reports that this machine works fine with an actual kernel and with Debian. Thanks for sharing this, Marco!
You can listen to him and to ‘unfa’, a vlogger from Poland tomorrow, see here.
As always, thanks for reading / viewing.
I’m helping out Richard with the Wikiloops project a bit, and sometimes like in every other bug report system, you need screenshots. No problem, in Linux (I use the Gnome desktop, mostly), it’s just a keystroke or two away. But how to annotate?
Like this:
I found Ksnip in an article on LinuxLinks via LXer. Very useful as you can see… problem solved.
And like always, thanks for reading.