This is from Sunday, in collaboration with Philip who wrote and sang his awesome polyrhythmic template – so I tried to stay polyrhythmic myself as well:
Thanks to Filo974 for the fun, thanks to you for listening.
Ardour 6.0 is released
Great news for all fans of free and open source software: Ardour 6.0 is out. In fact I was waiting for the announcement since last week or so, when Harrison Consoles announced their new version 6.0 of Mixbus and Mixbus 32c, both of which are based upon Ardour.
So this is how the original looks like:
You can read the announcement and get some links from Paul Davis, who is the founder and main developer of Ardour (and Jack and other great programs), here.
And after using it for free for over two years already, I decided to finally subscribe to it, making this the first and only software subscription for me (with the exception of Wikiloops, glad to support that platform as well).
I’ve not seen or tried version 6 yet since on Linux I’ll get it more or less automatically via the KXStudio repositories, but now I can also download the Windows and/or Mac versions of it if I like to – and sure, never tried it on Windows, so why not? I know that some plugins like the ones from Calf Studio Gear are available for Linux only, but so what – I can still try and compare it to others, right? Will be fun I guess 🙂
So thanks to Paul, Robin, and the countless other developers who make something that great even possible. Hats off to you guys and girls.
You can download precompiled versions of Ardour starting at 1US$ here.
Thanks for reading.
May 22a / One of these days
Yesterday I threw away all of my preset templates which I had made in Ardour – I had way too many, now I have one. And that is based upon the GxSVT amp simulation; I once had an Ampeg SVT amplifier and 2 cabinets, and I think that one would fit pretty well to a P (“Precision”) bass like the one I have.
So I took two tracks and played on them with that new sound setup. Here they are:
As always, clicking on the track IDs will lead you to the song within Wikiloops.
Thanks to Mark and Frankie for their awesome templates, and thanks to you for listening.
I’m busy – but I have helpers… :)
Shot with the webcam in my work notebook (Lenovo P50)
As always, thanks for viewing.
Over the train tracks and into the woods
Today I took another one of these short Sunday walks, and I also took my camera again, this time with my 25mm/1.4 Summilux as the only lens on it. So here are some impressions from my walk:
You see that jet? The airport is only about 7km direct line from our place. Oh, and my last walk was in the wood you see under that plane.
These stairs lead from the road down South into the wood. As you can see, they’re not that heavily used – which is exactly what I was hoping for…
Do you also feel that urge to travel when you see trains, even freight trains? Maybe I’m a hobo after all, like those who sing the Blues about it… just wanna jump a freight train and go… (romanticising a life which is very hard in reality, I know)
Saw this on a nearby bus stop, so for today this is the last photo of my walk.
If you click the photos you’ll see them on Flickr where I also added geo tags, so you can browse Flickr’s maps to see where that all is.
As always, thanks for viewing and for reading.
We moved
No, not in real life. But I just moved this domain you’re reading – lonien.de – from a small self-administered vserver to a new managed hosting, run by these guys & girls from Hamburg (although physically, we moved from Aachen to Frankfurt):
We have almost the same specs as on our previous machine, but this one’s administered by professionals, so that I can concentrate a bit more onto other things and hobbies.
So far, a very pleasant experience, I’d recommend this one if you need some web space and don’t want to do it all alone…
As always, thanks for reading.
Roll away
Here’s another fine take on John’s (Fanne’s) wonderful Celtic song – it’s almost like a reply onto the one from Brian, wonderfully composed and performed by Shi:
I’ve had so much fun with this one, thank you very much my dear friends – and thanks to you for listening to it 🙂
Cat on printer
Thanks for viewing.
Wild eyed Irish girls
Great template from fanne, cool lyrics and vocals from gwailoah:
Thanks for listening.
How to make a “systemwide” Sonarworks on Linux – the easy way
I’ve been contemplating on trying Sonarworks since a while, and after WhiteDrum55 and kimbo both acknowledged its usefulness in a thread in a Wikiloops forum, and after I learned that Sonarworks even offer some kind of beta version of their plugin on Linux, I downloaded and tried that. I was sold after 20 seconds, and decided to buy it after an hour or two.
So what does Sonarworks do, you might ask. Well basically it equals out the frequency curves of your headphones (and speakers in the ‘Studio’ version). Looks like this for some headphone models we have:
These are, from top to bottom, the curves (in blue) before correction, the corrective ones (in green), and the resulting ones (in purple) for the Sennheiser HD598 (my main “open” cans), the AKG K141-2 (Zuleikha’s), and the Sennheiser HD569 (my closed ones).
So that software makes them basically sound almost alike, definitely more neutral. Which is invaluable for recording and mixing.
After playing around with it a while in my DAW I thought how nice it would be to have these corrections systemwide, and in fact for Windows and for MacOS, Sonarworks offers a program they call “Systemwide” which does exactly that. But for Linux they don’t – so I’ve made one. 🙂
(Credits have to go to user sysrqer in this Linuxmusicians forum entry who’s describing how to do it in just a few words – so I’ll mostly add some screenshots to make it a bit more clear here)
You’ll need a few programs called ‘claudia’, ‘carla’, and ‘cadence’ for this, which come with the KXStudio repositories – so these are available for Debian and its many derivatives like for instance Ubuntu Studio. There are ways to do this on other distributions, but not with these tools, and therefore not that easy – so that’s out of the scope of this article.
So in Cadence, you’ll use LADISH to automatically load a studio after your login, like this (I called mine ‘Sonarworks’):
In the “Engine Settings” for Jack, you’ll have to mark a checkbox to “Ignore self connect requests to external ports only”, like this:
Then, under “Tools”, you use ‘Claudia’ to set it all up:
In ‘Claudia’ you have to set up that Studio (here ‘Sonarworks’), and add Carla to it, like this:
In ‘Carla’, you’ll add the Sonarworks Reference 4 plugin which comes as a VST plugin for Linux (with an .so file type):
And in the “Patchbay” tab of ‘Carla’, you’ll do the cabling like this:
Make sure that you don’t have a second set of cabling running from the PulseAudio Jack Sink directly to the System playback inputs, and also check after a reboot, or after loading/unloading programs like Ardour.
And boom – you’re set:
With the wrench symbol in the plugin loaded into Carla, you can start the graphical interface of Sonarworks – so that is how my screen looks after I log into my system.
This isn’t all perfect yet, and the plugin itself has some relatively high demand on CPU (about 10% on my older Core i5 processor), but that will surely improve over time. Hearing music (and now also videos and other sources) like they should sound is invaluable to me, and well worth the price. Did my first new mixes for Wikiloops already using this, and I couldn’t be happier.
As always, thanks for reading.