rantshoutwhisper

"Hold on. Lock In?" says the Linux user. "Linux doesn't suffer from lock in. That's a Windows thing."

I'm afraid not. There's a bewildering choice of distributions, and it's getting easier to install them and start using them. But most of the distributions will use either GNOME or KDE. There's nothing wrong with that - they're good. But if you're thinking of changing over to Linux because you've heard it's lighter and faster than Windows and will work on older computers, then you have to factor in that a fair few applications won't work if you decide NOT to use KDE or GNOME. And that can cause issues.

I bring this up as someone who started off using GNOME, got switched to KDE with openSUSE, and now is on Fluxbox with no GNOME or KDE dependencies. I plumped for Fluxbox because for audio work, it's best to give as much processing power as you can to the bits that do the audio; but if you like using graphical things [like I do] then you need a window manager. Using a lightweight window manager like Fluxbox [or Openbox, or...] is ideal for this purpose - you can then pick the other tools you need to build up your desktop environment.

For my laptop I chose not to download any KDE or GNOME libraries [or as few as I could get away with]. This immediately discounted Rosegarden [which relies on KDE] and Ardour [GNOME], two of the most popular audio production programs for Linux, from my choices. It also cuts out K3B and Brasero.

But of course, all is not lost, because the choices are there - but some are not easy to find. So, this is an attempt to gather the apps I've tried and like into one place. There are some very obvious ones, but there maybe some you haven't heard of. They all fulfil the requirement of not needing KDE or GNOME libraries; not crash on my system immediately; and come with a GUI.

It's a short list.

Audio Editing/Digital Audio Workstations/Multi-Track Recorders/Sequencers
Traverso - takes a small amount of getting used to, but it is good. And small. What's great about it is that you can once you've laid out the tracks you can burn straight to CD with it.

QTractor - this program reminds me of Cubase, and is very easy to use. Few glitches in the MIDI, but nothing major.

Each takes the gamut of file formats. The main frustration with both of these programs is that you can only apply effects per track, instead of per clip or region of audio; that's why you'll probably still need Audacity if you want to do electronic music work. But recording a band they'd both do very well. Crossfades elude all three, unfortunately.

CD burning
This was and still is my major bugbear. Unfortunately there isn't anything as good as K3B except Nero, and so unless you use a terminal [which is not the point of this list] there isn't a totally satisfactory CD burning tool that does not rely on KDE or GNOME. I tried to try XCDRoast with no success; and Graveman is unsuitable for audio [although it might be fine for data].

I've already mentioned the CD burning part of Traverso; the CD burning part of that was preceded by daoism. Although it's not been maintained for a few years, it remains a sensibly-designed application. It only accepts WAV at 44.1kHz but at least you can layout the tracks as you wish or put index markers in a long recording. It works perfectly as a simple tool. For burning data, there's icrave's recorder - again very simple but it works perfectly.

Audio playing
Bear in mind that I'm the sort of person that doesn't really like music collection managers. I use the audio player on my computer to listen to things. I expect it to play a CD and pretty much any file I throw at it without getting upset. As I rarely watch DVDs not having video isn't a problem, but having the option is nice.
Programs that seemed to be perfect from the description failed to load - Aqualung and GMerlin being troublesome on my system. I don't like any of the interfaces for MPlayer, so I stuck with VLC, which has a very clean interface in the Qt version. As long as you use the non-free version of FFMpeg, VLC will play anything, including AAC files. On my system Alsaplayer works more smoothly, but doesn't accept AAC files.

I tried to understand the concept of MPD but couldn't. Sometimes you just want to load things up and have them playing music WITHOUT configuring a server.

Format conversion
The best of show for me here is audio-convert-mod which now does bitrate resampling as well; so you can record at 96kHz/24-bit WAV and take it down to 44kHz/16bit MP3 if you wish. Its interface is clean and sensibly laid out, so doing single or batch conversions is a doddle.

Notation Editors
In this category there is only one: Musescore. To my mind, it's the most complete one by miles in a sea of really basic programs. If you want to copy Bach scores, then most editors will be fine. If you really want to do some creative work, then Musescore is your best bet.

That's about it. If there are any more audio programs with a GUI but no GNOME/KDE dependencies, let me know!

It took me ages to get this, and another discussion with mark-t on the IRC chat. Again, because I can't put this on the Fluxbox wiki [although there are signs this might be a menu option!] I'm sticking it here in the hope it helps someone out. In the apps file for Fluxbox you can control many variables. There's a pretty complete wiki page for this, but one of the things not fully explained is

[Deco] {NONE|NORMAL|TOOL|TINY|BORDER|TAB} Specify the decoration state. There are several predefined decoration sets:

• NORMAL - standard decorations
• NONE - no decorations
• BORDER - like NONE except keep the X window border
• TINY - titlebar with an iconify button
• TOOL - titlebar only
• TAB - like NONE except show external tabs only

A bitmask can also be used for fine-grained control. The bits are (from "1" to 1<<10): titlebar, handle/grips, border, iconify button, maximize button, close button, menu enabled, sticky button, shade button, tabbing enabled, focus enabled.

What's a bitmask? I kept asking. What does "1" to 1<<10 MEAN? What am I supposed to put? Each bit-property is given a value that's based on a power of 2 in ascending order: You pick the things you want and then add up the values. So if I wanted a titlebar with just a close button I'd do 1 + 32 = 33 and then enter [Deco] {33} in my apps file. Although I suspect it won't work if you've set where your titlebar buttons should be in a style... But as proof it DOES work, here's a picture of a terminal with just a border [exaggerated so you can see it: unfortunately I haven't found a way to set the border width per window]... and yes, I could have just used the keyword, but you just have to check these things sometimes.

Xterm is the simple commandline window that comes with most distibutions of Linux. Copying and pasting are not obvious, to say the least. Text just has to selected with the mouse to be copied; but that text goes somewhere called the primary buffer. From reading this, I suspect it's a standard. But it has to be said that I don't really understand it, and I'm not certain I should have to.

There are pages that will tell you how to change the behaviour so that your text goes to the clipboard: but these didn't work for me. So if they aren't working for you, here's another solution.

You'll need to edit your menu. I'm on Fluxbox, so I open up a text-editor and open up ~/.fluxbox/usermenu. I suspect you could use Alacarte or Kmenu for Gnome and KDE respectively.

Find the entry for xterm and replace what you have with

xterm -xrm 'XTerm*selectToClipboard: true'

So in Fluxbox the entry would be

[exec] (terminal) {xterm -xrm 'XTerm*selectToClipboard: true'}

Then save. When you open xterm and select text with a mouse, it goes to the clipboard. Where you thought it would go in the first place. You can still paste the text into another terminal with Shift+Insert: but you can paste into pretty much everything else with Ctrl+v.

I read the man page for xterm, which is how I thought of doing this. But the fact that I had to think about it, read the man page and then guess until it worked is quite frustrating.

UPDATE: I've JUST noticed that there's an RPM at http://www.rncbc.org/jack/ - install and you're away! That man's a genius.

When using audio on Linux, you have to be aware of the the realtime priorities of the system. And even though you may have edited the /etc/security/limits.conf file, the thread priorities of the sound card will not be set.

Rui Nuno Capela [creator of qjackctl and the excellent qtractor] wrote a script to help set the priorities of the most likely IRQs for your system. It didn't require any tweaking; however, when I first tried to use it there were no instructions as to how to apply it. SO...

1. Download the script from http://www.rncbc.org/jack/ (you'll need to head to the end of the page)
   
2. Extract the tar file. For this I used my file browser, PCManFM. No need for the terminal. Yet.
   
3. NOW open a terminal.
   
4. Become root by typing su and the root password.
   
5. Enter cd {path to rtirq script} - this takes you to where the script is.
   
6. Then cp rtirq.conf /etc/ - this copies rtirq's config file to /etc/
   
7. Then cp rtirq.sh /etc/init.d/rtirq - this copies rtirq.sh to the /etc/init.d/ folder, making it a system script. It then renames it as rtirq
   
8. Now enter insserv /etc/init.d/rtirq - this installs the script for the system on startup
   
9. Lastly, enter ln -s /etc/init.d/rtirq /sbin/rcrtirq -this turns the script into a command
   

Now when you enter rcrtirq you'll get

Usage /sbin/rcrtirq {[re]start|stop|reset|status}

You can only use the command as root unfortunately, but it doesn't matter because this script will now start when you switch your computer on - which means you don't have to think about it!