Category: Music

DeMuDi

DeMuDi is the Debian Music Distribution, and you can get an installable ISO of it from the Agnula Project.

It installed well on my Acer laptop, and yes, the sound setup was great out of the box, including recording.

Jack is installed and runs automagically on startup and there’s a widget to configure how applications interact with each other — all easy to use and graphical.

Every Linux audio app I’ve ever heard of and a number I haven’t are available precompiled. Alas, two of my favorite, Ardour and Freewheeling, proved rather crashy. I fear I may need more memory on that beast before it’s really happy.

But I had hella fun playing around with ZynAddSubFx, the most gorgeous software synth EVAR. Serious, you’ve got to believe me, it comes installed (at least on DeMuDi) with many dozens of fascinating sound presets, and it’s so damn rich you feel like you’re Rick Freaking Wakeman on his $10,000 synthesizer or something.

Oh, I plugged in my PC-300 USB piano keyboard and it autodetected it right out of the box.

I threw together this piece of nonsense by plunking around on the keyboard with one of the cool sounds. OK, the pitch bend in there sounds pretty stupid. I just wanted to try it, give me a break. :)

Anyway, the few crashy apps make the Baby Linus cry, but overall it’s the *best* experience I’ve ever had with Linux sound, ever ever ever ever. I was blown away. So much goodness… free… on a CD.

I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to play with Linux sound and who knows their way around Linux at least a bit. You may have to teach yourself a little Jack-fu, but it’s pretty easy to grasp.

Afterlife and Bongos

A couple really sketchy tracks laid down tonight with real instruments (mostly) — Afterlife Jam is a dubious attempt to play the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ “Hell” on my ukulele… it’s only got two chords but that was too much for me. I start rambling towards the end. I added a little reverb effect for fun.

Pipes and Bongos is an Apple Loop bongo track with three tracks of me playing a pennywhistle over it in a kind of meandering, random fashion.

I don’t disparage these things cause I don’t like them; if I hated them I wouldn’t put them out in public. I just don’t want anyone to download them expecting anything but me just dorking around. I mentioned to Kev today in instant messenger that maybe I’d lay down a track or two tonight, and I wanted to do so, so I did.

Alternatively, if you’d like to hear an amateur ukulelist who’s put some actual effort and discipline into his work, check out my man Clinton’s burgeoning West Palm Sessions, growing by the day.

Cog: Avast Ye Sound Files

Cog is a simple, to-the-point, just-works audio application that plays sound files in formats that are very cool but for which QuickTime support is flaky or lacking.

  • Ogg Vorbis
  • Mp3
  • Flac
  • Musepack
  • Wave/AIFF
  • Monkeys Audio

Very cool.

I had some Ogg files lying around and the only thing I had that would play them easily was VLC, and they sounded like crap in VLC for some reason.

I didn’t have anything that would play some of these other formats.

Rock.

Free Wheeling

Free Wheeling is a piece of software created by coder and musician J.P. Mercury specifically in order to help him compose music live in the fashion which works for him.

That is so cool I can barely stand it.

He’s got a couple songs on the project page, which I really like, and a link to a bunch of his music, creative-commons licensed and housed on Archive.org.

I am in awe.

Alas, I am not on board, cause I couldn’t get it to compile on OS X. It wanted “libfreetype6,” whatever that is.