Month: August 2015

August 11, 2015
TedS
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Ubuntu-Studio vs DreamStudio

Category : Audio Workstation DreamStudio Installation Jack Software Ubuntu Studio

Update 2021

Dick MacInnes has let Dreamstudio drift into obsurity. For a while he went from distro to package, but he has moved on to other things. Thanks for Dreamstudio while it lasted. At version 20.04, the decision is whether to use UbuntuStudio or Desktop Ubuntu with the UbuntuStudio Installer is one of whether you like the low overhead XFce desktop or the pretty Gnome 3.

Update 9/2019

It appears that Dick MacInnes did another pass on Dreamstudio in 2017 titled Volocian Dreamstudio based upon Ubuntu 17.04, and it has not been updated in two years.

update! 3/2016

DreamStudio is no longer a complete distro. It is now a package of applications available for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu and KXStudio.

It was last updated several years ago and was available on Sourceforge. Dick MacInnes has let his domain names Celeum.com and dreamstudio.com expire. I hope Dick is doing ok, with his, and his wife’s health issues.

Ubuntu-Studio is a very cool Linux distribution for folks who want to do audio, video, graphics, animation or other media production using open source software. It uses a very utilitarian XFCE user interface. This has the advantage of simplicity and lightweight overhead on processor chips, leaving muscle for DSP processes. Ubuntu-Studio is a derivative of Ubuntu, a distribution for regular computing based upon Debian, but much more user friendly. Ubuntu-Studio is dependent only upon software with the same open source licenses that are available to regular Ubuntu. As a result there are a bunch of programs, many of which are free, but not sufficiently liberally licensed, that are not natively included in the distribution, such as an .mp3 codec. Many of these can be easily added, but are not available in the distribution itself

Ubuntu-Studio has the advantage of a large user base. Its release schedule is synchronized with its bigger brother Ubuntu.

DreamStudio from Celeum Technologies is a gorgeous media suite also based on Ubuntu, but it uses regular Ubuntu’s Unity user interface, which diehard Ubuntu users complain about, but once you learn the basics is incredibly intuitive, helping to get work done.

Dreamstudio was a complete operating system distribution or “distro”. which you would install on a blank machine or set up as a dual boot. The last version was based upon ubuntu 12.04LTS, which is quite old. The new version is a suite of programs that you overlay on a regular Ubuntu installation. This makes some sense, as the low latency kernel is now standard in Ubuntu 14.04 and later, so there is no need to dicker with replacing the kernel.

I have not tried the new suite yet, and will try this out when I have another machine to set up. There are applications in the suite that can be complicated to set up properly, and I am sure that it will be a lot easier to get them all playing together using DreamStudio than trying to install them one by one. I am not sure what happens when you install DreamStudio on UbuntuStudio instead of Regular Ubuntu.

Celeum Technologies is a tiny company in Saskatchewan, Canada run by musician/technical guru Dick MacInnes. DreamStudio has no open source rules, as does Ubuntu Studio including best of the pack open source, commercial and free or limited license software where it makes for a better workstation.

DreamStudio is not updated as often as Ubuntu and is intended to be installed on Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) releases. Sometimes the releases are delayed a bit from the Ubuntu LTS release. This is because DreamStudio is a labor of love for Dick, and he works on it among other demands on his time (performance, family, running a small business). The craft he does during the long Saskatchewan winter nights may very well be worth it if you need the additional features and pretty interface.

The audio workstations in Ubuntu-Studio includes Audacity, a fine basic audio editor without the fine graphic control of levels in other editors, and ease of time dragging program elements. Ardour, a full featured recording editor is also included. Many people are afraid of Ardour because it won’t work until set up with jack2. Fortunately, both Ubuntu-Studio and DreamStudio have it already set up, so those headaches are gone. It is still complex and powerful in the same class as Pro-Tools.

DreamStudio also comes with a demo version (upgradable to full version for $80) of Harrison MixBus 3 DAW that has full professional analog simulation with everything that a recording studio would want. (You need a high quality multi-channel audio card to use it to full effect) This is a SERIOUS audio editor which does not support compressed audio file formats, so have a big hard disk. DreamStudio also comes with a host of professional video, animation, 2d and 3d graphics, film post edit, web design and other tools. The list is amazing, and most are free, and the rest are affordably priced like MixBus 3 and Lightworks NLE award winning video editor.

If your plan is to do a Rivendell – Jack installation for a radio station and Ardour (or Audacity) is suitable for your needs, Ubuntu Studio is the obvious choice. If you are doing a wide range of multimedia creations, then DreamStudio is your dream.

TedS
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Jack2 Audio Connection Kit

Category : ALSA Configuration Jack Server Software Uncategorized

Jack2 is the connector for audio within and between computers. It connects your audio soundcard to the guts of your computer using a simple to visualize jackfield, where you connect audio paths from one output to any number of inputs. You can also connect several computers’ audio together over ethernet! It is available for Linux (Ubuntu Studio), MacOS, and Windows! It does not know multi-channel audio natively, so you have to hook up the left and the right ‘cables’ independently.

My first exposure to Jack was back in Ubuntu 10.04 where I installed it manually in a system that had ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) and an early version of Pulseaudio installed. It drove me crazy, no audio or audio that had dropouts. Dozens of settings poorly documented. AARRRRGH!

9/2019 Update: Ubuntu 18.04 runs jacks quite nicely without problem when set up by KXStudio (See Article)

No longer! Ubuntu Studio comes with Jack2 already installed so all that grief is mostly behind you. Many web sources tell you to get rid of Pulseaudio, but the case is not so compelling as it once was, but if low latency or several sound cards are in your plan, dump it. Check out my article “Use Pulseaudio with Jack Audio Connection Kit?”

You should have your final soundcard(s) installed when you install Ubuntu-Studio so that it can pick up the cards automatically. Jack comes with a little utility called qjackctl that lets you set all the necessary configuration that lets you correct much of what might not work right away. KXStudio cadence application (See below) is much prettier, and shows status in a much more easy to understand way and hooks up plugins and other features that I didn’t figure out Cadence’s tools are more robust than qjackctl, although it has no internal provision for saving patches in a patchbay. No audio can usually be fixed with a command line utility called alsamixer because some sound card drivers set the volume to “0” not “11”.

There are packages from a site called KXStudio that make using Jack2 on Linux beautiful. If you dive into KXStudio, you will not need most of the Jack2 utilities like Patchage, qjackctl, etc. I will have a script on this site soon that automates installing all these Uber Cool features.

Once you can hook up an audio editor like Audacity to the audio outputs and connect a parametric equalizer to the microphone inputs and the equalizer to Audacity inputs, along a Jack meterbridge or spectrum analyzer you can see the power of this system. Jack can hook up Lapsda and .vst plugins for a multitude of effects.

NetJack is a way to hook up several computers’ audio together via ethernet with one master computer connecting to another, or several others. This can work over a typical quiet office network, but the NetJack audio should be on its own network with no competing uses of the bandwidth. If there is too much audio flying around even a 1 GB network can get overloaded.

There are more convenient and higher fidelity options than NetJack, Such as Zita-NJBridge the included zita-j2n and zita-n2j open audio ports to other jack instances on other networked computers.

So, the possibility of shipping audio around between workstations and a server is pretty easy, getting rid of lots of conventional cabling, and removing hundreds or thousands of places where the audio can get degraded.

One of the trickiest parts of Jack2 is making persistent setups and patchbay configurations that can automatically re-appear upon reboot or relogin, and understanding the relationships between applications started by different users and different sessions. There is no standard command line tags for jack naming, and automatic jack connecting. Auto-connecting a program’s output generally takes the form of

-<port tag> Jack_Device_name:Jack_port_name

On some programs the Jack_Port_Name can be a regex, sometimes a complete name, or sometimes a port name less the variable part. You have to play with the program to figure it out.

RadioTed

Month: August 2015

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Ubuntu-Studio vs DreamStudio

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Jack2 Audio Connection Kit

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