This site is dedicated to setting up and using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with Jack Audio Connection Kit and Rivendell Radio Automation in a KVM virtual machine for radio broadcasting purposes.
The initial configurations will be for the latest (As of October 2019) Ubuntu Long Term Support version 18.04.x distribution. Ubuntu is a Debian derivative of the Linux operating system. Ubuntu is available in regular Desktop, Server, Studio, and a number of other flavors that have been configured for special purposes and tastes. This site originally focused on Ubuntu-Studio designed for media content development and presentation. Ubuntu-Studio comes with the stripped down presentation manager Xfce that provides a much snappier and lower resource consuming user interface than the regular Ubuntu Unity interface. in 2018 Ubuntu with version 17 decided to scrap Unity and use the robust Gnome3 interface, taking away much of the Ubuntu-Studio benefit. The Linux generic kernel latency performance also dramatically improved, decreasing the advantage of the Ubuntu-Studio low latency kernel.
Ubuntu now has a painless installation route for the wonderful Jack Audio Connection Kit through the KXStudio repository and its Cadence application. With Jack you can connect up the audio (and midi) ports of all your applications as you need – your media player can be connected to an audio processor, a silence sensor, and some EBU level meters, with the audio processor’s output going to a master mixer and an icecast streaming client, for example. Zita-NJbridge can be used to connect computers together on a LAN to share resources.
There are tools for managing Jack in KXStudio which make life so much better than the standard tools that you would be foolish to skip the Jack tools Cadence, Catia and Claudia.
We will also use the open source Radio Station Automation system, Rivendell. It will be configured and set up for running a complete radio station. Unfortunately, it has many hooks into libraries in Centos7 operating system, that it does not like working in a Ubuntu environment. We will run Rivendell in a KVM virtual machine with a Centos7 os as guest in the Ubuntu host. Many of the wonderful jack utilities and applications have not been packaged for Centos.
There are a plethora of websites that have helpful hints on making these systems work together. A lot of the hints are out of date and some are just plain incorrect. I will try to keep you on track by detailing the ways that the new versions of this software actually play together, and how I have found to avoid pitfalls (after falling into them!).
Ubuntu Audio, Jack and Rivendell site
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8 Comments
Pedro
December 30, 2019 at 10:12 amNice, I’ve been about one year after that and I finally didn’t succeed.
Thanks!
Vincent Simpson
January 24, 2020 at 6:12 amHey ted !
Just a note to say that Rivendell works fine on Ubuntu… if you need more info, contact me. There’s a maintained deb repo maintained by the french rivendell google group. I’ve cooked up tutos (in French, but can easily translate to english) to get Rivendell to run on ubuntu… (standalone setup, or server & clients) . I too use ubuntu studio 🙂
TedS
January 28, 2020 at 4:43 pmHi Vincent
I know that Rivendell had been running on Ubuntu14.04 and perhaps on 16.04, however there were just so many things (QT3 vs QT5) and various libraries and networking issues. I went round and round without luck, so I finally took Fred Gleason’s advice and went with Centos 7. The tryphon.eu site was gone for some time, but there is a stub now.
Could you post a link to the site? S’il vous plaît
Ted
Vincent
January 29, 2020 at 3:39 amHey Ted !
The French Rivendell group : https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!forum/rivendell-fr
My personal tutorials (in French) :
Server Setup : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NlyzS8HJM32XZXu8plP3_Aafx60L5BlgQRcCyk_u-H4
Client Setup : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zXRzGsnCZEkZdxdh5KLMooFANfFpqXbMuKs5YsMCK6Q
Standalone Setup : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JTQ0V7wxCqD0R0j0EbHJBS9D7ZnrQ0OPENA7zb_sDjU
Please be careful, thes docs are in update process and are editable (mostly for corrections in French…)
Vincent Simpson
January 29, 2020 at 3:45 amIn my tutorials, you’ll find the repo… just follow the commands…
I tried to post the install commands for a fresh install here, but cannot post those commands here … your site’s security doesn’t allow me to pass on linux commands… You’ll have to go peek in my docs.
It’s all relatively straightforward.
🙂
Vincent Simpson
January 29, 2020 at 4:00 amHeck, I just did a google translate on the standalone setup so you can give it a shot :
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B1SvZCsnpQMjzRSYWWu6NFkKBcSIVK5JY1suow2UZQY/edit?usp=sharing
My Server & Client tutorials have more info in them… you can just use google translate, it becomes more or less understandable…)
TedS
September 28, 2020 at 11:50 pmHi Vincent
I finally got around to checking apt-rec.rivendell-fr.org for the rivendell on Ubuntu repository, and it appears to have been moved.
Do you have an updated address.
Also, has a new installation been worked out for 20.04?
Thanks
Ted
Vincent Simpson
December 2, 2022 at 5:35 amHi Ted !
First, to give a quick answer concerning Rivendell 3, thry this :
wget -q -O – https://install.rivendell-fr.org/bionic | sudo bash
Straight out of the box installer on a clean system, works great ! 🙂
I’m actually doing a test of Rivendell 4.0.0rc0 on Ubuntu 22.04.
My setup is going to temporarily replace the actual stations Rivendell 3 pending maintenance.
However, this setup is kinda special, being that I need to take down the server as well as the Airplay workstation and the Log creation/ sound adding client workstation .
One of the main problems I’ve had with the actual setup is that NFS fails after a couple days and we need to reboot everyone to get everything back up. (Original setup is Server w/ DB & sounds, 1 client for RDAirplay and 1 client for audio work & log planning… so a data failure via network is a bad deal)
This leads me to believe that the best solution is that the PC running RDAirplay should also have the DB and sounds on it. I needed to do a RAID setup on the hard-disks to ensure (hopefully) not losing data.
The second PC, would be client to manage logs, edit audio & whatnot. And being that I don’t have a spare server at my disposal, I’ll also use this 2nd PC to do FTP, samba sharing (to be able to put sound from the production studio’s Windows PC). So this PC got soft-raid too.
Finally, one last imperative was to have all the installation controllable off site. So a VNC solution was also needed. This is due to a a massive storm that hit our region and the studio is crippled at the moment (roof & ceiling fell thru!) so we’re doing lots of work from home. and the roof is covered w/ tarp & awaiting fixup…
With all these parameters in mind, here’s the setup I’m cooking up.
Being that I need soft-raid on my machines, I decided to go for the Ubuntu 22.04 server minimal install which is the only install that allows raid setup of disks at installation time out of the box. (I did succeed to do a raid setup on a Ubuntustudio, but it’s awkward and I finally opted for a clean minimal install & build up from scratch)
I’ve jotted down all the steps to get Rivendell4 up & running AS I WANT it to (and I’ll make a clean readable document shortly, to share), and not being user ‘rd’ used in the tuto : https://software.paravelsystems.com/howtos/ubuntu/jammy/
This tutorial works, but having 2 machines with same name wreaks havoc when not exactly the same machines are used. Sound card frequencies aren’t all equivalent and I had strange sound behavior with this tuto on a 2 machine setup. But it is great for a standalone setup. So I set out to do my own… and it works.
I’m now at the crossroad of getting Rivendell to work with Jack, something I’ve never been able to achieve, and of course I have to do full Jack installation, which just might be ‘fun’. 😉
I’ll keep you posted on my advances.