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I have a problem with Ubuntu Studio. There, I said it. I think that Ubuntu Studio is a wonderful distribution, packed with all the programs needed for my music composing hobby. But, there is a problem. Ubuntu Studio follows the same exact release schedule as Ubuntu, meaning, when there is a new version of Ubuntu, there is a new version of Ubuntu Studio. This means that if you want the latest software updates and latest programs, you must do a dist-upgrade every 6 months. Why is that? With an audio workstation, the last thing I want to worry about is wondering if my upgrades will take, that all my software upgrades flawlessly and that all of my data and projects will continue to work.

A workstation should not be subject to upgrades every 6 months. Each upgrade will force the user to run a risk of something not working properly. To give you an example, when 9.04 shipped, there was a bug in the real-time kernel that made the Ubuntu Studio maintainers not include the rt kernel. They recommended using 8.10 if you required the rt kernel. If you were using 8.10, you could do the upgrade to 9.04, but just keep on using the older rt kernel. Then, you would just have to wait until 9.10 comes out to get the updated rt kernel or compile it yourself. And this is just a problem with the kernel, let alone any number of the various other bugs introduced from doing a distribution upgrade.

If Ubuntu Studio wants to be thought of as a leading operating system for media creation, they should follow only the LTS releases of Ubuntu. This will make sure that the core of Ubuntu Studio will be secure and stable. The packages should then be offered in a rolling distribution fashion, meaning, instead of back porting only security and major bug fixes, just release the newer version. I honestly do not understand the difference of grabbing the latest source tar ball and packaging that or patching the older version and recompile that. Both will produce the same output, only difference is by patching, you can maintain the same version number.

If anything, I would suggest that Ubuntu Studio should treat their operating system maintenance in the same fashion as Suse by providing service packs that will update the core of the operating system, meanwhile the packages are constantly updated to stay current. When a new LTS comes out, treat that as a whole new version of the operating system.

I bring this up because I have Ubuntu Studio 9.04 installed on a second hard drive that was upgraded from 8.10. Now that 9.10 is released, the only reason why I would want to do the upgrade is to get the latest kernel, which I would have to recompile the ALSA modules anyway after installation. Why should I go through all of this work? I want to write music, not be an administrator of my workstation.

This was a problem I faced when I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu. It was not Ubuntu’s fault, but rather, it was my own fault. The problem came from when I tried to load my playlists into my audio player. Let me explain the problem and how it happened.

Originally, I had my music files located on a separate partition that was mounted in /home/sakuramboo/Media and from there I would access the Music directory. When I got my new 1TB hard drive, I copied all my music from /home/sakuramboo/Media/Music to /home/sakuramboo/Music and because of that, I would need to update the few playlists that I have. The good news is, there are not that many playlists that I had. If I wanted to, I could just use mocp to create the playlists just fine, but I felt like getting a little creative, plus, I wasn’t using the terminal in a while, so I figured I should give it a go. The command I use was a rather simple one liner.

cat playlist.m3u | sed 's/\/Media//g' > new_list.m3u

That is all there is to it. A brief idea on what’s going on. First, we cat the playlist file which just displays the contents of the file. With the pipe (|) we are passing that output to the next program which is sed. What we are doing in sed is, we are going to switch “/Media” with “” (nothing). The ‘g’ at the end just tells it to do it at every instance instead of just the first match. Then, the output of that goes to a new file called new_list.m3u.

Enjoy.