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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.

As an amateur DJ, I keep a rather large library of music on my computer. Some of the music I have, I downloaded from Jamendo.com. The rest of the music I have, I ripped from the CD. Doing so allows me to do other things as well, like for example, all of the CD’s I keep in my car are all backup, burned copies of what I ripped. Doing this let’s me treat (mistreat) the copies while keeping the originals in perfect condition. The question comes up, what format do I rip my CD’s to? The most common format is MP3, however, legally, I am forbidden from encoding to MP3 format. I could use something like LAME, but this is just a loophole that the LAME developers got around and with the RIAA and all major record labels trying to crack down on people who make copies of “their” music, I would want to stay as legal as I can. So, I encode all of my music into Ogg Vorbis.

There is another reason why I use Ogg Vorbis other than the legality issue. The biggest reason is, it is a better encoding format than MP3. The reason why MP3 is so popular is because it came out at just the right time and someone owns it, so the owners can do the same thing that Microsoft did in getting the majority to use their products, get companies to sign contracts and flood the market with their product. And as for quality, it is just as good, if not better than MP3 while maintaining relatively the same file size. It is a win/win situation for me.

Now, the program I use to rip all of my CD’s is Sound Juicer. Sound Juice sends a query to MusicBrainz for track listing, artist info and album name. All of that is needed because of my filing scheme I have set up (Artist – Album/Track). Sound Juicer also supports any encoding libraries I have installed. I can encode into MP3 (with LAME), FLAC, WAV or Ogg Vorbis. But, I recently came into a problem. For some reason, with the update of Ubuntu to 8.10, the default file extension for Ogg Vorbis that Sound Juicer uses got changed to .oga instead of .ogg. This is a major problem because most, if not all music players do not know .oga. For those who don’t know, .oga is used for audio only Ogg files (Ogg Vorbis). If I was encoding video, the extension would be .ogv (Ogg Theora). The .ogg is more of a wrapper in the same way that .avi is. However, nothing supports .oga. I found this out the hard way after already ripping a brand new CD. After this, I had two options, 1) Re-encode the CD or 2) Rename all of the files. The former would take some time, so I opted to do option two.

# for i in *.oga; do mv "$i" "${i/.oga}".ogg; done

That command changed all of the file names to *.ogg, the way it was supposed to. However, I do not want to have to do that every time I rip a CD. I then had to make sure that Sound Juicer knew to use .ogg for the file extension instead of .oga. After opening Sound Juicer, Edit -> Preferences -> (select CD Quality, Lossy (.oga type)) Edit Profile -> (select CD, Quality, Lossy) Edit, then change “File extention:” to “ogg” and close everything down. Now, Sound Juicer will use the .ogg file extension the way it is supposed to. The only problem is, I remember having to do this before. For some reason, when I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, the file extension got changed and I have a feeling that it is going to do this again when 9.04 comes out.

This has been a public service announcement.

Not everyone feels the same way about technology that I do. This is no surprise. Most people view technology as a convenience. They see it as a box that can record their TV shows, as a way to keep in touch with their friends and family or as an automatic headlight adjuster when they make a turn in their car. They see it as just something that will aid them in their daily life. To me, I see it as something much more. I see technology as a way to achieve exactly what it is I want to in life.

I am not really talking about my profession, but more of a way of life. When a normal person looks at new technology, they will usually react with “Ohh, that is cool.” or “Wow, that is pretty.” But when I look at technology, I will usually respond to it with “Wow, what ELSE can that do?” Of course, your average geek will respond in the same way, which is nothing really amazing. But, what I have a hard time understanding is just exactly WHY that is. Why aren’t people more passionate about technology? Is it because they fear that which they do not understand? Is it because they fear change? Is it because they just have apathy to new things?

Recently, I helped a friend install Ubuntu Linux on an old laptop of hers. The reason for this was because her laptop was just so beat down with malware that it would take 30 minutes for the laptop to completely power on. It would start Windows, but just sit there. Nothing could be “clicked” because it was just so slow. It got to the point where she really just needed it to work. I got a hold of her laptop and installed Ubuntu Linux for her. Now, she is just ecstatic at how fast her laptop really is. The entire operating system boots in a couple minutes and right away, she can browse the Internet, play a game of gaps or mahjongg or check her email.

Could I have just reinstalled Windows XP for her? Sure. Would it have been just as fast for her? Of course it would be. But now, 5 years down the road, it will still be just as fast for her as the day the gave it back to her. She is not the most technically inclined person, not even really as inclined as a casual user. She really only knew about Firefox and that was about it. And even then, she really only knew enough to get to her email and click on links. But, once I showed her the new interface, the new features and how secure it really is, she just loved it. But, do I expect her to become a kernel hacker? Not at all, I just wanted to give her something so she would not have to worry about her computer getting back to the state that it once was.

That is a really good example at what I mean. I looked at her laptop and thought to myself “What can I do with this that would really help her out?” I weighed all my options and decided that Linux really was the best way to go. But, the point is, I did something with her laptop that the manufacturer would not advise, in fact would be so strong against that her warranty, if she still had one, would have become void. And all for what? To get her laptop working again at peek performance. Does that seem fare to her? Does that seem fare to the other hackers out there that just want to get their computers, cell phones, PDAs to work how they want it to? Why must those wanting to extend the functionality of their hardware be penalized for their desires?

Another example of this is the very well known portable media firmware Rockbox. I own two iPods, a fourth generate grayscale 20 GB and a fourth generation iPod photo 30 GB. Both of which has Rockbox installed. Many people ask me “Why did I put Rockbox on it?” There are a few reason for this.

1) I want my audio player to support audio formats that the original iPod does not.
2) I can’t run iTunes.
3) I want functionality that I could not get from the stock iPod firmware.

The elaborate on these a little more. Mp3 has become the standard when it comes to audio on the computer. This has me scratching my head sometimes because out of all the codecs out there, mp3 is not the best, both in terms of quality and legal issues. A better format is Ogg Vorbis. Ogg has a much better quality sound while maintaining a small file size, so much so that most people wouldn’t even notice. And Ogg Vorbis is also free, as in free beer and free speech. I am not bound by any laws if I wanted to encode audio into ogg format. The same can not really be said about mp3.

I do not have the option to run iTunes. I could use something like GTKPod to create the playlists and to put music on the iPod, but I am still subject to the way Apple decides whats best for me. And let’s be real here, they have no clue what is best for me, they only know what is best for their business.

The iPod Photo was only designed to support color on the display. The photo feature was really just something to add to it to make people go “Ooooh, ahhhhh.” But, with Rockbox, there is added functionality. One of which is that I have the ability to view videos on my iPod. This was something that was introduced many years later on the iPod Video. But, now, with Rockbox, I can do this with an iPod that was never really meant to be able to play video. I can even play the original Doom on my iPod if I wanted to (and I have).

So, the moral of this story is, do you want to be just a consumer or do you want to be a ruler? The choice is yours.

I have been creating music for years, since high school, actually, and have been playing music since grade school. I have always had a deep love for music. However, I was only used to Windows and only knew of the programs for Windows and by the time I got into college, MacOS. After college, I started to get into GNU/Linux pretty heavily. And now that I have installed GNU/Linux on every computer I own, I didn’t want to give up on my music, so I started to research the programs available for writing music in GNU/Linux.

Now, before I continue, I do need to make it quite clear that I have no qualms with paying for software. Just because I choose to use GNU/Linux does not make me a FOSS zealot. If I find a great piece of software for GNU/Linux but comes at a price, I would gladly pay for it. It is the operating system that I choose not to pay for (and I am not a pirate, so stealing it is out of the question).

This post is not going to be an explanation to the different distributions and software out there, but more so to the problems that I have faced. More importantly, one major problem…

When dealing with audio, the one thing that is needed is low latency. This is mandatory if you wish to achieve anything decent. The best way to get a low latency is with a real time kernel. Of course, rt-kernel exists just for this sole purpose. But, just because there is a real time kernel does not mean that now they can add additional audio layers to the system. The added layer I am talking about is, of course, Pulseaudio.

Pulseaudio is a pretty cool audio sublayer, allowing the user to control the volume of each application, independently of the master volume as well as letting the user manipulate the audio across multiple sound cards, making things like 8.1 surround sound possible with just 2 sound cards or making the audio of one program come out of the head phones while the audio of another program come out of the main speakers. But the biggest reason for Pulseaudio is for its ability to allow older, cheaper sound cards handle multiple audio streams at the same time.

Back in the day, any program that produced sound would take complete control over the sound card and in doing so, making other programs become muted. This was mainly do to shitty drivers or shitty chipset architecture. Pulseaudio would fix this issue. But is it really needed for a music production workstation? I think not.

Anyone who is at all the least bit serious about music production would have enough common sense to invest in hardware that would give them the best quality audio and the best quality hardware that is available is not plagued by crappy driver or poor chipsets and indeed allow for multiple audio streams. So why is Pulseaudio being included in distributions like Ubuntu Studio?

I know that the Pulseaudio fan boys will sit here and try to tell me that a properly configured Pulseaudio implementation will not produce any serious lag and they are right, it won’t. But Pulseaudio is still beta software and is NEVER properly configured out of the box. This will produce latency that is unbearable to the human ear. And even when it IS properly configured, there is still some lag, it just isn’t “serious”. But, when I am sitting here with Jackd, Ardour, Hydrogen, 3 or 4 instances of ZynAddSubFX, Seq24, Audacity, TerminatorX and Mixxx running at the same time, latency means everything to me. The last thing I need is any added latency brought about by some beta, experimental audio sublayer.

Ubuntu Studio devs, take the advice from 64 Studio and remove Pulseaudio, or at least detach it from UbuntuStudio-Desktop.