Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Interview with Unbuntu Studio Project Manager
Over at Oktyabr's notepad, there's an interview with Cory Kontros about Ubuntu Studio. Check it out here!
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Impressions: Studio 64
Lately, I have been using the Studio 64 Distro for making music on my aging Athlon XP 1900+ based system. Here are some quick impressions:
This distribution uses the Gnome Windows manager, which is clean and efficient. There are not a lot of excess packages here, but the basics are well covered, including internet, office apps, etc. The included music packages are solid, if slightly limited. The essentials are here: JACK, Ardour, Hydrogen and Zynaddsubfx. They all work perfectly out of the box. I've had a lot of good recording sessions in Ardour.
While the limited number of music programs might be slightly frustrating, installing new ones are only a few clicks away. This is a solid, friendly and stable music production environment. The installer is an older text based one, and is not especially friendly, but works well. The advantage of having the packages compiled for either 32 bit or 64 bit systems is a big one though, and if you run a 64 bit system, the optimizations might make this distro worthwhile. Not that it isn't already. I highly recommend it.
Updates: Jacklab Distro Released
From Distrowatch.com:
JackLab Audio Distribution is a new Linux project based on openSUSE and featuring a real-time kernel, Jack Audio Connection Kit and the Enlightenment desktop. The first public alpha build was released earlier today: "The JackLab Team is proud to present the first public alpha release of the JackLab Audio Distribution (JAD). JAD is fully compatible with the recently released openSUSE 10.2. It contains a full production environment for media production, primarily music. For this, the JackLab team added a real-time kernel version 2.6.19 to have fast audio processing with a latency up to 1.5ms. The default audio system is based on the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) which is designed for the needs of musicians and producers and gives a professional audio/midi controlling interface." Visit the project's home page to read the full release announcement.
Also, Create Digital Music has an update on Ubuntu Studio. More updates on the Jacklab Alpha as I get to try it.
