Saturday, June 26, 2010

Vala & Gstreamer

Hey All,

Yesterday I took the plunge to try and learn Vala. That's
not too bad as its based on C#, which has syntax like Java / C++.

Its a language designed around the GObject system that the Gnome
platform employs, and hence is a great language to use for that kind
of application development.

GStreamer (or GnomeStreamer..?) is a multimedia library that follows
the GObject style, and incorperates well with Vala & the Gnome platform.

All in all this should allow for "write-once, run-everywhere" programming,
while the performance should stay approximatly as good as when coding in
native C, because Vala gets compiled to C, and then the C sources are run
trough your C compiler of choice.. (gcc).

Ill let you know once I have something useful coded.. -Harry

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Audio Experiences

Hey guys,

About time I actually posted what I'm working with. Its gonna be a long post, but it should provide an intresting piece, primarily because its all based on an Open Source Linux distro: Pure::Dyne.

So this is what me gear consists of:



 Two Tapco S8 monitors, provide a good flat response.
They're surprisingly loud for 120W RMS per side, and in a small room the bass will shake you.











 A Behringer B2092A subwoofer, 360 Watts RMS.. trough 2 8" backfacing cones in a semi-open design.. :-)





Driven by either the little
Phonic AM220 (left), or
the Soundcraft M12 (right).

Great thing about the M12 is it has direct-outs on each of the 12 channels. :-)






Witch are in turn fed signal by either the AudioFire 12, or the portable AudioFire 2.
Both do 24-96, but the AF12 goes right up to 192kHz...







The whole system is fed from an Acer TM 5720, which is a great laptop for Real Time work, as its got the firewire on the side, (Texas Instruments chip), and the Linux Kernel (2.6.x) recognizes it perfectly. This, teamed up with the FFADO firewire drivers for JACK, mean that there's a lot of audio possiblities around. :-)





On the "input" side, we've got the Akai LPD 8 midi controller (usb complaint), the Emu XBoard 61 (usb complaint too).



On the "fader side", there's a Frontier Design Alphatrack, which has support as an ALSA MIDI device trough a kernel module (bit of hassle, works well though).







The Software involved will be another post, But this is the hardware available to me at the moment.

Cheers, -Harry

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Tutorials!

Hey all,

After some recent activity on the Linux Audio Development mailing list,
I've decided to put all my Gtkmm Widgets, JACK MIDI examples etc into
repositories on Github.

Here's the links:
Gtkmm Custom Widgets
JACK MIDI Examples

Keep in mind that they're by no means "the professionals way to do it".
Also keep in mind that it does work on my machine here, any problems,
please report them back to me. :-)

Cheerio, till next, -Harry