On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 12:42:06PM -0500, Przemek Klosowski wrote: > I was always impressed with the amount and quality of audio software in > Linux. When it all works, and is driven by someone who knows what they're > doing, it's essentially a high-end DAW production environment. If it all > worked smoothly, I am sure it could be one of Linux and Fedora showcases. > > I am a musical dilettante, so my attempts have been perhaps haphazard, but I > had a mixed luck: I was able to get everything to run, but the setup seemed > very brittle. I was not very successful debugging the problems because the > audio chain is pretty complex, what with the raw devices, ALSA, PulseAudio > and Jackd having overlapping roles, and lots of obsolete and conflicting > information on the web. I decided to write to the development list in the > hope of starting a technical discussion that would result in either > technical and/or configuration fixes, or at least some documentation, that I > could perhaps help develop. > > I have been using the following programs: > > play/aplay simple .wav players > espeak speech synthesizer > Qsynth/fluidsynth .midi players/synthesizers > audacity sound editor > pianobooster keyboard play-along teaching tool > Rosegarden w/lilypond music editor > Hydrogen drum synthesizer > Yoshimi synthesizer > rakarrack guitar effect processor > > As I said, I was able to use all of them successfully, but I had problems > integrating them and keeping them up and running in the long term. I wonder > if I am doing something wrong, or are there technical issues that I'm > running into, currently on Fedora 25 but also on previous versions. > > Obviously, out of the box, simple sound obviously works: I can aplay a .wav > file, espeak works, and some of the synthesizers like audacity and hydrogen > simply work without any preconditions. > Other audio programs require starting Qsynth first: that seems to be the > case for Rosegarden, Yoshimi and pianobooster. What is puzzling is that > there seems to be a lot of hidden state: after running Qsynth for a while, > the simple sound (aplay, espeak) tend to no longer work: they hang without > producing any sound, even though Qsynth is no longer running. I tried > stracing them, but they just go into nanosleep() busy loops on internal file > descriptors, so it's not clear what exactly they're blocking on. I ran into > one glitch where qsynth somehow inserted a .wav file as a soundfont in the > configuration file, which prevented it from working subsequently (I had to > delete the ~/.config/rncbc.org/Qsynth.conf file). > > I am planning to log some bugzilla reports, but I am not sure against what > subsystems: is it ALSA, or PulseAudio, or Gnome/pavucontrol, or Qsynth. > Specifically, I'd like to address the following issues: > > - simple sound (aplay, espeak) failing after running fancy synthesized sound > apps (Qsynth): I'd need guidance what to test to find the hidden state that > causes that. > > - fancy sound apps (Rosegarden/pianobooster) silently failing without the > synthesizer (Qsynth) running first. I'd like to discuss what could be done > to at least produce some error messages directing users to set up > synthesizers first, or maybe to automatically start the required > synthesizers. I thought most of those music apps required jack to run--are you running jack or not? If you are, then it's probably just the usual jack/pulseaudio conflicts. Which Fedora seems set up to fix, but for seem reason the fix doesn't work; I filed a bug here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1390043 Agreed that the Fedora music stuff seems very promising but a bit frustrating to get set up in practice. It'd be nice to get some of these problems sorted out. I'm an amateur musician more interested in live performance--I use my laptop as a sound module for organ/piano/synth sounds played from a midi controller keyboard. --b. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
