I try to learn the amazing wealth of Linux tools for musicians and digital-audio recording a little at a time. The last couple days I've dug into the Hydrogen drum sequencer and, finally, the imposing and daunting Ardour. Anyway, here is a rough draft of one of my pieces (I'm a musician, not an accomplished mixer/masterer): http://www.xscd.com/pub/music/ogg/lonesome_butte.ogg The drums are pure Hydrogen, using its default drum kit. All digital-recording was done in Ardour and the session was exported to .wav file, then encoded to OGG using oggenc. Hydrogen -------- I was nervous about trying to create a believable drum part using a sequencer. I'm not a drummer and I felt it would sound very mechanical and awkward. However, Hydrogen's "human feel" time smear and velocity variation in the FX section of the mixer helps a lot. Ardour ------ I had put off learning anything about Ardour for a long time. I was scared of its seeming complexity. However, by concentrating at first on just the features that I needed to understand in order to record something, it wasn't as hard as I thought. It will take time to learn the program well though. Anyway, it sure is fun playing with these and other programs. I'm very impressed with all the great audio-oriented stuff available to Linux users and very grateful to the developers who create the tools. Steve D New Mexico US -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- A computer without a Microsoft Operating System is like a dog without bricks tied to its head. ----------------------------------------------------------------
