On Thursday 16 November 2006 18:47, Brad Fuller wrote: > Nigel Henry wrote: > > On Thursday 16 November 2006 16:28, Brad Fuller wrote: > >> anyone use Ubuntu? > > > > Yes. At least Kubuntu. On my 2 machines, that's along with FC1,2,3,4, > > and 5, Slackware 10.0, Debian Sarge, Debian Etch, and last but not least > > Gentoo. > > Which one(s) do you prefer for audio work? In many ways I'm not suitably qualified to answer this. I started off in computers, being quite old in 2003 with Win 98, then XP. Got some some music apps, mainly demos, as I wanted to try making music. I bought a licence for Making Waves (a step sequencer) which I've had a lot of fun with. The same year (2003) I ventured into Linux with an FC1 cover disk from Linux Format mag. I couldn't get any sounds out of it, until a short time later I found a link to planetccrma. I suppose I've become a bit biased, as there were many music apps available from planetccrma. As I've said I wanted to make music, but seem to have been distracted by wanting to try different disros, and over the last 3 years have spent more time trying them than making any music, apart from a couple of uploads of demos to the Gungirl site. Regarding Slackware, I don't know what the present situation is for music apps from a repo. Since Luke Yelavich found that he could no longer continue the audioslack site, and I did see that someone else was willing to continue with it, but havn't had Slackware booted up for a while, so don't know where this stands at the moment, but of course there's no problem installing the source files for music apps on Slackware. I looked on the link that was posted for Gentoo's proaudio thisafternoon, and there appear to be many music apps available for Gentoo. Mark Knecht used to use Fedora, and planetccrma, but has moved on to using Gentoo, and seems to very happy with the music apps provided , and that you don't have to keep upgrading the distro to a newer version, as you have to with others. Debian has loads of music apps available from the repos, and I've just done some updates on Kubuntu, then looked on synaptic for music apps. There don't seem to be as many music apps available on "Multimedia (universe)" as there are on planetccrma, but you can always install the music apps you want from the source files. Even on FC there are music apps that arn't available from planetccrma. I think of Mhwaveedit, https://gna.org/projects/mhwaveedit/ . To build it you need to have libsamplerate-devel, and libsndfile-devel installed, and to playback .mp3's you need to have lame installed, which is obtainable from Dag's repo or others. As to your question as to which distro do you prefer for music apps. I just think that this is a bit of a personal preference. If you can produce music on the distro of your choice, and it sounds ok, then that is ok with me. I suppose the only complaint that I, personally have, is that we only have only one real synth (ZynAddSubFx) provided by Paul Nasca. There are modular synths, but perhaps not so easy to work with. Looking back at Windows, there are loads of synths available. and yes, I know you have to pay for them. I only have the demos on my XP install, but there are so many synths with different sounds. It would be so nice if someone could write us another synth, different to ZynAddSubFx, but not in competition with it. Just another synth, with different sounds. Just my 2¢ worth. Take it as you will. Nigel.
