FreeBSD for audio production and productivity.

[sossego]

This howto is not going to be your standard tutorial with install this or that. It is open to all members of the community to add anything useful to it.

The equipment used was an i386 laptop with a 1.7 GHZ processor and 502 MB of available memory before graphics use. I installed Blackbox as the normal desktop and had KDE4 for use of K3b.

Okay, the fun part begins. What you will need to install:

• audio/mixxx
• multimedia/ffmpeg
• audio/lame
• audio/audacity
• audio/normalize
• audio/wavpack
• multimedia/schroedinger
• libtheroramultimedia/libtheora
• audio/lmms
• and whatever else is required

What this is used for: This is the first part of a multi-machine multi-architecture studio using FreeBSD as the base system. Although I did not mention it, you will also need some ripping software.

Why this project was started: A friend had unintentionally ruined his laptop. I had a spare and decided to build the system for him. He is a quick study and is able to navigate around FreeBSD with little to no trouble. Audio software and equipment is unreasonably expensive. This tutorial will make it easier for those who cannot afford such or do not have the time to assemble such.

For the reason that FreeBSD does not have support for all sound cards, you may need to build a kernel with sound commented out. OSS from Git is newer than what ports has to offer. Disabling checking of MD5/hash/DES sum for a newer version can be done but only do this if you are not afraid of doing some royal screwing up of your system.

Part 2 is being worked on with the following equipment:

• PowerMacG4 Quicksilver
• Soundblaster Audigy/Live (I need to look at the card)

The system is to be used and is used for DJ'ing, mixing, music concrete, and production.

All additions and comments are welcome. Remember this is a work in progress.

 

[freesbies]

You forgot Ardour :r (a perfect DAW for music recording and production)

 

[sossego]

Thank you so much. I did not realize that danfe was this involved in audio. Oh, man, that is so great.

 

[sossego]

Ardour3-3.3 has been built on 9.x and 10.x for i386.

On the microphone setup:
1. Use a shotgun microphone as the center piece. You will need to split the input with a stereo Y adapter that does not separate into left and right channels. Add a four way splitter- or you can create one- to attach four omnidirectional microphones.
2. You can also have the shotgun microphone plus a stereo split microphone working together.

 

[sossego]

http://code.google.com/p/freebsd-10-audio-i386/source/browse/

Okay. I do not have harvid or xjadeo built. My current system is limited when it comes to hardware. I will add more packages if they are not available from the normal repositories.

:e Yay!!

 

[scottro]

One thing I would mention: rather than multimedia/ffmpeg I would use multimedia/ffmpeg1. In my VERY limited testing, (some light re-encoding an AVI to use Libx264 and AAC), ffmpeg was noticeably slower than ffmpeg1, taking over six minutes to re-encode something that ffmpeg1 did in approximately a minute and 47 seconds.

 

[sossego]

I'm adding /usr/ports/audio/rosegarden and /usr/ports/audio/csound to the list of applications.

And the answer is, "No. I do not know how to do the href link because I am too nervous and high strung right now."

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=ladspa&stype=all&sektion=all LADSPA search query for plugins.

 

[sossego]

Currently working on http://traverso-daw.org/ as a port.

Wavpack is a dependency. The build is going slow.

Everything is being built on a laptop.

1. If your laptop does not have a MIDI input, you can use a set of splitters and a few reducers to connect the audio out.
2. Use a dedicated sound card if you are running from a pre-amp or an amp to the computer.
3. Only the sound emu20k2 driver will work on the newer Creative Labs cards with dedicated memory and CPUs. "OSS is not production ready." The problem is that one will need a machine with a lot of CPUs and RAM if the person wants a system to run constantly - or for a long time.

 

[numpad5]

Dont forget abcmidi, espeak, and stereo mix recording device (strange tee commands come in handy here). I've also had success streaming between different PCs in a cluster type setup with things like netcat/nc (in case you have really old hardware like 5x Pentium 2 machines or something).

 

[sossego]

There is PySynth http://home.arcor.de/mdoege/pysynth ; and, being that there is no port for it:

# mkdir $PATH/TO/PYTHON/PySynth
# cp PySyth/build/$VALUE.py $PySynth/PYTHON/PATH/
# mkdir /usr/local/lib/PySynth
# cp Pysynth/lib/* /usr/local/lib/PySynth/

If there is anything missing from the above, feel free to correct it.

 

[segfault]

Not sure if it suits your particular mission statement but audio/hydrogen may be of use to you. I've successfully used this in live performances before as well.

 

[sossego]

I'm trying to set[]up a system that has multiple options for suites and application types. It seems that a lot has to be ported to FreeBSD. A dual monitor setup with a jail plus separate audio card plus separate video card breaks with xinput creating a new pointer and not recognizing the mouse plugged into the laptops USB ports. This may mean I need to configure Synaptics in xorg.conf. The other goal is to turn a PowerPC based MacMini into a portable studio to work along with a laptop/netbook mixing/DJ setup.

 

[sossego]

svn checkout [url=http://freebsd-10-audio-i386.googlecode.com/svn/]http://freebsd-10-audio-i386.googlecode.com/svn/[/url] freebsd-10-audio-i386-read-only

This needed to be updated.