More adventures in Linux and the audio studio

Having pondered the inevitable upgrade, to my production studio, from Debian old stable (Squeeze), to Debian stable (Wheezy). I finally bit the bullet. It wasn’t without apprehension, though. My system was absolutely rock solid, and did everything to spec. It was time though, and Gnome2 is no longer a developing desktop, so I also needed to make the transition to XFCE desktop, with the upgrade.

The upgrade itself went pretty smoothly, but the transition to XFCE was a little rocky, and took a few days to get working smoothly. Also, some of the configuration for Jack needed tweaking, as it stopped working properly, having gone from producing precisely zero xruns when in use, to frequent xruns, post upgrade.

Around the same time I have also been investigating the Non suite of audio applications (being a few years since I did, last.) and found them to be back under active development. Unfortunately Non is not packaged for Debian, so I compiled it on my day to day system, to see how it is, nowadays. Unfortunately I am getting plenty of xruns with non-mixer. I don’t know why, but I am. There are packages for KX Studio and AV Linux. I wasn’t to keen on KX Studio (An Ubuntu derivative), because it is built on KDE, which just doesn’t work well for me, in an AV production environment. AV Linux (Debian Derivative), though is built on the LXDE desktop, which is similar in practice, to use, as my preferred XFCE desktop. The downside of AV Linux though, is that it is built on old stable (Squeeze). Never the less, I installed AV Linux on a virtual machine, to see how Non worked when set up properly — not so well, on the VM; lots of xruns. I also wasn’t that impressed with having a system laced with commercial demo version software.

Next step was to investigate KX Studio a bit further, and it turns out they know support XFCE desktop version, though without a how to, for installation. But they do have instructions for converting Ubuntu to KX Studio. It seems the easyiest method was to use a KX Studio XFCE netinst, which is very minimal. So I started on another VM build. This proved much better than I was expecting, because it starts out as a very minimal XFCE set up, with some excellent KX Studio repositories, that really are plug and play. My initial experience with the Non suite in KX Studio is the same as in AV Linux, so I am guessing that it maybe an issue with trying it in a VM, which doesn’t allow me to tune Jack, with my external sound card. Which means I will probably do an XFCE KX Studio install, natively on my computer. As I do want to spend some time learning to use Non, which though simple in concept, to use (why I like it) is proving harder for me to grasp, than Ardour (my current DAW). Also I want to explore the use of Ambisonics in recording, which Non’s developer has obviously spent a bit of time doing (He has built Non with this capability). Given that most people listen to most of their music with headphones now, I think that some of the results of using Ambisonics would work well.

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