woo, tangent » Linux

The Salamander Grand Piano, and LinuxSampler CVS

lsd — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:27:36 +0000

NOTE: The Salamander has been updated! The new V2 release adjusts a few things, and also comes in a much smaller 44.1Khz, 16-bit version. I’ve updated the link below with the new version — the smaller version is here.

After a bit of a wait, what’s perhaps the ultimate free piano sample library, the Salamander Grand Piano (that’s a direct download link, so don’t click it unless you mean it!) is available! One of the guys on the linux-audio-user spent I’d-hate-to-think-how-long recording every note on a Yamaha C5 grand at 16 different volume levels with a pair of stereo mics, and the result — all 1.9GB of it — sounds lovely.

Getting it running, however, is a bit fiddly right now. Due partly to its heft, it’s distributed in SFZ format, instead of the more common GigaSample “.GIG” format. Linuxsampler supports SFZ in CVS, but it’s buggy, and the instrument needs to be set up just right to load without crashing Linuxsampler. Once you’ve installed Linuxsampler from CVS — a bit of effort, but fairly straightforward, especially since it comes with Debian package scripts — follow these steps, in order, to get the Salamander up and running:

Launch Linuxsampler and the Fantasia GUI as usual — so far, so good!
Create a new sampler channel in the middle of the window. Click the “GIG engine” text in your new channel, and select the “SFZ engine” option
Set up your MIDI and audio devices on the right — I use ALSA for MIDI and JACK for audio, but you can use whatever you prefer here.
Click on the “OPTIONS” button on your sampler channel, and select your newly-created MIDI input and audio output. Your window should now look like this:
Click the “Load Instrument…” link on your sampler channel and load the “SalamanderGrandPiano.sfz” file

If you follow those steps in order, and cross your fingers, you should have a working Salamander Grand Piano setup! Once you have a working setup, make sure you export it to a file (Actions/Export/Sampler Configuration…); you’ll then be able to fire up your new piano next time by using that export (with the Actions/Run Script…) option.

linux synth tutorial: part 6

lsd — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 06:13:33 +0000

Another long one! In part 6, I jump from Xsynth to Specimen, a simple sampler, which is ideal for when you want to take a simple sound and quickly transform it in to a playable instrument. Specimen does much more than just playing samples, though — it can sculpt and shape them with envelopes, filters, and LFOs, just like you’d find in Xsynth.

Hi-res Ogg Theora version is here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!

linux synth tutorial: part 5

lsd — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:57:01 +0000

In part 5 of my Linux soft synth tutorial, I look at the concept of modulation — changing synth parameters over time. We saw an example of this in part 4, where we used an envelope to control the volume of a sound over time; modulation extends this to other parameters, such as the pitch of the oscillators and the filter cutoff. Modulation can use envelopes to change parameters over the length of the sound — in fact, there’s a second envelope in Xsynth-DSSI just for modulation — or the low frequency oscillator, or LFO, to perform repeating rhythmic changes.

Modulation can produce effects ranging from subtle vibrato through to sweeping soundscapes and alien sound effects. Either way, it’s a powerful way to breathe life and movement in to what might otherwise be a dull sound.

High-res Ogg Theora version is here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!

Due to the length of it all, the Youtube version is in two parts:

linux synth tutorial: part 4

lsd — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:49:51 +0000

In part 4 of my Linux soft synth tutorial, I look at Xsynth-DSSI’s amplifier section, and particularly the “envelope”, which defines how the volume of your sound changes over time. By tweaking the envelope, you can make your sounds fade in and out softly, hit hard and then slowly fade like a piano, or come on strong and then disappear just as quickly, like a xylophone.

High-res Ogg Theora version is here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!

linux synth tutorial: part 3

lsd — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:47:54 +0000

In part 3 of my Linux soft synth tutorial, I look at the next major component of the traditional analogue synth — the filter. The filter… uhh… filters the sound from the oscillators, typically cutting away at the high frequencies; the effects range from the subtle to the drastic, especially once you start tweaking that “resonance” parameter. In fact, analog synthesis is sometimes called “subtractive synthesis”, due to the way the filter cuts away parts of the sound.

High-res Ogg Theora version is here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!

linux synth tutorial: part 2

lsd — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:42:49 +0000

In part 2 of my Linux soft synth tutorial, I look at the oscillators in Xsynth-DSSI, the different kinds of sounds they can produce, and some of the ways they can be combined to create more interesting sounds. The oscillators create the raw synth sound, before it’s shaped by the filter and amplifier, so it’s more responsible than any other part of the synth for the general timbre of your sound.

Again, if you’re on Chrome or Firefox, or you just want to download it for later viewing, you can grab a high-res Ogg Theora version here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!

linux synth tutorial: part 1

lsd — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:01:37 +0000

I often talk to people in the open-source music community that want to learn more about sound synthesis, and this is my answer: a series of screen-cast tutorials on that very topic! In this first part, I look at the basic components of a traditional analogue synth, using Xsynth-DSSI as the example.

Linux has some powerful and interesting soft-synths, including PHASEX, Minicomputer, and of course ZynAddSubFX (and its fork Yoshimi). Why, then, am I talking about Xsynth-DSSI? There are a few reasons:

It’s simple — Xsynth-DSSI has a very straightforward design, so it’s easy to get to grips with its components and what they do. It’s also very easy to get your hands on the controls, since they’re all in one cleanly-arranged window.
It’s traditional — the design of Xsynth-DSSI is based heavily on classic 70s analog synths; the synths that shaped all that have some since. Most modern synths are just extensions on these same ideas, and even those that are radically different still borrow some components from the classics, so knowing your way around a traditional analog-style synth will stand you in very good stead when learning other synths.
It’s accessible — just about every distribution includes Xsynth-DSSI packages, and because it’s a DSSI plugin, it’s very easy to use inside DSSI-compatible sequencers like Rosegarden and Qtractor. If you’re not using a DSSI sequencer, you can use the “jack-dssi-host” tool to launch a stand-alone copy:

jack-dssi-host xsynth-dssi.so
It’s good! — despite its simplicity, Xsynth-DSSI is still capable of some great sounds. It’s also resource-light, so even an older PC won’t break a sweat hosting multiple instances of it.

So, without further ado, here’s the video, introducing the Xsynth-DSSI GUI and providing a quick overview of its basic components. NOTE: If you’re using Chrome or Firefox, there’s a high-res Ogg Theora video should work for you here.

crisis aversion

lsd — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:22:29 +0000

I run a RAID array in my home theatre PC to store all of the media I’ve managed to accumulate over the years, and running it as a RAID array has come in handy once again, since I lost a hard drive over the weekend. It was one of the two 500GB drives I’d carried over from my old array, so instead of picking up a new 500GB drive to replace it, I replaced them both with a (sub-$100) 1TB drive.

Compared to the last time I had a drive fail, this replacement was a snap; I just shut down, removed the 500GB drives, added the new drive, and booted up. Once the system was running, it took just another minute or two to partition the new drive and add it in to the array. Total downtime: no more than 10 minutes. I do love it when things work as advertised

songbird

lsd — Tue, 12 May 2009 05:45:56 +0000

Songbird is an interesting creation — the result of cross-breeding an iTunes-style music player with a modern web browser. It’s based on the Mozilla XULRunner platform (you can essentially read that as “it’s based on Firefox”), and that’s probably partly responsible for its lust for resources (while running, it likes to use ~30% of one CPU on my laptop), but you’d be surprised just how useful it can be to have the power of a web browser in your music player.

There’s perhaps no better example than the mashTape extension. It appears as a bar along the bottom of the Songbird window, and when you play a track, it automatically pulls in related information from all over the web: artist info and a discography from last.fm and Wikipedia, photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, reviews from Amazon… you get the idea. The LyricMaster extension pulls in lyrics in much the same way.

The other really neat example, which I only just discovered, is website streaming. Just like in Firefox, you can hit Ctrl-T in Songbird to open a browser tab, and while I wouldn’t use it for general browsing, it’s very handy if you have a page that’s full of links to MP3s. When you open such a page, Songbird detects the links and lists them in a playlist panel at the bottom of the window, where you can play them using the standard Songbird controls, or download them to your library with a click. It even fetches the tags from the files in the background, so while it only lists filenames at first, it soon fills in the full details.

As you’d expect, Songbird also has quite complete last.fm support — it’ll scrobble your tracks for you, and also give you access to your streaming radio. If you’re a music junkie, and you’re not wedded to your current player, Songbird is definitely worth a look.