The Linux Experiment

So I decided to take a go at Ubuntu 11.04 in a virtual machine before taking the leap and installing it for real. As I understand it, the new Unity desktop is a pretty major departure from the Gnome 2.x desktop that I’m used to, and I want to see if it’s as bad as it looks in the screenshots.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to make it to the desktop, as Ubuntu has decided that it will take 42 minutes to download some language packs that I neither want or need.

Didn’t I tell it what language I speak as the first step of the install process? Surely this can be done later.

Recently, Tyler linked me to Linux Multimedia Studio, a Fruityloops-type application for Linux. Since I’m big into music recording and production, he figured that I’d be interested in trying it out, and he was right. Unfortunately, the developers of same were not as interested.

To start off, I installed the application from a PPA with the following terminal commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:dns/sound
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install lmms

After the install process finished, I tried to launch the application from the command line, only to see a bunch of nasty error messages:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT:~$ sudo lmms
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
Segmentation fault

I dumped the errors into Google, and found a helpful thread on the Ubuntu forums that suggested that I uninstall Bluetooth Audio Services from my machine. Since I don’t use bluetooth audio in any capacity, I happily obliged. When finished, my list of installed items with Bluetooth in the name looked like this:

Unfortunately, I didn't think ahead enough to note down the names of the packages that I uninstalled.

After ridding myself of Bluetooth audio support, I tried to launch the application again. Unfortunately, I got another Segmentation fault error:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT:~$ sudo lmms
Segmentation fault

Reading on in the thread, I saw somebody suggest that I check the dmesg tail for messages pertaining to the crash:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT:~$ dmesg | tail
[  233.302221] JFS: nTxBlock = 8192, nTxLock = 65536
[  233.314247] NTFS driver 2.1.29 [Flags: R/O MODULE].
[  233.343361] QNX4 filesystem 0.2.3 registered.
[  233.367738] Btrfs loaded
[ 2233.118020] __ratelimit: 33 callbacks suppressed
[ 2233.118026] lmms[10706]: segfault at 7f241c7fdd80 ip 00007f241c7fdd80 sp 00007f24187f8a38 error 14 in zm1_1428.so[7f241ca01000+1000]
[ 2523.015245] lmms[10808]: segfault at 7fd80e9bcd80 ip 00007fd80e9bcd80 sp 00007fd80a9b7a38 error 14 in zm1_1428.so[7fd80ebc0000+1000]
[ 2671.323363] lmms[10845]: segfault at 7fbe39a77d80 ip 00007fbe39a77d80 sp 00007fbe35a72a38 error 14 in zm1_1428.so[7fbe39c7b000+1000]
[ 2836.885480] lmms[11246]: segfault at 7f885b71ed80 ip 00007f885b71ed80 sp 00007f8857719a38 error 14 in zm1_1428.so[7f885b922000+1000]
[ 3039.773287] lmms[11413]: segfault at 7ff83056ed80 ip 00007ff83056ed80 sp 00007ff82c569a38 error 14 in zm1_1428.so[7ff830772000+1000]

On the last few lines, you can see that the error was thrown in a module called zml_1428.so. A bit of Googling turned up the fact that this module is a part of the LADSPA (Linux Audio Developers Simple Plugin API) stack, which provides developers with a standard, cross-platform API for dealing with audio filters and effects.

Scrolling down in the aforementioned thread, I found a post that suggested that I kill all PulseAudio activities on my system before attempting to run the application. PulseAudio is another part of the Linux audio layer that allows user-land applications to talk to your sound hardware via a simple API. It also provides some effects plugins and mixdown capabilities. I went ahead and killed the PulseAudio server on my machine with the following command:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT:~$ killall pulseaudio

After executing this command, I still got a Segmentation fault when starting LMMS under my user account, but did actually get to a Settings panel when running it with Sudo:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT:~$ sudo lmms
Home directory /home/jfritz not ours.
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1010:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Playback open error: Device or resource busy
Expression 'snd_pcm_hw_params_set_buffer_size_near( self->pcm, hwParams, &bufSz )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 1331
Expression 'PaAlsaStreamComponent_FinishConfigure( &self->playback, hwParamsPlayback, outParams, self->primeBuffers, realSr, outputLatency )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 1889
Expression 'PaAlsaStream_Configure( stream, inputParameters, outputParameters, sampleRate, framesPerBuffer, &inputLatency, &outputLatency, &hostBufferSizeMode )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 1994
Couldn't open PortAudio: Unanticipated host error
Home directory /home/jfritz not ours.
Home directory /home/jfritz not ours.

Although the output appeared to be riddled with audio layer errors, and the Audio Settings tab of the Setup panel gave me a clue as to why:

Notice how the Audio Interface setting in that image says “Pulse Audio (bad latency!)”. I would hazard a guess that the latency issues with PulseAudio have something to do with the fact that I killed it just prior to getting this damned thing to launch. When I hit the OK button, I was able to see the application, but there was no sound.

Figuring that sound was a necessary component of an audio production application, I booted back to the Setup menu, and told the app to funnel its audio through JACK instead of PulseAudio. The JACK Audio Connection Kit is another sound subsystem, kind of like PulseAudio, that provides an API that developers can use to interface with a machine’s audio hardware. Because of its low latency performance, JACK is often considered to be the standard API for high-quality audio recording and production apps. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work worth a damn in LMMS:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT:~$ sudo lmms
jackd 0.118.0
Copyright 2001-2009 Paul Davis, Stephane Letz, Jack O'Quinn, Torben Hohn and others.
jackd comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details

no message buffer overruns
JACK compiled with System V SHM support.
loading driver ..
SSE2 detected
creating alsa driver ... hw:0|hw:0|1024|2|48000|0|0|nomon|swmeter|-|32bit
control device hw:0
SSE2 detected
all 32 bit float mono audio port buffers in use!
cannot assign buffer for port
cannot deliver port registration request
no more JACK-ports available!
No audio-driver working - falling back to dummy-audio-driver
You can render your songs and listen to the output files...
Home directory /home/jfritz not ours.
Home directory /home/jfritz not ours.
the playback device "hw:0" is already in use. Please stop the application using it and run JACK again
cannot load driver module alsa
Home directory /home/jfritz not ours.

Having dealt with JACK on a previous install, I had one more trick up my sleeve in my effort to get this bastard application to make a sound. I installed the JACK Control Panel from the Ubuntu Software Centre. It’s a QT app that interfaces with the JACK server and allows you to modify settings and stuff.

With it installed, I pressed the big green (or is it red – I’m colour blind, and hate when developers use these two colours for important status messages) Start button, only to encounter some nasty errors:

That might be a problem. I hit the messages button and found a message advising me to make a change to the /etc/security/limits.conf file so that JACK would be allowed to use realtime scheduling:

JACK is running in realtime mode, but you are not allowed to use realtime scheduling.
Please check your /etc/security/limits.conf for the following lines
and correct/add them:
@audio - rtprio 100
@audio - nice -10
After applying these changes, please re-login in order for them to take effect.
You don't appear to have a sane system configuration. It is very likely that you
encounter xruns. Please apply all the above mentioned changes and start jack again!

I figured that it was worth a shot, considering how far I’ve already gone just to try out a piece of software that I don’t really even need. I made the requested changes in the config file, restarted my machine and tried again… only to be greeted by the same damned error message.

At this point, I decided to give up on LMMS. It’s too damned complicated, and ultimately not worth my time. Perhaps when they release a version that I can install and start using without an hour of troubleshooting, I’ll come back and give it another shot. In the mean time, if you’re looking for a decent drum machine with more than a few tricks up its sleeve, check out Hydrogen Drum Machine. It works very well, and I’ve created some neat stuff in it.

A couple of nights ago, I left Banshee running overnight, filling my phone with music to listen to the next day at work. Sometime during that process, the media player crashed in a big way, and my entire system ground to a halt. When I woke up the next morning, my computer was frozen solid, with no keyboard or mouse input accepted, and the system clock hadn’t advanced since 11:16pm the previous night. I did a hard reboot, hoping that all would be well when it came back up.

Boy was I wrong.

The Problem

It seems that when Banshee went down, it took my library database file with it. Now, whenever I launch the application, I get a lovely dialog box that looks something like this:

Launching the application from the command line provides more details:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT: ~/.config/banshee-1$ banshee-1
[Info  11:20:32.175] Running Banshee 1.9.0: [source-tarball (linux-gnu, x86_64) @ 2010-12-09 13:07:07 EST]
[Warn  11:20:32.451] Service `Banshee.Database.BansheeDbConnection’ not started: The database disk image is malformed
database disk image is malformed
[Warn  11:20:32.453] Caught an exception – Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteException: The database disk image is malformed

Apparently, the SQLite database that forms the backend of Banshee is severely corrupted, and the application can’t open it for reading. Based on the command line output, I figured that Banshee uses SQLite3 for its database, and after a little bit of research, I found out that it stores the database file at ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db. After installing the SQLite3 package from my repositories with the command sudo apt-get install sqlite3, I was able to connect to the database without issue. A little bit of reading over at sqlite.org showed me how to do an integrity check on the database, which came back with some nasty results:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT:~/.config/banshee-1$ sqlite3 -interactive banshee.db
SQLite version 3.6.22
Enter “.help” for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a “;”
sqlite> PRAGMA integrity_check;
*** in database main ***
Main freelist: 2291 of 2292 pages missing from overflow list starting at 18928
On tree page 28 cell 4: Child page depth differs
On tree page 28 cell 6: 2nd reference to page 15475
On tree page 28 cell 6: Child page depth differs
…
On tree page 16807 cell 25: Child page depth differs
On tree page 16807 cell 26: 2nd reference to page 18171
On tree page 16807 cell 26: Child page depth differs

Each line of this output refers to a broken or corrupted index, with a total of 99 errors reported. Yikes.

The Solution

Before attempting to fix the problem, I made a backup of the broken database, just in case some data could be resurrected from it. To do this, I made sure that Banshee wasn’t running, and then made a copy of the database file with the command cp ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db.old.

Since the integrity check showed a number of broken or corrupted indices, I thought perhaps I would be able to recover the database by rebuilding all of its indices. A quick scan of the SQLite documentation turned up the REINDEX function. Again, I connected to the database through the command-line interpreter, and gave it a shot:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT:~/.config/banshee-1$ sqlite3 -interactive banshee.db
SQLite version 3.6.22
Enter “.help” for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a “;”
sqlite> REINDEX;
Error: database disk image is malformed

That clearly didn’t work.

My next thought was to drop and re-create all of the indices in the database, in hopes that I could rebuild them. I used the graphical tool sqliteman (available from your repositories with the command sudo apt-get install sqliteman) to dump the database schema out to a text file and then scrolled through the file looking for each index. I managed to drop all but four of them, but got the image malformed error whenever I tried to drop the remaining four or recreate any of the ones that were successfully dropped.

Out of ideas, I resorted to attempting to recover what data I could from the mangled file. Using sqliteman, I created a dump of my library data to go along with the schema dump that I had created earlier. The good thing about this dump is that it contains all of the data with none of the indices. Next, I opened up a terminal and navigated to the temporary directory where I had saved the database dump. Using the sqlite3 command line interpreter, I built an image of the old database from the dump:

jonf@THE-LINUX-EXPERIMENT:~/Desktop/banshee$ sqlite3 -interactive banshee.db
SQLite version 3.6.22
Enter “.help” for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a “;”
sqlite> .read dump.sql

Finally, I copied the newly created database into the banshee data directory with the command cp ~/Desktop/banshee/banshee.db  ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db.

The next time I started the application, all of my data was restored.

Prevention

I’ve put a lot of work into collecting and maintaining all of the music in my Banshee library. In order to avoid losing all of that work, I’ve decided to write a short script that takes a backup image of the library database every so often, and puts it in a safe place on my hard drive. Once I get that put together, I’ll throw it up on here for so that everybody can use it.

During a routine update of my Fedora 13 system, I received the following notification:

You’ll notice, upon careful inspection, that the update utility would like to remove my kernel. This ought to be fun.

This file copy is running over my local wireless network:

That is all.

Regular readers of this site will know that I’m no fan of Rhythmbox. When I recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop PC, I decided to give Gnome’s default media player a few days to win back my affection. Unfortunately, while Novell’s Banshee project appears to be moving ahead with lots of great new features, Rythmbox still suffers from the issues that I outlined in my now infamous lambasting of it, nearly 8 months ago. To be fair, the pre-installed version of Rythmbox is only 0.12.8 on Ubuntu 10.04 (the same one that I reviewed previously), while the project has forged ahead to version 0.13.2.

Regardless, I prefer to listen to my music with Banshee, and I’m itching to try the latest version. On November 10th, the project released Banshee 1.9.0, and it looks positively excellent. I decided to give it a go, and downloaded the source tarball from the project’s website. Following are the steps that were necessary to install it:

1. Head over to a terminal and install intltool, libgtk2.0-dev, libgtk2.0-cil-dev, libmono-dev, mono-gmcs, libmono-addins-cil-dev, monodoc-base, boo, libboo-cil-dev, libmono-addins-gui-cil-dev, libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil-dev, libgdata-dev, libgdata-cil-dev, libtag1-dev, libtaglib-cil-dev, sqlite3, libsqlite3-dev, libgconf2.0-cil-dev, libmtp-dev, libmono-zeroconf1.0-cil, libmono-zeroconf1.0-cil-dev, libwebkit-dev, libwebkit-cil-dev, and libsoup-gnome2.4-dev with the following command:
   

   sudo apt-get install intltool libgtk2.0-dev libgtk2.0-cil-dev libmono-dev mono-gmcs libmono-addins-cil-dev libmono-addins-gui-cil-dev monodoc-base boo libboo-cil-dev libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil-dev libgdata-dev libgdata-cil-dev libtag1-dev libtaglib-cil-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libgconf2.0-cil-dev libmtp-dev libmono-zeroconf1.0-cil libmono-zeroconf1.0-cil-dev libwebkit-dev libwebkit-cil-dev libsoup-gnome2.4-dev

2. Next, you’ll need GStreamer and a few of its base plugins package: libgstreamer0.10-dev and libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev
   

   sudo apt-get install libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev

3. If you want to play music encoded in non-free formats like mp3, you’ll also need a few restricted GStreamer libraries like gstreamer-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-bad-multiverse, gstreamer-plugins-ugly, and gstreamer-plugins-ugly-multiverse.
   

   sudo apt-get install gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-ugly-multiverse

4. Since I don’t have an iPod or similar Apple device, I’ve configured my installation to disable Apple device support. If you have an iPod, you can lose the –disable-apple-device and –disable-ipod flags after the configure command, but you’ll also need to add a couple of extra libraries to your system. To compile and install Banshee, navigate to the folder where you unzipped the tarball, and type the following in your terminal:
   

   ./configure –disable-appledevice –disable-ipod
   sudo make
   sudo make install

Banshee should now be installed. From your terminal, type

banshee-1

as a sanity check. Once the application launches, select Help > About and ensure that the version number is 1.9.0. If so, you should be good to go.

I’ll try to post a full review of this latest version of Banshee within a couple of days. In the mean time, happy listening!

When I’m not rocking out my ninja-like linux skillz here at The Linux Experiment, I like to spend my spare time working on SlightlySauced, a weekly round table podcast. When we started the show, we chose to host it on a simple Tumblr blog, because it offered a fast setup experience and didn’t require much additional configuration to work well enough for our purposes. In light of this week’s Tumblr outages, we’ve decided to move the show off of the cloud and onto the same hosting provider that this site resides on.

Since I find myself with a little bit of spare time recently, I’ve also decided to write a custom site for the show using Django, my new favourite web framework. If you’re interested in trying your hand at Django development (and honestly, if you’re doing web development of any kind, why haven’t you tried it yet?), you can follow along with my progress here.

Step 1: Installing MySql

Because Django is a Python-based web framework, it includes SQLite out of the box. My web host of choice provides solid MySQL support, so I’ve decided to swap out SQLite for MySql. This requires that I install a local MySQL server for development purposes. Ubuntu has posted some handy documentation that I followed loosely. I’ll repeat the relevant steps here for posterity and ease of use.

From your terminal, type:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

During the installation process, you’ll be prompted to enter a password for MySql’s root user account. If your server is going to be public-facing, it’s a good idea to enter a strong password. If it’s just for development purposes, you can probably use something weaker and easier to type.

Once the installation has finished, check that your server is running by typing:

sudo netstat -tap | grep mysql

This command should output something like the following:

tcp     0     0     localhost:mysql     *:*     LISTEN 2556/mysqld

Note: This command didn’t actually work for me. I had to remove the pipe and type just

sudo netstat -tap

and then search the resulting list for the MySql entry. I found it easily enough, and was convinced that the daemon was running and waiting for clients.

Step 2: MySQL Workbench (Optional)

Once your MySql daemon is up and running, you could edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file to alter its configuration. Instead, I opted to use MySQL Workbench, a decent graphical management tool that is distributed by Oracle (the same folks who make MySql). I’ve used it extensively at work, so I’m familiar with it and comfortable with its quirks. If you care to use it, you’ll have to grab it from Oracle’s website, as it’s not in the Ubuntu repositories. Luckily, Oracle provides a Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit *.deb that can be easily installed with GDebi. For those who care about such things, MySQL Workbench is a fully OSS GPL-licensed product, so there’s no funny stuff going on with regards to licensing.

With MySQL Workbench up and running, you’ll be presented with a screen like this one:

Click on New Connection under the SQL Development column in the bottom left of the screen, and enter the connection details of your local MySql server. It should be available via the loopback IP 127.0.0.1 on port 3306. The default username is root, and the password is whatever you set during the installation process. Once you get access, you can create a new schema and fire a few commands at it to test your setup.

Head back over to the Home tab and click on New Server Instance under the Server Administration column at the bottom right of the screen. In the dialog that pops up, select Take Parameters from Existing Database Connection and hit Next a bunch of times. The resulting window is a full MySQL daemon monitoring window that details traffic, the number of connections to the server, etc. More importantly, it allows you to set up user accounts and change configuration variables from a handy graphical front end instead of wading through MySQL’s extensive configuration files.

I headed over to the Accounts tab and created a user account for Django. At this stage of development, you’ll want to give this account full root access to the database, as Django will automatically create and drop schemas and tables as you code your website. Once development is done, you can pare these down to only those that are necessary.

Step 3: Installing Django

Holy crap, that was a lot of work, and we haven’t even gotten our framework of choice installed yet! Let’s get on with that. The project has some excellent documentation on this issue. I’ll repeat the basic steps here for your convenience, but strongly suggest that you read through the full instruction set if you encounter any issues or want to perform a customized installation.

Since Django is a python-based framework, you’ll need to make sure that you have a compatible version of Python installed on your system. At the time of writing, Ubuntu 10.04 ships with Python version 2.6.5. Django only works with Python versions 2.4 through 2.7. If you’re not running Ubuntu 10.04, you can check which version you have installed by typing

python –version

in your terminal. Once you’ve ensured that you have a compatible Python version installed, type

sudo apt-get install python-django

in your terminal to install version 1.1.1 of the framework from your repositories. Once the installation has finished, you should check the installed version. Since Django lives inside of python, you’ll need to start a python terminal by typing

python

in your terminal. Once started, type

import django
print django.get_version()

If you don’t see any horrendous-looking error messages, you’re good to go. As a side note, if you type

apt-cache search django

you’ll see that the Ubuntu repositories include quite a few handy Django plugins and applications that you might want to use in your projects, including a URL shortener, a user-registration module, and a contact form. Each of these can be installed on your system and included in any Django project quite easily. I’ll probably end up using one or more in my project to save me some time.

Finally, you’ll need to install an extra database connector for python in order to use MySql from within Django. In Ubuntu 10.04, this package is called python-mysqldb.

Step 4: Write Some Code!

So you’re up and running. If you’re not familiar with Django, I suggest that you run through their online tutorial. It’s well-written and provides a great introduction to some of the stuff that the framework can do.

Whatever you do, have fun! In my experience, Django makes web development a pleasure because it takes care of a lot of the nitty-gritty crap for you and lets you get on with solving harder problems.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Edit: Added an extra database connector package that’s necessary if you want to use MySql with Django.

Yesterday, I picked up the newly launched (in Canada) Samsung Captivate. So far, I’m extremely impressed with the device. The super amoled display is gorgeous, the touch screen is responsive, and the UI is stunning to look at and use. Coming from a Blackberry Curve 8310, this phone is like a digital orgasm.

Once I finished gushing over how awesome this phone is, I decided to try and get it to interact with my Linux Mint 9 Isadora install. For now, I just want to be able to transfer images and music to and from the device, although later on, I’d like to get a development environment set up and try my hand at writing some apps.

My first try at getting the phone to play nicely with Linux was not successful. It took me a little bit of fooling around before I could figure it out, but here goes:

• On the phone, navigate to Settings > Applications > USB Settings and make sure that ‘Ask on Connection’ is selected
• Plug your phone into the a USB port, and when prompted, select ‘Mass Storage’ from the dialog that appears on the phone
• At this point, if you open up your Computer in Nautilus, you should see an icon that says something like SAMSUNG SGH-I896, but you won’t be able to interact with it in any way
• On the phone, grab the notification bar at the top of the home screen and drag it down
• In the notifications area, tap USB Connected, and when prompted, select Mount from the dialog
• Back in Nautilus, the icon under Computer should now say something like SAMSUNG SGH-I896: 14GB Filesystem, and you should be able to read and write to the card

With these steps complete, I was able to interact with the phone through the file system and from within Banshee and FSpot. I’m not sure why the phone won’t allow Linux to mount its storage devices by default when in Mass Storage mode, but this little work around seems to make it behave correctly.

Drop me a line in the comments if you have any Linux/Android compatibility questions, and I’ll do my best to help you out.

Lately, I’ve been doing some audio recording. In addition to a couple of podcasts that I work on, I occasionally like to record my own musical compositions. While there seems to be no shortage of high-end audio editing applications on either Windows or Mac, the situation on Linux is a bit more sparse. Faced with some frustration, I went out and downloaded a number of linux-based audio editors. I used Wikipedia to find the software in the tests below, and following are my totally subjective and highly biased reviews of each.

Each piece of software was used to edit some raw recordings from a podcast that I have been involved with lately. This source material is almost 100% spoken word, with some music and sound effects sprinkled throughout. It’s important to note these details, as your needs may vary drastically depending on the type of audio project that you’re working on.

Audacity:

The Audacity Project is kind of the Linux standard for non-professional audio editing. It was the first application that I tried to use, mainly because I was familiar with earlier versions of the program that I had once used back in my Windows days. Audacity includes a great number of features that make it ideal for post-processing of any audio project, including a wide array of effects, some great noise generators, and a few analysis tools that make it perfect for cleaning up your finished file before publication.

Audacity audio editor with a demo project loaded

Unfortunately, I found that it lacked a usable GUI for editing podcast material. In particular, it seems to be missing the ability to edit a single track in a multi-track project without unduly affecting the other tracks.By default, if you use the selection tool to grab a portion of audio that ought to be deleted from one track in the project, it seems to delete that portion of audio from all tracks in the project.

I found this out the hard way when I played back the master track that I had assembled my finished podcast on, only to find out that significant portions of the audio had mysteriously gone missing at some point during the editing process.

To make matters worse, I closed the application, lost the undo record for the project, and had to start the editing process from the beginning.

This lack of GUI polish also exhibits itself in the way that you can interact with the audio tracks themselves. Unlike in most DAW solutions, a portion of audio that has been clipped out of a larger track cannot seemingly be moved around in the project by clicking on it and dragging it across the stage with the mouse. At least I couldn’t figure out how to do it, and ended up relying heavily on my cut, copy, and paste functions to edit my project. This is a poor way to work on a project of any kind of complexity, and makes projects that rely on audio loops a pain to assemble.

Ardour:

Where Audacity is suited more towards hobbyist recording setups, Ardour aims to be a professional audio solution that is capable of competing with mainstream software like ProTools. It is a fully featured audio suite that can allegedly do most everything that you may require, but as such, can also confuse the hell out of first-time users with its complicated GUI and lengthy manual.

Granted, this is hardly a slight to the project, because it really isn’t suited to my needs. It is a pro-level audio environment that can be used as the centrepiece to a full recording studio or stage

Ardour wants sole control of my audio interface

show. If you just want to edit a podcast, it may not be the tool for you. As such, if the GUI seems challenging and you find the documentation to be long-winded, you may just be using the wrong tool for the job.

The biggest issue that I had with this piece of software was getting it to run at all on my machine. It uses JACK to attach itself to your audio interfaces in the name of providing a perfect sampling environment that doesn’t get slowed down by having to share the interface with other pieces of software.

Unfortunately, this means that in order to use it, I had to quit all other processes that are capable of generating sound, including this web browser. This is a pain if you are trying to run Ardour in a multi-application environment, or need to reference the internet for anything while working.

After reading the introductory documentation and adjusting the settings in the startup dialog for about 15 minutes, I simply gave up on Ardour without ever managing to get into a workspace. It seems to be far too complicated for my needs, and doesn’t seem worth my time. Your mileage may vary.

Jokosher:

From the moment that I started reading about this project, I like the sound of it. Jokosher is a multi-track recoding and editing environment built on top of Python and GStreamer that was

Jokosher may look cartoony, but it may be exactly what you need for small projects

created by a podcaster who was unsatisfied with the audio editing tools that were available on Linux. The application focuses on being easy enough to use that non-technical people like musicians can pick it up and get their ideas down with minimal hassle. Think of it as Garage Band for Linux.

Indeed, just as the website promised, I was able to get a working environment set up in a matter of minutes. The editing tools allow for splitting the audio, grabbing it and moving it around, and non-destructively editing multiple tracks at the same time (I’m looking at you, Audacity). The GUI also has a beautiful polish to it that, although a tad cartoony, really makes the program look and feel simple. For editing something like a podcast, I’m not sure that this application can be beat.

The only issue that I encountered in my short time using Jokosher was with its support of LADSPA plugins. These are free audio plugins that can be used to apply effects to the different tracks of your audio project. When I tried to use them from within the application, it instructed me to download some from my repositories. Upon checking Synaptic, I saw that I already had a number of them downloaded. Even after installing more, the program did not seem to pick them up.

All in all, this project lived up to its hype, and I will most certainly take some time to break it in, and may write a more in-depth review once I get used to it. If you’re doing podcasting, you owe it to yourself to check this app out.

In Conclusion:

Each of the three applications that I tried to work with while writing this piece deserve your respect. The underlying audio framework of most Linux systems is a veritable rats’ nest of subsystems, platforms, daemons, plugins and helper applications. I would wager a significant amount of money on this situation as the reason that we don’t have ProTools and its ilk on our platform of choice. I’ve done a little bit of work with GStreamer, and even it, as perhaps the prettiest and best supported of all audio libraries on the platform, left me scratching my head at times.

When choosing audio software, it’s important to keep in mind that you need a tool that’s uniquely suited to your project. Since I’m editing podcasts and fooling around with drum loops and samples of my guitars, Jokosher does just about everything that I need and more. I may use Audacity for post-production, or to record my source audio (simply because I haven’t tried recording in Jokosher yet – I know that Audacity works), because it falls somewhere in between a simple editing tool and an advanced platform. Ardour, meanwhile, is probably suited towards the more hard-core audio engineer slash system administrator types who are so fanatic about recording quality that they are willing to sacrifice an entire box for running their DAW software. It’s simply more power than the majority of hobbyist enthusiasts really needs.