Switching Hydrogen drum kits using Emacs

If you ever used Hydrogen, you might know the following problem: you want to switch to a different drum kit but it has a different layout and all the activations of the instruments are off. I wrote some Emacs functions to ease the pain of changing all the activations and to do it without excessively clicking in the Hydrogen GUI. »

Spectral analysis

Real-time spectral analysis in Linux using JACK

A very important part of digital signal processing (DSP) as well as music processing is to analyze the spectrum and the spectrogram of your recording. Even Audacity already can handle it. So let’s use it with Non Timeline or a general JACK-based environment too. In this blog post I will review the available software for creating spectra in Linux systems and how to deploy them. »

Using ZynAddSubFx as sound synthesizer in TuxGuitar

Although not as good as the original GuitarPro, I really like TuxGuitar. After all, it is the only usable software to produce guitar tabs and scores in Linux systems I’m aware of. But of all its shortcomings the issues I had with its sound system were the worst: The sound generation is broken quite frequently and the whole program remains silent. In this short post I’ll explain to you how to replace the internal sound generator of TuxGuitar with ZynAddSubFX for a more stable and reliable setup. »

Recording audio using Linux systems Pt. II

The Linux sound servers

As for most other Linux subsystems the audio one grew naturally too. So you have quite a number of alternatives and different ways to achieve a goal. Not just in using different software, but also in the underlying sound servers. While this grants advanced users quite some flexibility, it’s almost threatening for beginners. That’s why the overall goal of this post is to provide you with a bigger picture of the main Linux sound servers. »

Recording audio using Linux systems Pt. I

General concepts, applications, and workflow

As much as I love the Linux system, its incredible amount of free and open-source software and distributions, and the whole supportive community providing awesome documentation etc., as much pain it was to migrate all my music recording and mixing from Windows to Linux. It cost me numerous sleepless nights and resulted in some quite discouraging failures during my first years of diving into open-source. In this post I want to provide a general overview about the landscape of Linux audio in both basic concepts and available software. »