this girl drives a tank

jokosher

Jokosher is a multi track studio along the lines of ardour and muse which I found a little bit harder to set up. The latter two apps are quite mature and feature rich, but not exactly easy to use for non music studio types like yours truly.



I have a little midi keyboard, an maudio-keystation49, which has very good support under Debian. I needed to install first the Jack audio server and a nice little front end called qjackctl Once that is done I just plug the keyboard into a usb port and start qjackctl and it pops up as a midi device. Then I need something to act as voice for the keyboard, two software synth's that fit the bill are zynaddsubfx and amsynth. Then I need a wav editor, audacity is very popular but the one I really like most is sweep. Finally some drums would be nice, again plenty to choose from but I tend to like hydrogen.

This sounds like a lot to setup but really in Debian you just install it and it works. Using ardour or muse to control all of this is a bit tricky, and as I am decidedly amateur when it comes to this type of thing frustration and lost work would often be the end result. This is where I hoped jokosher would come to the rescue. It has only an Ubuntu package but on Debian sid if you first install python2.4-dbus gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs python-alsaaudio and gstreamer0.10-gnonlin you can then dpkg -i the Ubuntu .deb.

As soon as I loaded a wav file it crashed however, in fact it crashed quite easily and frequently. This is expected, I'm not even running Ubuntu and it is a first release after all. I should probably try to compile it from source instead.

The interface is excellent though, I could understand what was going on quite easily and it will be nice to see this app develop over time. The big drawback? It uses gstreamer instead of jack, so I can't even use the drum machine and synth's with this program :-( I should have clued in when I had to install all those gstreamer packages.......

The CD ripping project is plodding along, I am almost through box 1 of 4. I hope to be done tonight with that. Two new bands I really like in his collection are Audioweb and Sugar..more on that later.