QJackCtl and Pipewire

Posted on May 27, 2021 by Adam Young

It took me a few tries, but I finally got a passable demo/tutorial about Pipewire and QJackCtl.

Here’s the final version. Well, final for now.

Here’s the version before that that got hit by a copyright claim and thus was not visible in Canada. I chose the “auto edit” option to remove the copywritten material. I think that means that you don’t see how you can feed browser audio back into itself. I’ve not watched it since it got cut.

Here is the original Camcorder version. This was really the approach I wanted to take, with the camera picking up the same audio that I was hearing. But the video was unwatchable.

Pipewire low latency

Posted on May 4, 2021 by Adam Young

Just wanted to leave myself a note here. On QJackCtrl It shows the latency in the bottom right of the Parameters page. If I drop the Frames/Period to 16 (Lowest) the latency drops to 1 msec. For a Jamulus server with a ping time of 22ms I get an overall delay of 44 ms.

And that is over wireless.

This is on my laptop, not my NUC, and it does not have the Scarlet Solo USB Analog-to-Digital converter on it.

But it is encouraging.

Unifying Audio with Pipewire

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Adam Young

ALSA. Jack. PulseAudio. MIDI. Musescore. Jamulus.

My musical interactions with Linux are not the most complex in the world, but they ain’t trivial. The complexity of the Linux audio landscape has been a stumbling block so far. Pipewire has just gotten me past that.

The title of this article implies that you need to do something other than install Pipewire. So far, this is not true. On my system, at least, it Just works.

Continue reading →

Musical Midi Accompaniment: First Tune

Posted on November 22, 2020 by Adam Young

Here is a tune I wrote called “Standard Deviation” done as an accompaniment track using MMA. This is a very simplistic interpretation that makes no use of dynamics, variations in the BossaNova Groove, or even decent repeat logic. But it compiles.

Here’s the MMA file.

Slightly Greater than one Standard Deviation from the Mean:

Musical Midi Accompaniment: Understanding the Format

Posted on November 22, 2020 by Adam Young

Saxophone is a solo instrument. Unless you are into the sounds of Saxophone multiphonics, harmony requires playing with some other instrument. For Jazz, this tends to be a rhythms section of Piano, Bass, and Drums. As a kid, my practicing (without a live Rhythm section) required playing along with pre-recordings of tunes. I had my share of Jamie Aebersold records.

Nowadays, the tool of choice for most Jazz muscians, myself included is iReal Pro. A lovely little app for the phone. All of the Real Book tunes have their chord progressions been posted and generated. The format is simple enough.

But it is a proprietary app. While I continue to support and use it, I am also looking for alternatives that let me get more involved. One such tool is Musical MIDI Accompaniment. I’m just getting started with it, and I want to keep my notes here.

Continue reading →

Recovering Audio off an Old Tape Using Audacity

Posted on October 14, 2020 by Adam Young

One of my fiorends wrote a bunch of music back in high school. The only remainig recordings are on a casette tape that he produced. Time has not been kind to the recordings, but they are audible…barely. He has a device that produces MP3s from the tape. My job has been to try and get them so that we can understand them well enough to recover the original songs.

I have the combined recording on a single MP3. I’ve gone through and noted the times where each song starts and stops. I am going to go through the steps I’ve been using to go from that single long MP3 to an individual recording.

Continue reading →