[TriLUG] Music, Musicians and the Penguin

[Michael Alan Dorman]

"Roy Vestal" <rvestal at trilug.org> writes:
> I'm in a local band (http://www.blackeyedsuzy.com - shameless plug)
> and I want to be able to rip/burn/etc songs from our demos and
> eventually setup a digital studio with software much like
> protools. Anyone have any suggestions on software/hardware setups?

For drivers, ALSA is certainly the option being most actively
developed and supported these days.

For professional multi-channel cards, the absolute top-end are the RME
Hammerfall/Hammerfall DSPs (www.rme-audio.com), both of which are well
supported---you can get 24 channels of digital I/O on these things.
These are totally non-consumer cards, though, so you end up buying
outboard A/D-D/A converters, etc.

The second, pro-amateur tier of interfaces are predominantly based on
the ICE Envy24 chipset---the only one I know by name is the M-Audio
(midiman.net) Delta-1010, but there are others---which gives.  When I
shake $600 loose from somewhere I plan to purchase one. :-)

For multi-channel recording, the leading app is probably Ardour
(ardour.sourceforge.net), which will do a frightening amount of
stuff---add in the large number of LADSPA plugins, and the ways you
can interconnect it using JACK (jackit.sourceforge.net), and it's a
heck of an environment.

PlanetCCRMA (www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software) tries to cut
the amount of pain for RedHat users when it comes to getting all this
stuff with its myriad dependencies setup and running.

Mike.
-- 
the piano is firewood, Times Square is a dream -- Tom Waits