Linux Music Production

[Tod Hansmann]

On 8/11/2011 12:26 PM, Brett Rasmussen wrote:
> One thing that might be a caveat: you said you have no budget for this, and
> the paradigm that I'm slightly familiar with is having at least some sort of
> instrument outside of the computer for actually creating the notes.  For
> example, a MIDI synthesizer that you would play on to send note data to the
> computer, for which you'd need a MIDI sound card, and the software would
> provide the sound itself.  Or you could use a synthesizer or mic or guitar
> that you were just recording into the computer via a sound card that took
> XLR or 1/4-inch inputs.  For these sorts of things, I've been looking at the
> M-audio Delta 1010lt (~$180), which is a sound card that has a whole bunch
> of different dongles of different types of audio inputs and outputs.  With
> something like that, you could do all of the above and more.
>
> But that whole paradigm is based on having at least some external hardware.
>   As for creating the notes directly on the computer, I know there's stuff
> out there that does that, like GarageBand in the Apple world, and there
> probably is stuff like that in linux, but I just haven't played around with
> all of it enough to know.
>
If I got into it, I'd obviously make budget for it, but for now it's 
purely a curiosity, so it gets no dough until I'm a little more 
serious.  I have heard much the same, but I don't play keyboard anyway, 
so that wouldn't be terribly helpful.

A long time ago, say, 15 years or so, I have a .mid editor in Windows 
that basically let me make sheet music and turn it into a midi file.  It 
was fun, and made small files I could share over dialup with friends, 
and it led to other musical things we enjoyed, but they were midi files, 
and sounded pretty bad compared to them new-fangled mp3-majigs.  So we 
never went much further than a month or so of fiddling.

I figured I could do something like that with some sound-loops and 
create something either very lounge or very 80s sounding with nothing 
but a computer.  So that's the dream, I guess.  Thanks for your input.  
It's a good start.

Maybe some linux sound people could put together a presentation for a 
PLUG meeting sometime.  *hint hint*

-Tod Hansmann