After quite a while, I recently picked up recording with Fedora again and ran into a couple of snags which I could (eventually) work around and fix. I’m not completely done with that but my experience up to here was not really optimal. Much of the content you find online is about other Linux distributions and/or outdated, and I can probably thank my stubbornness to make it as far as I did.
I came to think that the topic of making music on Fedora is a bit neglected lately – some years ago we had a not very populous but reasonably lively mailing list and IRC channel which I would have contacted about my issues, but this time I felt like I was on my own.
I’d like there to be a place where like-minded folks can contribute to improving the state of making music on Fedora – packaging, documenting, being occasionally available for questions – and a Special Interest Group seems to be a good format for it. If this is something you could see yourself help out with, I’d appreciate it very much and would like to hear from you!
Cheers,
Nils
P.S.: Meanwhile I rediscovered that there is (or: was) the Audio Creation SIG, which we could breathe some live back into (see convo below).
I want to get into Ambisonic mixing, and the IEM plugin is only available as a .deb. I experimented with some Audio Mixing apps as Flatpaks, and Ardour in a Debian Distrobox to test that one plugin.
Especially with pipewire there are huuge things to be discovered.
Flatpakking plugins as runtimes works it seems, and this is probably the best way to go.
Making this Studio1 app work on Fedora could be interesting, I think they have a trial to test packaging?
Yeah, availability of software is an area that could use some love.
Ooooh… guess what it was I was tripping over. I mean, some old hardware was involved, too, but that definitely wasn’t the thing that sent me spinning!
I don’t have much experience with flatpaks other than a user, so I wasn’t aware that you could use runtimes as a mechanism for plugins. Maybe even layered? This sounds interesting.
I think you should talk to @q5sys about building out a proper SIG to own the Fedora Jam spin and handle music production stuff. There’s a lot of good that could be done by both building out the tools and techniques and providing a spin that sets things up for you in one go.
Yeah, there’s some legacy that we should dust off in the process such as how the Jam Lab fits, also the long dormant (to put it mildly[1]) Audio Creation SIG which I only rediscovered after I wrote the original post. We could revive the old SIG (name) and overhaul the contents. I’d also like to rope in @ycollet (hi!) who has done tremendous work in the Audinux COPR repo – I’d really like to see these packages in Fedora proper, at least where possible.
I’ve checked the logs of the fedora-music mailing list and the #fedora-audio IRC channel and haven’t seen real traffic over the past 2 years, only the occasional question that never got a reply… ↩︎
For starters, let’s gather where our respective interests and strengths are:
My background (from a user’s perspective) is mainly playing and recording physical instruments or voice and a bit of notation (which doesn’t seem to need a lot of love, the apps I use work fine for me). My main instrument is the drums which I record and monitor with a tandem of slightly aged Firewire audio interfaces assisted by a digital preamp, getting that to play well with pipewire is an ongoing process which I want to document and make smoother where possible.
I mainly contribute to Fedora as a software developer in the Community Platform Engineering team and by maintaining way too many packages, most of them not related to my day job , such as the Ardour DAW and the ffado firewire audio interface drivers and tools for JACK. I’m a proven packager and packager sponsor, so if you’re blocked in that area, hit me up.
After the project @nphilipp and I, plus a few others did, I would also be interested in this. I am very very very much an amateur when it comes to using any DAWs, but I’m keen to learn.
I’m a newbie in Linux audio space, but I’d love to become a cheerleader, who wants to revive a SIG. I’m drawn to recent news from hardware manufacturer’s support for Linux;
Only just began tinkering with a Behringer audio interface (Midas pre-amp) and an external microphone. For amateur-level of recording to create e-learning content, I’d say entry level device is more than enough. I earmarked Scarlett Solo for next upgrade
Busy learning about sound server and foundations on Linux audio.
I met several problems with livecd-creator / lvecd-tools:
For example, it looks like the ISO format of Fedora release has changed around Fedora 37 and a fix has been pushed to livecd-tools repo, but no release has been made yet with this fix.
Pipewire is in quite good shape now. Some MIDI small problems, but it’s manageable.
Are you interested in becoming one? I would be more than happy to sponsor you.
I’m confident that something can be done about it, the person who rolled the last release of livecd-tools upstream even commented above (wink wink, nudge nudge @ngompa).
Interestingly, MIDI was the least problematic area for me. But I’m progressing in getting my rig tamed!
I have a ticket to add.
I need to reproduce the problem I met with livecd-iso-to-disk.
There was a problem with some size. I remember I read a post telling this problem was solved using a sync size using cylinder via parted or something like that.
I will reproduce the problem tonigh and fill a ticket ASAP.
. Glad to have you!
, such as the Ardour DAW and the ffado firewire audio interface drivers and tools for JACK. I’m a proven packager and packager sponsor, so if you’re blocked in that area, hit me up.
).