Recently in Digital Audio Category

The fine folks who develop the Ardour Digital Audio Workstation for linux have released version 2.8.4. This will be the final release of the  2.x series unless there is a catastrophic bug or something similarly problematic that needs to be addressed. This is largely a bug-fix release, with a few new features, and should be very stable.

Next up on the Ardour to-do list is continuing development of the 3.0 code-base, for eventual release. Version 3.0 is greatly anticipated since it will incorporate MIDI support, which is something that Ardour users have been looking forward to for some time.

As I said in a previous post, Ardour is an amazing tool that rivals the big commercial DAW programs. If any of you do digital audio work, and have been thinking of switching to linux, now would be a great time because of the robustness and availability of great tools like this.


Ardour DAW 2.8.4 Released

I get several audio magazines in the mail, and one of them occasionally writes about other technologies that could affect electronic music production. Last year they wrote about more efficient solar cells that were less costly to produce, and in the latest issue they're talking about Holographic Disc Storage.

It seems the engineers over at General Electric's research and development laboratory have developed a polycarbonate material that when produced in the size of a CD/DVD/BR disc, can hold many times the amount of data of even a BR disc.

Right now, the engineers have a prototype that is capable of storing 500 gigabytes of data, and as they improve the polycarbonate material, and refine the technology in general, they expect to be able to get one terabyte of data onto a CD/DVD/BR sized disc.

Obviously a technology like this has implications for everyone who has use for storing and archiving massive amounts of data. This applies to music production because digital audio requires massive amounts of storage, particularly if you're recording at higher sample rates like 192 KHz.

First generation commercial devices are expected to be available by 2012.

I don't know how this developed so quickly, but I really am at the "shit or get off the pot" stage with my record label idea. I have an artist ready to go now, and I have no infrastructure.  This guy is a super talented guitarist, who is starting his own publishing company to promote his original compositions.  He hopes to get them into commercials, and movies and such.

I contacted him at apparently the exact time that he had been thinking that he needed a label to help distribute his music, as well.  How fortuitous!

The problem is that we will need a real E-Commerce web site, and I have no skills in that arena, and I really don't have the money to pay for it.

How did the Vanderbilts and Guggenheims get their start?!

For many years now I've had the idea of starting my own record label.  Call me crazy.

It would be my kind of label, where I am the A&R guy, and I get to choose what artists appear in our catalog.  The primary focus of the label would be to feature artists who write interesting and original music, that you simply don't get to hear on most radio stations and in most clubs.  I sometimes refer to it as "player's music."

Me?  I prefer the creative end.  I want to find artists and record them and I want nothing to do with the paperwork end.  But, we still would need a paperwork end, and that's what scares me the most.  I want to be sheltered from the paperwork end.  I want nothing to do with it, but in a venture like a new boutique label featuring non-commercial music, I guess that in the beginning I would have to be the only employee, most likely working for free.

Do people really do this kind of thing?  I mean I know I read about stories like this, but is it like winning the lottery?  Does anyone actually succeed at such a crazy thing?

As of this writing, I have actually purchased a domain name, and contacted several people whom I would love to have as artists in my galaxy of stars.  Most have agreed, or at the very least have been very receptive.

I'm bursting with ideas, and my friends are being very helpful and supportive.  Now the only question that remains is: Do I have the Gonadicals to attempt the difficult parts of starting a project like this.

I've been following the development of the Ardour DAW program for years.  Back in the day when I was a very new Linux user I took note of this program, its goals, and its development.  At that time, installing it required lots of libraries, and there really weren't any pre-compiled binary options.  Since I wasn't a very experienced Linux user, the idea of compiling the program, and all of its dependencies was very daunting.

Well times have changed.  All of the good Linux distributions have package management programs that install the programs and all necessary dependencies.

Since I became unemployed, I have been very interested in getting back into audio production, and recording, again.  I installed Ardour onto my desktop machine last month, and found it to be a very capable DAW that is rich in features.  Unlike the commercial DAW programs, I can log into an IRC channel and speak to the main developer (and most of the developers) at any reasonable hour, almost any day of the week, which is an amazing resource.

Of late I've been more involved in some of the online music forums, and I've made a few new friends, and I ended up using Ardour to mix a tune that a friend from Vancouver recorded, and I found Ardour to be an amazingly powerful program, that was very easy to understand and adapt to with all of my analog audio experience.  Steve and I are pretty happy with the way the tune came out, and the tune called Big Mouth, can be found here.

If you're a Linux or MacOS user, I would really recommend using Ardour, and donating to the development team.  I made a modest donation myself, and when I get some spare cash, intend to build a dedicated Ardour box, and hope to make some money on the side mixing projects for people out there on the inter-tubes.  Pipe Dream?  Maybe, but I'm gonna give it a shot as soon as I am able.

 Ardour 2.8.1 released