Monday, January 17, 2011

Making your Ubuntu into a Record Studio

This article assumes you are using Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10. If you haven't allready installed it you might want to check out the Installing Ubuntu in Windows as a program using Windows. In case you've allready installed Ubuntu I can only say Congratulations, you've just made a great choice by choosing Linux!

Now this might be your first FOSS product (Free and Open Source Software), realizing that most of everything you see in front of you is made by people like you and me that sacrificed there spare time in order to make this product. I assume you already looked around in ubuntu? If not you should just go ahead. The beauty about installing Ubuntu in Wubi is that you can screw it all up without any harm is done. You can always boot into Windows and throw Wubi of your system again.

Installation of Software
If you did look around in ubuntu you have seen the Ubuntu Software Center standing out of the menu without a doubt!
Ubuntu Software Center in the Applications menu

When we click it open we see that we can install a awful lot of them. We don't want to install all of them, that's for sure.
Ubuntu Software Center

But! we do want to install a lot of them. To make things a bit easier for us some guys made Ubuntu-Studio. This is an Operating system that uses Ubuntu as a base. They made a few tweaks to make it better. An operating system based on Linux is often called a Distro. Anyways, Ubuntu-Studio is a great thing for us without a doubt. But the moment being there are a few things in Ubuntu-Studio that aren't that good as the standard Ubuntu.
Since I claimed that everyone should be able to install this I opted for the normal Ubuntu. (Ubuntu-Studio can't be Wubi either.)

We'll use the advantages of Ubuntu-Studio anyways!
The first thing we need are our applications/programs/apps (whatever you want to call them). More than 25 five to be correct. This would still be a lot of work in Software Center (25 clicks! Yeah I'm lazy!). So what do we do. We open a terminal window. you either do this by going to:
Applications > Accessories > Terminal
Or by pressing:
ALT+F2 entering gnome-terminal and pressing RUN.

Once we have our terminal open we have to type:

sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-audio

The terminal will ask for our administrator (root) password. Normally this is your own password since you are the primary user. If you aren't the primary user you should ask the system admin what his password is.
The terminal window will now install the apps we need.

Now lets take a closer look to what 'sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-audio' does.
The first word is sudo, this will make sure the rest of the line is performed as if we were the administrator of the system. (Its a safety feature so people who aren't authorized can't install new applications)
Next we have apt-get this stands for aptitude-get. This still says nothing but in essence it calls the program that installs applications (the software center is also a program that installs other applications, you can't have two of these open at the same time)
Word number three is install, this is an easy one, it tells apt-get that we are going to be installing the packages that follow.
The last word ubuntustudio-audio is the name of the package we want to be installing. The ubuntustudio-audio package is a bit of a strange package, it doesn't house 1 application, it houses a ton of them. But basically you can change this into any package you want to install. If you'd like to install gnome-do you can enter 'sudo apt-get install gnome-do'.
NOTE: during install terminal will ask you if you want to use realtime audio, if you are running on any system newer than a pentium 4 you should definitely say yes, if you are on a pentium 4 it's up to you to decide
The realtime audio will make sure that your audio has very low latency.

Now you know what you did we're going to do this again but now for an other application. We might have all the audio applications we need, we don't have all the plugins that we need to get everything going like we want it to go. That's why we are going to install those plugins by entering:
sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-audio-plugins
in terminal.
This package will make sure all our programs will work how we want them to work.

When you go to Applications > Sound & Video you'll see you've got a ton of apps there. Go ahead and try some. Some of them won't work now or will say that they require JACK. No worries, we'll cover that soon! ;-)

Make sure you check this place again from time to time because from now on things might just follow up a lot quicker ;-)

kind regards


Woutervddn
TechProjectMasters

PS: sorry for the bad photo quality. I'll use a better imagehost next time ;-)

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