Compile Ardour 2.3 in Ubuntu Gutsy

Published by ubustu on February 10, 2008 in Ardour. 15 Comments

Recently we were shoked to find the version of Ardour currently available in the official Ubuntu repository was more than six months old. Since August 8th of 2007 (the release date of Ardour 2.0.5) many goodies have been added, existing features have been upgraded and improved, and entire tools have been redesigned. Long story short, if you’re still using 2.0.5, you really need to check out Ardour 2.3

Ardour

Some of the most notable features include mouse scrubbing, an improved JACK control dialog, time stretching via Rubber Band, the beatslicing tool RhythmFerret, LV2 support, not to mention several interface improvements. Here are the official feature lists for 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3.

Downloading the source code

Luckily, compiling Ardour 2.3 in Gutsy is rather straightforward. First things first, you’ll want to download the Ardour 2.3 tarball into your Home folder.

You can also achieve the same results by using the terminal command wget. Just remember that you must use Shift+Ctrl+C and Shift+Ctrl+V to copy and paste from within the terminal to install:

wget <Paste URL Here>

Now, extract the contents of the source code:

tar -xjvf ardour-2.3.1.tar.bz2

Finally, change directories into the newly created ardour-2.3 folder:

cd ardour-2.3

Fetching dependicies and compiling

Before we can compile, we must download a few libraries and compiling tools. Simply paste this list into the terminal:

sudo apt-get install scons build-essential libjack-dev libasound2-dev libglib2.0-dev liblrdf0-dev libboost-dev liblo0-dev libgnomecanvas2-dev libsamplerate0-dev fftw3-dev

Now that all the dependicies are met, we can get down to business. The next command could take anywhere from 10-20 minutes to complete, a perfect time to steep some tea or have a smoke:

scons

If you’ve made it this far without any errors, you are now ready to install:

sudo scons install

Remember, Ardour requires JACK to run, so if you don’t have it already :

sudo apt-get install jackd qjackctl

qjackctl is a simple GUI interface for JACK. So load it up, configure it, and then fire up Ardour 2.3 :

ardour2

screenshot-about-ardour.png

You can add a shortcut to Ardour 2.3 to the panel by using the Custom Application Launcher. The Ardour icons can be found in /usr/local/share/ardour2/icons

How to uninstall

You might want keep the ardour-2.3 source code folder around. We created a unique folder called sourcecode to store such things in. Whatever you do, it can be useful for uninstalling Ardour later. Simply change into the source code directory:

cd ardour-2.3

And run this command to uninstall:

sudo scons -c install

Please leave any questions, suggestions, hints, or tips in the comments below. Thank you!

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Trouble with the Appearance Preferences dialog?

Published by ubustu on January 12, 2008 in Misc. 6 Comments

Here’s a quick off-topic post just to get this Gutsy fix published and easily found on Google, etc.

For some people, opening the Appearance Preferences dialog causes the application to freeze. This program is also known as gnome-appearance-properties.

The freeze usually occurs when trying to switch to another tab, such as the Visual Effects tab, or the Fonts tab. If you are trying to switch to the Visual effects tab and the window keeps freezing, or does nothing at all, this is the post for you.

Users with this problem will find that clicking on the Background tab does nothing :

theme-menu.png

And that clicking on anything else, such as the Customize theme button, causes a blank or empty window to appear, like so:

customize-freeze.png

Luckily the fix is easy. The offending program is one gtk-qt-engine. This is an optional and apparently not very useful package which tries to help KDE programs run and look better on Gnome. If you want to regain control of your Appearance Preferences screen, you need to remove it :

sudo apt-get remove gtk-qt-engine

Now go to System > Preferences > Appearance and viola! You can now freely modify the look and feel of your system.

visual-effects.png

We were also able to run all of our favorite KDE programs just fine without the additional help from gtk-qt-engine.

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New Wallpaper for Gutsy Release

Published by ubustu on September 27, 2007 in News. 5 Comments

New Wallpaper for Ubuntu Studio Gutsy

Although probably not inspired by our critique of the originally proposed wallpaper, a member of the Ubuntu Studio team held an either/or vote via the Ubuntu Studio mailing list to determine the official wallpaper for the upcoming Gutsy release :

Option flame:
http://andrew.wedderburn.googlepages.com/flames-ish.png
http://andrew.wedderburn.googlepages.com/flames-ish-s.png

Option lights:
http://andrew.wedderburn.googlepages.com/ubuntu-ish.png
http://andrew.wedderburn.googlepages.com/screenshot1.png

“Lights” (pictured above) won by a landslide. A few people were curious whether the original gray wallpaper from the first Ubuntu Studio release would still be available. Rest assured, if its not, we’ll hunt it down and host it here ourselves. As for the new wallpaper, new theme, new icons, whether you love them or hate them, it still only takes two clicks to change ‘em. Here’s a little more insight into the new artwork from the lead developer of Ubuntu Studio :

From the chat here and forum votes its clear that “lights” is the preference. I will now take this chance to explain the art. We lost our lead artist mid-way through the development cycle. We had a design direction that also suffered because of this. We called for another art lead but nobody stepped up. Its now open to the community here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuStudio/Artwork/OfficialHardyIncoming

So with v2’s idea being moved to v3, we had to scramble to put another idea in place. What will ship with Gutsy is the result. The gloss is gone. Everyone loved it but it’s being done to death and we are moving away from it to create something really unique for Hardy. So while people wont like it, ultimately, it’s the tools that matter. So everyone get prepared to contribute to Hardy. We’ll be posting a lot to -devel and all constructive chat is welcome.

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The UBUSTU Weekly Roundup #2

Published by ubustu on September 24, 2007 in News. 3 Comments

Welcome to the second installment of the Ubuntu Studio Weekly Roundup. This should be self-explanatory :)

New Artwork for Gutsy

New Ubuntu Studio Artwork

First things first, check out some of the proposed art (not necessarily final) for the upcoming Gutsy release of Ubuntu Studio. We really like the new simplified logo, and the psychedelic logon screen, but, we’re not so wild about the new wallpaper. The proposed wallpaper is the same as the background for the logon screen (which we like!) however, we feel the image is too busy and distracting for a desktop. We’d prefer something more thoughtless, zen-like, and serene. A clean slate, so to speak.

Bulk Image Resize/Rotate

Resize and Rotate Images in Bulk with Ubuntu Studio

Did you know you had bulk image editing capabilities built into your file browser? Thanks to an extension of the file manager Nautilus (both of which are prepackaged with Ubuntu Studio) you can convert images on the fly. Select the images you want to resize and right-click to bring up the context menu pictured above.

Liquid Rescale via Seam Carving

This amazing technology has been turned into a GIMP plugin. While not officially packaged with Ubuntu Studio for the time being, you can download the plugin for Feisty or Gutsy here. It’s a .deb file so all you’ve gotta do is double-click and go! We used it to shrink the Bulk Resize menu above in a matter of seconds!

Learning to Love the Terminal

Accessories > Terminal &eq; Shell

Lastly, we found this great guide to getting the most out of the Terminal (otherwise known as the command line or shell). This particular guide is extremely well written and walks you through the basics with great ease. If you want to be a power user, this is where its at.

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How to Sync Hydrogen with Ardour

Published by ubustu on September 19, 2007 in Ardour and Hydrogen. 7 Comments

We’re going to skim over a few things we’ve already discussed in the last Ardour tutorial, so if things get confusing please go there first.

This tutorial will show you how to sync up the digital audio workstation, Ardour, and the advanced drum machine, Hydrogen. This will allow you to have a full featured drum machine playing in perfect time with your Ardour session. Or, one hell of a fancy click track.

Learning to play nice

First, start up JACK. Open Ardour and create a new session. Near the top of the window in Ardour, make sure that Time Master is enabled (green) and is set to JACK rather than Internal:

Ardour Tutorials

Now, open Hydrogen. For simplicity’s sake, go ahead and load of one of the demo tracks from the File menu :

Hydrogen Tutorials

Continue reading ‘How to Sync Hydrogen with Ardour’

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