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Ubuntu Studio Announced 268

Posted by Zonk from the another-toy-for-ubuntu-users dept.
lukeknipe writes "Ubuntu has set up a page for the April release of the Ubuntu Studio. An ambitious project, it is described by Ubuntu as a 'multimedia editing flavor of Ubuntu for the Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional who is already familiar with the Ubuntu-Gnome environment.' They've set up an Ubuntu Studios Wiki for the project, and their stated goal is to have a the package ready for use in time for 'Feisty Fawn'."
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Ubuntu Studio Announced More

Ubuntu Studio Announced

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  • Last Rev (Score:5, Funny)

    by jdigriz ( 676802 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @04:57AM (#17700702)
    I am so waiting for "Zany Zebra"

  • Good news (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dotslashdot ( 694478 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @05:08AM (#17700746)
    This will really help attract even more dedicated linux users. As a multimedia enthusiast, I left Linux because of the lack of multimedia support that was integrated to some level and that worked. Hopefully this will bring back some others who may have left for the same reasons.

    • Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @07:48AM (#17701366)
      Did you read their page at all? Their wiki says their plan includes "Use only packages in official Ubuntu repositories" ... That'd make it just plain Ubuntu, but with certain packages preloaded, rather than the current defaults. Just like Kubuntu and Xubuntu do.

      Maybe a neat idea, but I wouldn't put much effort into it if it was my baby, and I certainly don't approve of the slashvertising of it before it's really even started. Vaporware is a BAD thing for Linux.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 )
        ...I certainly don't approve of the slashvertising of it before it's really even started. Vaporware is a BAD thing for Linux.

        Oh, good one! Now you've just blown *any* chance of us ever seeing Duke Nukem Forever come out for Linux...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zotz ( 3951 )
        [Did you read their page at all? Their wiki says their plan includes "Use only packages in official Ubuntu repositories"]

        I read some, poking around on the wiki it seems like they are working on getting the packages that they want to use, and that are not currently in the repositories, into the repositories.

        So you are right, but your statement doesn't capture the whole picture from what I can tell in a short time.

        A decent "audio" (low enough latency for ardour multitrack recording - say 24 tracks recording a

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Aladrin ( 926209 )
          I am not an artist, I'm a programmer, so I can't really say exactly what needs to be done to make Linux handle audio/video/graphics for professionals, but simple re-arranging the packages isn't much of a step. I'll agree that it's in the right direction, but it seems a LOT of work for nearly no benefit. It's not as if you can't just apt-get everything they are including from a standard install.

          If the apps were all top-notch already, I could see it being worthwhile. I prefer Kubuntu over straight Ubuntu m

  • The Ubuntu Way of doing things ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Sunday January 21, 2007 @05:15AM (#17700778)
    ... is what was desperately missing within the Linux/OSS community. Just looking at that splash page of the Ubuntu Studio project made me utter a sigh of relief. Visual and outer skin consistency are things that Linux has seruiously lacked up to now. Ubuntu - basically a not-like-shit-looking version of debian - is what OSS needs to finally succeed in the real world. They use Gnome (which I don't like) but if they continue to improve it style as they did I couldn't care less.
    Seeing this, one knows that OSS will prevail and Ubuntu will be at the helm. Nice prospects indeed.

    • Re:The Ubuntu Way of doing things ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by aurelian ( 551052 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @06:10AM (#17700984)
      The Ubuntu Way of doing things ... is what was desperately missing within the Linux/OSS community.

      You mean a millionaire prepared to spend lots of his own money with no prospect of short-term return? Yeah probably. Maybe if Linux distros became even more like sports teams, we'd have cheerleaders as well!

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You mean a millionaire prepared to spend lots of his own money with no prospect of short-term return?

        No prospect?

        From The ubuntu marketing mailing list [mail-archive.com]:

        Ubuntu is a distro. It does not need to make money. Canonical is the
        company which funds most of the development on that distro. Canonical
        needs to make money. Is Canonical profitable? AFAIK, currently no.
        However, as a private company, their finances are not available for
        public scrutiny. How does Canonical make money? Support and services.
        Will Ubuntu be around

        • Yep that pretty much says the same thing - no prospect of *short-term* return. the $10 million came from Mark Shuttleworth selling Thawte, not Ubuntu support tickets

          BTW I think Ubuntu is great - been using it since the first release (when we actually did have naked cheerleaders on the desktop wallpaper). And I'm not saying the community or the attitude of the distro is irrelevant.

      • ...we'd have cheerleaders as well!

        We do [dindinx.net]!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by kbahey ( 102895 )
      They use Gnome (which I don't like) ...

      You don't have to use Gnome.

      Just download Kubuntu [kubuntu.org] and enjoy KDE. We use it on five machines, and it is great.
  • This might be the distro that might attract me away from my redhat core. I started with redhat 3 back in the day and progressed with each new release and now I'm using fedora core 6. People have been bugging me to try Ubuntu (in spite of the fact that they keep calling it "Oou-Buhn-Too" or even "You-Buhn-Too") But given that this one aims to cater to an interest that I haven't fully explored yet...? Maybe it's time.

  • Great Idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @05:19AM (#17700796) Journal
    This really is a great idea for a distro. In my own experience, I've found that keeping workstation task (web, e-mail, programming, etc) and multimedia tasks (DVR, editing, etc. as well as games...) on seperate systems works out for the best of both tasks. The two have a terrible tendancy to conflict with each other...

    One may be working on a job that will take hours, while the other may need a quick reboot ASAP. One may need 99% uptime, while the other serves it's purpose just as well at 95% downtime. One needs quite high-end hardware, latest drivers, and frequent updating of software, while the other is better handled by older, lower-power, more reliable hardware and old, known-good software. One can be tucked away in a corner, while the other often needs to be nearby. etc.

    Plus, it's no secret that many multimedia tools are a serious hassle to get up and working in the first place. Different toolkits and widely varying interfaces abound in this space. Good luck trying to INTEGRATE them with each other, on your own. My multimedia system is filled with shell scripts, which do the job pretty well, but aren't very elegant solutions. Doing something in a convoluted way is sometimes quicker and easier than trying to adapt the scripts that, for example, convert between formats for different editing tools.

  • I've been meaning to get back into recording, but ardour has been putting me off it for years. Perhaps the Ubuntu team will dig out something that doesn't require the user to script stuff to get going. I've been meaning to check out Beast ( http://beast.gtk.org [gtk.org] ) but haven't gotten around to it yet.

    Anyone got any other good audio apps.

    As for the comment I see about no good video editing apps, I've had marvelous success with kino. I did a documentary on a Stop Bush demo when the bastard came to Canberra. It

  • The wrong direction (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JPriest ( 547211 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @05:32AM (#17700844) Homepage
    I fail to see the point of forking an entire Operating System for the sake of haveing 4 or 5 applications installed on it.

    Why not just build packages than can be installed to the main Ubuntu distro(s) already out there?

    • Re:The wrong direction (Score:5, Informative)

      by mrjb ( 547783 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @06:03AM (#17700964)
      I fail to see the point of forking an entire Operating System for the sake of haveing 4 or 5 applications installed on it.

      To us pro-audio guys this is great news. My guess is you're not into pro audio. You must have missed my other post [slashdot.org]. You'll see, the number of applications is significantly bigger than that.

      Secondly, pro audio is a field that places some very specific requirements on the OS. For years on end, I've needed to manually rebuild my kernel to include Ingo Molnar's low latency patches. Without these patches, linux audio will either suffer dropouts (not a huge deal for gaming but intolerable for pro audio) or feel sluggish. For quite a while, doing pro audio on Linux meant following endless HOWTO's, patching the kernel, and so on. A fork prevents this, without bothering other users with features that are not ready for prime time. *That* is the point.

      I'm thrilled to see that after years, a lot of the progress that has been made has found actually ended up finding its way into the mainstream kernel, and I'm sure this will keep happening. I'm particularly happy about ALSA being part of the kernel now. I've also gladly welcomed the O(1) I/O scheduler, and recently, at last, as of kernel 2.6.18, Ingo Molnar&co's low latency patch finally made it into there. No more re-compiling the kernel for realtime support!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )
        A fork prevents this, without bothering other users with features that are not ready for prime time. *That* is the point.

        I'm thrilled to see that after years, a lot of the progress that has been made has found actually ended up finding its way into the mainstream kernel, and I'm sure this will keep happening. I'm particularly happy about ALSA being part of the kernel now. I've also gladly welcomed the O(1) I/O scheduler, and recently, at last, as of kernel 2.6.18, Ingo Molnar&co's low latency patch fina

        • Re:The wrong direction (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @08:20AM (#17701456)
          What he's saying is that the needs of people doing pro audio on Linux are considerably different from the needs of someone using Linux as a server or general purpose desktop OS. Serious pro audio users NEED the realtime patches to the kernel--trying to track something and hearing what you've played in your headphones a quarter of a second after you've played it is simply not acceptable for something that needs to be perfect down to the millisecond. So in this case, yes a fork is necessary. It's this attitude of "You don't really need that, do you?" that hurts Linux in the eyes of many people who know what they're talking about. The same can be said for the repeated claims of "You don't really need CMYK support" for the GIMP. Because in order for Linux to be taken seriously in certain fields, these issues need to be addressed. And when I say "seriously", I mean widespread professional adoption, not just hobbyists or people willing to pull their hair out to get something working right.
    • I would imagine it would work much like Kubuntu or Xubuntu.

      If you don't know, the only difference between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu, is what packages are included on the disc, and what packages are installed at install time. If you are like me, and like to see what's going on on the other side of the fence, but like the vanilla Ubuntu for the most part... then you just install Ubuntu, like normal, and then simply install the kubuntu-desktop and xubuntu-desktop meta-packages from the repositories. Th

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ubernostrum ( 219442 )

      Why not just build packages than can be installed to the main Ubuntu distro(s) already out there?

      It's easier for the end user to have something that gives them most or all of what they need out of the box, rather than forcing them to scour around for the packages they need to get their job done. And once you have a solid reusable core OS like Ubuntu, building specialized distros tailored to specific types of users isn't all that hard.

    • And is it really a fork? Highly doubt they wouldn't use GPL to license this studio thing, and it is likely they would use gtk so it is unlikely there would be anything that would prevent this to go to other distros.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by g2devi ( 898503 )
      You're missing something subtle. Ubuntu-studio is a metapackage, just like Kubuntu and Xubuntu. You can install Kubuntu *after* installing ubuntu by installing "kubuntu-desktop" and you can do this for Xubuntu too. If Ubuntu-studio is planned properly, it should be just as easy to install the Ubuntu-studio desktop.

      Basically, it's the best of both world.

  • Linux audio software (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrjb ( 547783 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @05:42AM (#17700886)
    Linux audio is maturing at a rapid pace. Where at one point I considered it not mature enough for studio use, this is rapidly changing. With Ingo Molnar & co's low latency patches being integral part as of kernel 2.6.18, the hard part is taken care of.

    The rest is a matter of finding the right audio and music software. Here's a list of the software that I've actually used personally and that I consider the best of breed audio and music software for Linux. You will find these packages to fulfill most any audio need you might have. If you are going to get started on Linux audio for the first time, check these out before anything else.

    Transport:

    JACK audio connection kit: supported by almost all linux audio software.
    Allows routing audio between jack-enabled applications. Use with qjackctl.

    Mixing:

    Ardour: Multi track Digital Audio Workstation. Very complete and definitely very usable. Main downside: Not all mixing parameters can be MIDI-controlled by an external mixer (yet), this is currently my main obstacle to integrating my mixer into my linux audio chain.

    Audio editing:

    Rezound: A decent wave editor. Feature rich, although not very suitable for multi-track work.
    Audacity: Another good wave editor.
    mhwaveedit: A small wave editor, which, although a bit limited, I've found very reliable for recording jack streams.
    Gnu Wave Cleaner: To remove noise, pops and crackle from recordings. Works well, but unfortunately is rather unstable. Make a backup of your audio before denoising it.

    Soft synths:

    ZynAddSubFX: A very nice virtual analog synth
    fluidsynth: Sample-based synth, use with qsynth or (better) java-based fluidgui
    LinuxSampler: More powerful sampler than fluidsynth, albeit with higher latency
    Aeolus: A virtual pipe organ. Believable to the untrained ear.

    Composition:

    soundtracker: IT-tracker style music editor
    hydrogen: A drum machine (or more accurately, a drum sequencer).
    Rosegarden: A MIDI sequencer. Use in combination with one of the above soft synths. I've experienced some trouble combining both MIDI and audio inside the same project.

    Real-time processing:

    LADSPA plugins: Effect processing for almost any purpose. Most prominently absent is a good pitch corrector/auto tune.
    freqtweak: Create all kinds of interesting effects by tweaking parameters in the frequency domain.
    Jack-rack: Process incoming JACK audio in realtime.

    Other:

    amidi: Command line utility to dump incoming MIDI traffic and send MIDI traffic.
                  Very useful for MIDI diagnostics
    hd24tools: A jack-enabled suite that allows playing disks recorded on Alesis HD24 recorder.

    Main things I feel are still lacking:

    - Replacing audio peaks by drums: I've written a small tool, drumreplacer, which does this for a single audio channel. However it is rather limited and uses a lot of CPU. Still a far cry from the capabilities of drumagog.
    - Auto tune
    - A tool to 'unwobble' wobbly drum tracks in real time

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Stormx2 ( 1003260 )
      I have to say the audio department is already pretty good. But video? Video editing packages for ubuntu are very limited at best. I've tried editing video on more than one occasion and drawn a complete blank after 4 or 5 apps. Same goes for graphics, I absolutely cannot stand The GIMP. I try to emulate paint shop pro 7, but its pretty shakey...

    • Transport: JACK audio connection kit: supported by almost all linux audio software.

      I have recently spent a lot of time researching network-transparent audio transport applications so that I can, for example, walk around my apartment with a wireless Linux laptop while it is outputting sound to big speakers in the room (over wifi to a Linux media server connected to an audio receiver).

      I have come across JACK and a dozens other apps, but it seems that PulseAudio [pulseaudio.org] is by far the most advanced and the clean

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by froh ( 553491 )

      - Replacing audio peaks by drums: I've written a small tool, drumreplacer, which does this for a single audio channel. However it is rather limited and uses a lot of CPU. Still a far cry from the capabilities of drumagog.

      You should check out Aubio http://aubio.piem.org/ [piem.org] It does what you want, and more. It turns my guitar into a midi instrument when combined with jack configured to ultralow latency via my beautiful M-auio 44 soundcard.

    • Jokosher (Score:4, Interesting)

      by babbling ( 952366 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @08:21AM (#17701460)
      You left out Jokosher. It's still less than a year old, but it's probably already one of the best, and it's only going to get better. Jono Bacon (the guy who started the project) is an employee of Canonical, and I'm pretty sure Jokosher is one of the applications open in that screenshot on the Ubuntu Studio website, so you can expect it to be one of the "killer apps" in Ubuntu Studio.

  • No use without HW support... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bazman ( 4849 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @06:36AM (#17701086) Journal
    What's the point of me installing UbuntuStudio if there's no support for my RT-X100 video editing card? No real-time effects. No hardware encoding. Perhaps no DV grabbing either.

    Until hardware suppliers ship Linux drivers (with all the interoperability issues of standardising drives for so many things) its pointless. I'm sticking to Windows for my video editing and music mixing. Linux for everything else though...

  • That's only three months from now. I can already see it being "almost done" at that time, and of course it's such a good PR doohickey that they'll push back Feisty two months rather than wait for Feisty+1. And then the integration will still be half-assed. Save it for 7.10 and do a killer job, guys.

  • If you can't wait: 64 Studio (Score:3)

    by stereoroid ( 234317 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @08:22AM (#17701468) Homepage Journal

    I've been trying out 64Studio [64studio.com] v1.0 over the last couple of months. Debian-based, with a core set of audio apps that fit on a single CD, and JACK to glue them all together. Ardour and Rosegarden work well, and it wasn't hard to get my USB audio & MIDI gear working with standard modules. Includes some decent graphics / video programs too, Blender3D, CinePaint & more. If I have one wish, though, it's for more synthesisers in the base package, and even a general-purpose sampler. (QSampler only supports GigaSampler files so far, not building your own sample sets, as supplied.)

  • Has anybody tested out Wired [epitech.net]? I never got around to installing it myself, but it looks promising as well. Just wondering since it does not seem to be mentioned here at all...

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