PRO DSP1000P automation with Hydrogen ?

Up until now we have always rehearsed and gigged without any FX applied to the vocals.  In fact we use almost no FX on any of our instruments either.  I guess that mainly has to do with the no-nonsense in-your-face type of pop/rock we play.
However, after or last gig my niece said we should add a bit more reverb to the vocals.
When i told her that we have no FX unit (not even built into the mixer) she looked at me as if i was some sort of alien  ;-)

I dont like people looking at me as if i'm an alien, so today we bought a second hand FX unit

KRK VXT6

Today i bought a pair of KRK VXT6 studio monitors  :-)

This is how it works : "take your favorite CD's with you, listen to the monitors, chose the one that sounds 'right' for you"

Some remarks if I may :

rugged laptop for live usage

About a week ago i got an old Compaq EVO N610c laptop from my brother to see if it was good enough to run Hydrogen for live usage. Specs : P4 2GHz, 512 Mb ram
I started by installing standard Ubuntu 11.04, applied all the usual audio tweaks and found out that i could get the Jack latency down to about 10ms without running into any X-runs. Not bad, not bad at all :-)
Next i copied all the Hydrogen songs and the playlist from my main laptop to the EVO, connected my midi keyboard (to simulate the midi drum that would normally be connected to this laptop to trigger sounds and patterns) and i was rockin' !

With all the software in place i wanted to go just one step further and see if i could 'ruggedize' the laptop to make it suitable for live usage. I also wanted to see if i could reduce the setup time (connecting cables) and make it as reliable as possible.

This is what i came up with :

Amsynth jacksession support

Beginning of the week i filed 2 bug reports for Amsynth.  Today one of them was fixed. And the other one, well, was no bug :-S BUT it did help the developer of Amsynth (Nick Dowell) to figure out how jack_session works in QjackCtl and fix an other minor bug :-)
It is always nice to get some feedback on a bug you file, and its even better if the bug actually gets fixed.
I love Amsynth

Startup manager

A couple of days ago i decided to cleanup the audio startup scripts i created so far and put them all together into 1 'master' startup script.
Since i have a number of different startup scripts for various configurations (internal sound card, firewire soundcard, network setup, softsynths ...) I wanted to make it flexible and easy to extend + avoid using the terminal to start it up. For this last bit i used zenity and this is the result :

I created a launcher on my desktop so i can easily access it, and although i'm not 100% happy with it yet it definitely helps me when i want to switch between different setups or when i want to try something new.

Nice article : Jack and friends

i just stumbled upon this nice article about Jack and some of the most famous Jacked audio apps. Not too much detail, but it's still a nice article. Enjoy !

Jack_session first steps : it ROCKS !

I just did a first test with the jack_session session management and i gotta say i'm impressed !
The setup was simple : AlsaPlayer, Yoshimi and Qtracktor. To manage jack i upgraded QjackCtl to version V0.3.7 (from the KXStudio PPA) and after starting it up i saw a new 'Session' button on it: