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:

session management confusion

Like i wrote before : there are LOTS of session management options to choose from in the linux world. They all more-or-less do the same thing, but they dont work for all apps, require different jack versions ...

Today i stumbled upon a forum thread on linuxmusicians.com that illustrates this confusion very well.

Let me warn you : the chances are that you will be even more confused after reading this ;-)

quick & easy audio setup

I have been thinking about the easiest and quickest way to configure my current live setup (jack-hydrogen-alsaplayer) that i talked about in previous posts.  The goal is to startup the PC, click 1 shortcut and the setup is running.
You could see this as a 'mini' session, so LADISH could be an option.  However, i wanted to keep it really simple since the configuration of this setup doesn't change often and there are only 3 components in the setup.

I decided to write a small bash script :