In which I share some tips on getting a Linux system set up for making music.
Audio on Linux What do you use to make music on a Linux computer? This is an answer; one of many, certainly not the best, but it’s my answer. I’m making unpopular, somewhat experimental, music. I’m on a low budget. It’s amateur home-recording and soft-synth stuff; I don’t have a studio, or even a bedroom full of hardware synthesizers. So if that’s how you work, this might work for you.
In which several interesting noises are made.
30 days, 30 noises. My plan for November 2020 is to make 30 patches for the Yoshimi software synthesizer, and post them along with audio samples. Yoshimi is a fork of ZynAddSubFx, and exports patches in a compatible format, which I'll include here. (I have nothing against the slightly more famous ZynAddSubFx, but the two projects are still pretty similar, and Yoshimi has the pronounceable name and the pink robot icon.
In which I tell Hello Games what's what.
ѰҴϑŁ¶¤ЖӚӠℓ‡Ԓ∫ѰҴϑŁ¶¤ЖӚӠℓ‡Ԓ Just about the most anticipated computer game of last year, No Man’s Sky was notable for the algorithmically-generated galaxy in which it’s set - trillions of planets, all unique. It’s awe-inspiring. Unique creatures roam among unique plants and rocks on unique landforms, but when you land your nearly-unique starship at a rather familiar-looking trading station, the trading terminal is exactly the same as all the others.
In which Csound might just get a Q&A site.
Wouldn’t it be nice… …if there were an equivalent of Stack Overflow, the popular and tremendously useful programming question-and-answer site, for Csound? That’s what these guys are proposing. I’ve put my name to it (the 7th supporter - never let it be said I’m not an early adopter), but I’m not convinced it’s got the momentum to take off. After all, there is already Stack Overflow itself, which has all of 19 questions tagged “csound”.
In which Csound newbies learn to put together a little synthesizer.
What are Csound and Cabbage? Csound is a computer music composition system. It turns 30 this year (2016), which makes it a veteran in technology terms: 1986 was the year of the Nintendo Entertainment System, if that helps. It predates the 486 processor, the World Wide Web, Linux, SMS, Java, and mobile phones smaller than a brick. But Csound has continued to evolve, and is still in active development and use.