Snippets!

Yes, it's more snippets, as Christopher and I continued to test, and much of what we're doing is behind the scenes.

Despite the quiet blog traffic, we've been busy, not only with our own projects, but working towards our project goal of unified applications and utilities in one environment.

Last week, Christopher and I split up and took a task each. He went for working with the new sfz engine in Linuxsampler, and i headed off to the land of JackAudio, and Torben Hohn's work with JackSession.

Christopher began his trip with a day of manual reading, and although this isn't the most exciting way to spend one's time, it's proved more than useful. The SFZ format has been, until recently, a bit a of a sleeper in sample and audio circles, but this powerful format seems to be on the rise, as users are more and more drawn to non proprietary formats.

Although Cakewalk, a commercial company, bought RG, and as a result, picked up the SFZ format as result, there's no license involved, and to Cakewalk's credit, they've kept it this way. Nice to see a reasonable attitude in this world of patents, and legal blustering.

The SFZ format is both incredibly powerful and simple. It consists of the wav/ogg (either one works) files in a directory, and a configurable text file. That's right, it's no more than that. There are a series of what's called "opcodes' which the user can use to specify an action, or parameter change, and the user can use as many or few of these opcodes as he or she wants, to produce an SFZ file.

As the Linuxsampler SFZ engine is fresh out of the oven, not all opcodes are working just yet, but as Christopher found out, the basics are already there, and more are being added on a regular basis. We don't think it will be long before we get a full set, but it's worth mentioning to users to be patient. If your SFZ file doesn't work just yet, it might not be the file, but simply an opcode that isn't coded just yet. Don't panic!

Christopher is continuing his research and testing, and will keep us all up to date, as things progress further. He's also going to do a more extensive review, and basic how to, of SFZ format files, as more opcodes are integrated into the Linuxsampler SFengine.

It goes without saying that we are highly appreciative of the Linuxsampler team's continued development of this amazing sampler, and look forward to seeing it grow and mature further. Thanks!

 ------------------------------------

Last week, I got involved in a discussion with Torben Hohn, one of the Jackaudio developers, about session management. This is a bit of a snarly beast in any OS, and few do it even remotely well, with most not doing it at all.

Managing a session composed of multiple apps, connections, parameters, etc, is a big job for any management system, or at least i thought so until now. Torben has taken the simple and elegant path, outside of huge dreams of automatic session manipulation, involving everything from running the lawnmower from the front porch, to global network systems with a million musicians all playing at once.

He uses Jack as the messaging service, and does so with a minimal impact on the Jack API, leaving the donkey work to an external session management app. It's simple, effective, and in my testing so far, works. Each app in the Jacksession has some additional code (openoctave-midi had 11 lines i think, so it's minimal impact on the app itself), and a "jack_session_notify save" command saves the session to a user specified folder. And I did this mid session, which is crucial for large and complex projects, where the user is making a lot of changes, and running a lot of apps putting pressure on the computer(s).

More to come on this as we add more apps to the jacksession stable, and do further testing, but it just may be the case that after 10 years of discussion about a practical user friendly session management system in Linux Audio, we may actually have something the user can work with, practically, and easily. Jacksession is very much a work in progress, but Torben has done much, quickly, and it shows in the rapid maturity and refinement of this much sought after working toolset. I'll continue testing Jacksession for him, and we'll see what comes as we progress further.....

My thanks and continued respects to Torben for not only his practical perspective, or his formidable coding skills, but the effort he's making for users, with a real, everyday use, intent.

Endless discussion of large and all encompassing dreams are fine, but having the basic toolset, in code, that actually works, is the real result, and something users can work with, not just dream about. We look forward to seeing the modest Jacksession enabling code (11 lines? 13? Maybe 45? Is it really that little?) included in more apps by developers.

Thanks Torben!

Christopher and I are still busy, still testing, and pushing OOP forward. Most projects go through a quiet spell where much of the work is done in the basement, and this is our time to do that.

More to come....

Alex.