been fiddling with linux audio stuff recently. Been making some progress,
mostly due to
Planet CCRMA.

It’s improved alot since I last took a look. Enough so that I’m kind of
vaguely thinking about what kind of laptop/small system I could put
together that would be portable enough and powerful enough to make
interesting noises.

JACK and
ALSA are pretty much required to do anything useful. Maybe we can
get ALSA into Fedora at some point
(if nothing else, with 2.6…)

But between JACK, ALSA, and LADSPA and
all caps acroynmns, it’s starting to verge on useable. Like so much stuff
in linux and open source software, integration is whats really needed.

Been fiddling with Pd, and AlsaModulatSynth
(I pretty much love any app with a menu item for “randomize all settings”),
Jack Rack, and some experimental support for windows VST plugins via wine.
See this screenshot for an example. Kind of fun.

I don’t really have anything midi, so I haven’t poked around the midi stuff that much,
but it looks like decent support exists. And it looks like my $20 sound card (soundBlaster PCI)
has a midi port/dongle thing thats supportted, so something to try.