Switching to KXStudio
I've used AVLinux to my music works past year, but when its development stopped last summer, I finally decided to try KXStudio. At christmas vacation I took time to finally install it, and procedure was really easy.
I installed vanilla Ubuntu 12.10 with Unity and then followed this guide from KXStudio website. All went well, and soon I had a shiny new KXStudio with Unity desktop. I'll have to give kudos to FalkTX for supporting new Unity features like app indicators: no other music software on Linux uses those, and for example QJackCtl is nowadays PITA in Unity, because it cannot be minimized to system tray.
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KXStudio with Unity desktop looks just gorgeous.[/caption]
(I think supporting those new Ubuntu technologies is really important no matter whether we like them or not: most people use Ubuntu, and if they cannot get any music software working easily, they will not bother at all, but switch back to Windows or Mac. Maybe I should write separate article about this.)
Cadence and Claudia
Anyway, when I switch my computer on and log in, I start with Cadence: it is tool for starting and stopping Jack, configuring soundcard and launching few additional services: Alsa to Jack bridge (nice with Youtube videos and such), Alsa midi to Jack midi bridge and PulseAudio to Jack bridge.
When Cadence is started and Jack is running I switch to Tools tab and select Claudia.
Claudia is graphical LADISH client and it manages loading and saving projects. It has ready-made templates for all the programs one would like to use, and customizing environment is quite easy if you know how command-line arguments work in Linux. Basically Claudia is a very nice starting point if you want to find out what is included in KXStudio: all the programs and synths are there.
I've created one studio for each of my sound cards (two atm), and then I have one room with Basic preset inside of those studios. That way I can normalise all my projects' connections: no matter whether I use my integrated soundcard or Fast Track Ultra, all projects open inside a Basic room preset and have just the same connections.
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Claudia loaded with FastTrackUltra studio and basic room called "Perushuone".[/caption]
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Claudia has very nice status bat at the bottom of the window. One can also change buffer size with it on the fly.[/caption]
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Sidebar lists all programs that are included to the project. It also shows wether they are running or inactive. In this example all programs are running.[/caption]
Working with it
I've tested producing few tracks, and my experiences are variable: on the other hand all works better than ever: I can really launch and save my programs quite widely. On the other hand most of the programs crash all the time and there are dozens of quirks to remember: different key commands between programs, buttons that crash everything, synths that don't auto-save their presets and so-on. And I've found so many irritating bugs (or maybe they are features?) from Qtractor that I really consider just installing Ardour 3.
After some weeks of testing I decided to switch from Unity to XFCE. Unity is nice and easy-to-use desktop environment, but my computer hangs up with it. XFCE eats less memory and horsepower, so I can use more softsynths!
Anyway I really recommend KXStudio! There are so many great tools and synths readily installed, and I'm very optimistic that when I find right tools (Ardour 3 maybe?), I can really get to work and do better stuff than ever. Now I just hope that ZynAddSubFX soon gets some kind of session management support and proper midi-learn.
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My first project here. I created this as "studio" because I didn't know how to work with Claudia. Midi Through comes from Seq24 that I didn't get working with Claudia. Maybe different A2J bridge settings would've done it?[/caption]
And here is the song I made with my new setup: [soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/78137941" params="" width=" 100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]