Open-source music and audio is finally delivering the goods: useful and unique tools that make sense even alongside commercial/proprietary software. And as a sign that the mainstream could get a taste of these tools soon, Intel is exhibiting at the massive Las Vegas CES consumer electronics show with Transmission, says Trinity Audio’s Ronald Stewart.

Transmission is Trinity Audio’s open source software bundle and live Linux distribution. It’s built for Trinity’s Linux-powered Trinity mobile studio device, which we’ll be seeing more of soon. At CES, it’s running at the Intel booth on the Samsung Q1 Ultra Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC). (The advantage of the Trinity over the UMPC for audio folks: XLR jacks, among other things.) But you can also run this free software on your PC — try the live CD link below. Haven’t tried it on Intel Mac yet, but that should work, too, theoretically.

Audacity [the open-source waveform editor]

Burn is a cd burn app

DJ is IDJ for live podcasting ( i love this with a mic)

Drum is Hydrogen [the simple but fun software drum machine]

Mixer is the Gnome ALSA mixer [for mixing virtual channels of audio on your system -- something not nearly as functional on Mac or Windows]

Mixxx 1.6 beta (rips with the touch screen grabbing the tracks and faders)

Record is Ardourino (Ardour is so awesome) [the open-source DAW]

Sequencer is Qtractor (another great app)

Synth is amsynth

Upload is an ftp app [so you can upload your tracks]

Zynaddsubfx is another great synth

For more description and links to the individual tools — an excellent selection of the creme de la creme on Linux — check the Transmission site. (warning: auto-plays audio!)

Transmission

But no need to have a UMPC or Trinity device to give this a spin. This live CD will do the trick. For Mac users, it even includes the native (non-Linux) Ardour for Mac, an excellent free and open source DAW for Mac users.

Trinity Live Master CD

Even as someone dedicated to proprietary software I really can’t live without (hello, Ableton!), I think there’s huge potential in using these applications for specific applications (like mobile devices), for collaboration, and file exchange. If we were really lucky, some of those major developers would start to build in support for, say, Ardour’s file format. But that’s the subject of another story.

Below: the Trinity mobile device getting celebrity treatment.

Ardour, the free and open source DAW for Mac and Linux, has already won some fans by providing robust audio multitrack features in free software, along with some unique innovations (like robust support for inter-app JACK audio routing). But one major complaint has been a lack of serious MIDI tools. MIDI functionality is baked in, but it’s not as full-featured as some might like.

That should change soon: Ardour is involved in Google’s Summer of Code, a seasonal code-fest that helps develop open source projects. Ardour creator Paul Davis describes progress on his Ardour blog:

Dave Robillard continues his work on Ardour’s MIDI recording, playback and editing capabilities as part of the Google Summer of Code program. Since the last screenshot (below), Dave has added color coding of velocity values, percussion tracks, two modes for delivering MIDI CC data (discrete+interpolated), and some basic editing operations such as quantize, note selection and pencil-based note creation & deletion.

Sounds great to me. Of course, it could rob Paul of the job of having to listen to whining forum/comment trolls complaining about the lack of Ardour MIDI. We’ll be watching — an update following the Summer of Code is definitely in order. I’d love to have a free DAW to use with students, for instance, as opposed to them (cough) pirating Cubase.

For mobile work, your choices have traditionally come down to one of two choices: either lug your laptop and audio interface, or get dedicated recording hardware with far fewer capabilities. We’ve been following the evolution of the Linux-powered Trinity mobile recorder for over a year now because we’re interested in what could happen between those two extremes.

Prototype Trinity recorders initially failed to impress on the software side: the bundled software focused on Audacity 2.0, a fairly basic waveform editor. That already allows far more than what’s possible with dedicated hardware recorders, but maybe not quite enough to warrant leaving your laptop at home. Since we last saw it, though, the Trinity has gotten two major improvements. First, it’s not naked any more; it’s got a lovely, brushed aluminum case. More importantly, though, it’s got an application worth writing home about: a new, mobile/embedded edition of the powerful, free DAW Ardour called Ardourino.

Linux naysayers get mighty grumpy about all the Ubuntu hype. I can certainly imagine some Ubuntu fatigue, but Ubuntu is actually gaining some real traction in a way that previous attempts to be a “Linux for the rest of us” have not. For that reason, it’s significant that there’s an Ubuntu release for creatives — not just one niche group of people, like audio, but for multimedia creative work in general. We’ve seen Ubuntu Studio before, but the big news is that you can go and download it now, and give it a shot on your Intel Mac or PC:

Ubuntu Studio

Note that there’s no live CD version, so you will have to install it to try it (though if you’re curious about Ubuntu, you could use a live CD of that).

We’ll be testing Ubuntu Studio CDM over the summer, both for the music and motion side. I will say, though, the music and audio end of this release seems to pale in comparison to Ubuntu Studio’s video and graphics tools. There’s Ardour, yes, a terrific DAW, and built-in JACK support. Other than that, though, the choices are generally far weaker than what’s available in commercial and even free closed-source software — or, for that matter, even other Linux audio distros. Compare the 3D application Blender, or Cinepaint for video, which easily stand alongside commercial tools. On the other hand, there are lots of terrific music packages that just didn’t make it into Ubuntu Studio — and that’s okay, because it’s not necessarily that hard to install the other apps. And there is a full complement of JACK audio utilities and some neat toys (trackers and whatnot). The big remaining question will be how the distro itself does in terms of performance and ease of use, which we’ll definitely be testing here.

Ardour, the free, open-source audio workstation for Mac and Linux, received a major 2.0 release on April 30. Now, this is the point where you’d normally expect to see the same, boring list of feature improvements that commercial manufacturers release as bullets in each release. But when I asked the Ardour project lead Paul Davis to say something about the new version, he responded with something — well, unorthodox:

Audio on Linux sucks, you can’t make music on it, there are no soft synths, my plug-ins don’t run, nobody can configure Linux, my hardware doesn’t work on Linux, it can’t open Pro Tools sessions, it doesn’t do MIDI sequencing which makes it about 10 years behind the curve, Reaper is better and changing faster, it doesn’t run on Windows, why bother?

Sorry to disappoint those of you ready to troll in comments; Paul just took your ammunition.
Ardour 2.0 Release

Whew! I’m glad we got that out of the way. Now, having dispensed with the typical PR hype (yeah, that should silence any comment trolls), the 2.0 “bullet points” actually do look quite nice:

If you haven’t been paying much attention to the leading open source DAW, Ardour, now might be a good time to start. Not only is this software fully open source and freely available for Mac OS X and Linux, but as it nears a major upgrade, it’s getting some significant feature support — and the endorsement of a studio recording heavyweight. Even if you never intend to use Ardour, this could have significant positive ramifications for commercial DAWs, too, like helping build a truly open interchange format and plug-in platform.