Free multitrack software for linux

Simple Multitrack contains a set of programs that allows the simultaneous recording of an audio track while listening to a monitor mix of other tracks.

This software uses the OSS audio drivers found in the Linux kernel or the
CoreAudio API on Mac OS X. It has been tested on

Linux 2.4.20 on a Pentium III 1.4GHz with a SBLive soundcard, and
Linux 2.4.20 on a Pentium I 120MHz laptop with a Crystal soundcard.
Mac OS 10.3.3 on a PowerBook G4.

Both Linux machines are running Slackware, so please tell me about your successes or problems on other distros.

Please read the BUGS section of this document. If you have bug reports, bug fixes, questions, comments, criticism, improvements, or documentation corrections please e-mail me.

OVERVIEW:

./build
cd bin;
source shellsetup;

This will compile the programs and put them in your path.
It will also make your shell prompt shorter, so you have room.
It will also define a little function that is explained below.

to record initial track:
srp < /dev/zero > my_file

to listen to a track:
mix 2 1 1 1 my_file | srp > /dev/null

to listen to one track while recording a new track:
mix 2 1 1 1 file_1 | srp > file_2

to listen to two tracks while recording a new track:
mix 2 1 .5 .5 file_1 .5 .5 file_2 | srp > file_3

Simple Multitrack is basically two programs. They were designed to be used together, but they might be useful on their own. I will describe each program separately before discussing them together.

mix is a command line program. It mixes one or more monophonic audio files into a single output stream. The output stream can have any number of channels: mono, stereo, quad, whatever you like. The output stream is written to standard out.

The input files are specified as command line arguments, as are the gain settings for each input. Invocation goes like this (in stereo mode):

mix nocs mgain l_gain_1 r_gain_1 file_1 l_gain_2 r_gain_2 file_2 ...

where nocs is the number of output channels, and mgain is the master gain.

Command line arguments to mix after the nocs and mgain arguments are the channels. For N output channels, you will have N gain arguments and then the name of the file. Therefore, the arguments after nocs and mgain must appear in (nocs+1)-tuples.

mix will continue to pump out an endless stream of silence after the end of the input files is reached. This behavior is different from most UNIX command line programs, which exit at the end of their input data, which closes their stdout.

mix can be exited with the keyboard interrupt, ctrl-c. The input files must be 16-bit 44100 samples/sec monophonic raw signed word files. The output stream is in 16-bit 44100 samples/sec stereo raw signed word format. (Thank God, its in word format!) The program sox can be used to convert from most audio formats to and from most other audio formats.

EXAMPLES:

mix 2 1 0 1 my_file
This pans my_file completely to the right.

mix 2 1 1 1 my_file
This centers my_file.

mix 2 .5 1 0 flute 0 1 viola
This puts the flute completely to the left and viola completely to the right.
The master_gain is set to .5 to reduce the overall level of the mix by 3dB.

mix 2 .5 1 .3 flute .2 .9 viola
This is similar but gentler.

mix 2 .5 2 .6 flute .2 .9 viola
This is the same but the flute is louder.

mix 2 1 2 .6 flute .2 .9 viola .3 .3 violin
The violin is added in the center.

Note: If you get clipping errors when using mix, you can lower the mgain factor instead of adjusting all of the individual channel gains, although that works too.

srp is a command line program. It enables simultaneous recording and playback of audio using a sound card. It will only work if your sound card and its driver support full-duplex operation correctly.

srp reads a stream of stereo 16-bit 44100 samples/sec raw signed word data on standard in and plays that stream out on the soundcard. Meanwhile, it reads from the left channel of the soundcard and writes a mono 16-bit 44100 samp/sec stream on standard out.

Musix GNU+Linux is a Free Operating system intended for musicians and users in general. Musix GNU+Linux also contains an enormous collection of free programs.
The system will boot from your CD/DVD drive, with no need to install anything on your hard disk. The programs currently support the Spanish and English languages.
Main features:
- Master for CD
- Publish musical scores
- Print musical scores
- Create MIDI Instruments
- Record and reproduce Audio and MIDI
- Edit and mix Audio and MIDI tracks with Multitrack Sequencers/Editors
- Perform noise-reduction to recover recordings
- Use effects in real time with any device (microphone, line, etc.)
- Connect a keyboard or another MIDI device and control the available software synthesizers

Traverso project is a free, cross platform multitrack audio recording and editing suite, with an innovative and easy to master User Interface. Its suited for both the professional and home user, who needs a robust and solid DAW.
A complete suite
Traverso is a complete solution from recording to CD Mastering. By supplying many common tools in one package, the user isnt forced to learn different applications who often have different ways to be controlled. This will lower the learning curve considerably and as a result, the user will be able to do his audio processing much quicker!
Robust non-linear audio processing
A unique approach to non-linear audio processing was developed for Traverso to provide extremely solid and robust audio processing and editing. Adding and removal of effects plugins, moving Audio Clips or creating new Tracks during playback is perfectly save, giving the user the opportunity to instantly get feedback on his work!
Enhancements:
- New AudioClip Edit Dialog
- Reworked and much improved External Processing Dialog
- Jack transport control support added
- A number of important bug fixes, including the audible glitch when playing over splitpoint
- Improved default theme (better contrast)

Wired project aims to be a professional music production and creation software running on the Linux operating system. Wired supports unlimited Audio/Midi tracks playback and recording, and introduces a Plugin system for instruments and effects. It can also read AKAI CDs and import 18 different Wave formats.

The following instruments and effects are being developed:

Loop sampler, with pitch shifting and time-stretching
Beatbox with a new editing concept, to create reallistic and complex drum sequences
MIDI controlled sampler, which can read AKAI program and sample files.
High-pass, Low-pass and Notch filters
Compressor/Limiter
Delay

Wired is composed of a Audio/MIDI sequencer and a rack based plugin system, which enables you to record your instruments and mix them with electronic effects at the same time. The user interface of Wired has been designed to make it easy for professionals or beginners to compose music in a software based environment.

Wired targets the Linux operating system, and uses GTK and wxWindows for the graphic interface. It supports the ALSA sound architecture and OSS for Audio and MIDI I/O.

The following parts of the project are already implemented :

Wired

Multitrack Audio playback and recording
Multitrack Midi playback and recording
Sequencer engine
ALSA/OSS/Jack Audio support
ALSA MIDI Input support
Plugin system
Rack view
Sequencer view
Dynamic Mixer console
Transport panel
Online help
Import Wave and Midi files
Reads AKAI CDs

Plugins

Loop Sampler
Beatbox
Sampler
Low-pass filter
Delay
Crusher

Glame is a multi-track wave-editor with synthesis capabilities.

Glame is targeted to be the GIMP for audio processing. Glame supports non destructive multitrack editing, recording and mixing; realtime effects using native or LADSPA plugins; OSS, ALSA or SGI audio and WAV, Mp3 and Ogg file formats.

Blue for CSound project is a java program for use with Csound. Its interface is much like a digital multitrack, but differs in that there timelines within timelines (polyObjects). This allows for a compositional organization in time that seems to me to be very intuitive, informative, and flexible.
Main features:
- SoundObjects are the building blocks within blues score timeline. soundObjects can be lists of notes, algorithmic generators, python script code, csound instrument definitions, and whatever plugins that are developed for blue. these soundObjects may be text based, but they can be completely GUI based as well.
- Timeline allows for visual organization of soundObjects
- Polyobject are objects which hold other soundObjects, and have timelines in themselves. working within them on their timelines and outside of them on the parent timeline help organize and understand the concepts of objective time and relative time between different objects
- The soundOject library allow for instantiating multiple copies of a soundobject, which allows for editting the original object and updating all copies
- noteProcessors allow for modifying the soundObjects properties, i.e. adding 2 to all p4 values, multiplying all p5 values by 6, etc.
- The orchestra manager organizes csound instruments and functions as an instrument librarian. you can selectively choose what instruments to output to the generated csound .csd file, so you can feel free to keep all of your instruments in a large library and output only the ones you need, cutting down on load time for csound.
- Syntax hilighting of csound language
- Use of scripting for user extensibility
- SoundObject freezing - free up CPU cycles by pre-rendering objects
- Microtonal PianoRoll allows editing notes using any Scala scale
- blueLive - work with soundObjects in realtime to experiment with musical ideas or performance
- and more!

FDMS-3 Ripper is a Perl program for extracting the tracks from the FDMS-3 filesystem. I recently bought a Fostex FD-8 multitrack hard disk recorder for recording music. It works great, but I was disappointed to discover that, although it uses a standard external SCSI hard disk, there was no way to "rip" the recorded tracks from the hard drive to my PC over the SCSI port. The alternatives were to use the analog-out to re-record each track using my soundcard (resulting in loss of quality and loss of synch between tracks), or buying a $500 ADAT card for my PC.

I decided that I would try to figure out a way to rip the music directly over the SCSI port. The FD-8 uses a proprietary Fostex filesystem, FDMS-3. I decided to hook it up to my PC and probed the drive. I was able to figure out the basic layout of the filesystem pretty quickly. Note: this is designed to hard disks formatted in the FDMS-3 "Mastering" mode, which stores the audio data in uncompressed format.

In order to use the program, you will need to take the hard disk that has the FDMS-3 filesystem on it and hook it up to your PC (mine is a SCSI drive -- dont know if this will work with one of the internal IDE drives you can hook up to the FD-8). Make sure that Linux can see the drive (dont try to mount it, though!). You might want to have a look at SCSI-2.4-HOWTO to get the drive recognized. My external hard disk is located at "/dev/sda", but yours could end up elsewhere.

Next, you need to make sure you have the following on your system: perl, sox and fileutils (for the "dd" utility). Security Warning Unfortunately, this program presents significant security issues, so be careful with it. The script needs to be able to access the hard disk directly, so you can either run it as root (not safe), or change the permissons for the hard disk device (in my case, "/dev/sda"). Run the program with "./fdms3rip /dev/sda" (substituting the actual location of your hard disk).

This will list all of the programs present on the hard disk. Then, run it again with the number of the program you want to fetch off the hard disk: "./fdms3rip /dev/sda 5" to get all of the recorded tracks for program number 5. After waiting a bit, you should now have a bunch of WAV files on your Linux machine. Warning This program will create and erase files with the names "dir" and "header" in the directory it is run from. It would be best to run this program from a clean directory, just to make sure there are no problems.

Audio::Ecasound is a Perl binding to the ecasound sampler, recorder, fx-processor.

SYNOPSIS
One function interface:
use Audio::Ecasound qw(:simple);

eci("cs-add play_chainsetup");
eci("c-add 1st_chain");
eci("-i:some_file.wav");
eci("-o:/dev/dsp");
# multiple n separated commands
eci("cop-add -efl:100
# with comments
cop-select 1
copp-select 1
cs-connect");
eci("start");
my $cutoff_inc = 500.0;
while (1) {
sleep(1);
last if eci("engine-status") ne "running";

my $curpos = eci("get-position");
last if $curpos > 15;

my $next_cutoff = $cutoff_inc + eci("copp-get");
# Optional float argument
eci("copp-set", $next_cutoff);
}
eci("stop");
eci("cs-disconnect");
print "Chain operator status: ", eci("cop-status");

Object Interface

use Audio::Ecasound;

my $e = new Audio::Ecasound;
$e->on_error();
$e->eci("cs-add play_chainsetup");
# etc.
Vanilla Ecasound Control Interface (See Ecasounds Programmer Guide):
use Audio::Ecasound qw(:std);

command("copp-get");
$precise_float = last_float() / 2;
command_float_arg("copp-set", $precise_float);
warn last_error() if error();
IAM Interface, pretend interactive mode commands are functions.
use Audio::Ecasound qw(:iam :simple);

# iam commands as functions with s/-/_/g
my $val = copp_get;
copp_set $val+0.1; # floats are stringified so beware
eci("-i /dev/dsp"); # not all commands are exported

Audio::Ecasound provides perl bindings to the ecasound control interface of the ecasound program. You can use perl to automate or interact with ecasound so you dont have to turn you back on the adoring masses packed into Wembly Stadium.
Ecasound is a software package designed for multitrack audio processing. It can be used for audio playback, recording, format conversions, effects processing, mixing, as a LADSPA plugin host and JACK node. Version >= 2.2.X must be installed to use this package. "SEE ALSO" for more info.