Be the master of mastering

Sound mastering is one of the most complicated task for sound engineer, anyone having done music and recorded some tracks have notified the problem of mastering.

If you record a song without using any compression and without doing mastering your going to hear a big volume gap between your production and the one's available on a professional release (CD/LP/WAV).

Since today I was always doing mastering manually using my hardware compressor and different software... Compressor was doing a good job put it wasn't enough to get a real powerful sound, so I tried using some PC plug-in without a real success... The only way I had to get a good mix was to manually remove peak !

All that is finish, for sure I keep all my tube-filter and analog compressor (really useful for live...) but I can now forgot all other sad plug-in used before, JAMin is the only one today !


Just try it out (under Linux with JACK) and you will see his true power... really incredible, nice eq, really good dynamic compressor... and all module can be fine tuned. This software is free and can do better job than some semi-pro expansive software !

Composing music in freedom

I started composing music in 2002 and from this years I was shocked by the price of audio software.

Professional MIDI sequencer can cost several thousands of dollars. But basically what they did is simply sending MIDI messages. I observed same problem with synth module, when wanted to emulate musical instrument with computer I was finally starting to work with SoundFont due to the cost of other professional alternative.

At the begin SoundFont was patented by EMU and usable only on specific Creative product (that include hardware RAM on sound card to load sound wave tables).
This kind of hardware was really useful when PC hardware wasn't able to play (with an acceptable latency) SoundFont.

But today SoundFont can be considered to be an open format. Creative as open documentation and a lot of free tools are available, and today's PC can run it without any problem and without using specific hardware.

So all that to explain that I made transition from Windows to Linux with all what I need to compose music (including SoundFont) with minimal latency. And the best is that it's totally FREE !

I now use Rosegarden as MIDI sequencer, and I want to say that this sequencer is really better than a lot of non-free sequencer you can found on the market.

You find all professional functions needed by a musician to compose a whole song, and with the help of QSynth you can access to huge collection of free virtual instruments using SoundFont technology.

Rosegarden is part of 64Studio distribution, I recommend to all musician working with computer to take a look to powerful Linux tools available for audio production.

Linux is a formidable opportunity for every beginner in music production to start experiment freely professional tools and techniques (preventing use of illegal license in home-studio).

64Studio an open source audio studio

I have spend some times this week-end and Monday to do my first installation of the 64Studio Linux distribution.

I'm using every day Linux (Ubuntu) on my home PC until the begin of the years and I'm really happy with it, I can do all stuff I done before using Windows but for free and in an open world.

I'm still running Windows on my musical PC, but I wanted to know if possible to switch to linux using open source software. I'm actually preparing the computer for new studio (St-Martin 9) so I took this opportunity to try 64Studio, all can I say: Stop use Windows for audio production ! Linux is so powerful !

The studio PC is a Intel P3 800Mhz with 384Mb RAM and 250 GB HDD (half linux/half windows, I'm not alone to use it... so I needed to install windows too) all hardware was automatically recognized by 64Studio.

But the things fantastic with Linux and the ALSA audio platform is the possibility to create 'virtual' audio card. I plugged 3 standard (SoundBlaster to not name it...) sound card in PCI slots and then using ALSA configuration file I created a 'virtual' 6-in/6-out sound card. I now can record/playback simultaneously 6 mono track !

I'm a lover of analog hardware and use a lot, but I think the use of computer as mulit-track recorder is really comfortable. Using Linux anyone that have standard PC and some good sound cards can build one !

In addition I want to say that Ardour is really beautiful and useful. All feature needed are easy to find and I prefer Ardour's GUI than Cubase/ProTools/...

Next to basic recording software, 64Studio includes other useful free software enabling drum sequencing and midi composition.