Re: [LAU] Live performance played, made, recorded, mixed and screenplayed with GNU/Linux

Hi!

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 08:19:54AM -0400, Dave Phillips wrote :
> Aurelien wrote:
> >A video of Sebkha-Chott live performances in 2010.
> >
>
> Excellent stuff !
>
> Best,
>
> dp
>

I wanted to thank you Dave for that article in LinuxJournal, nice of
you talk about us.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-audio-conference-2011-report-maynooth

I just wanted to precise something, still, concerning production quality,
not to argue about what we and our sound guys are able to do, but more
about how free softwares might be used in an audio profesionnal context.

First, let's forget about the quality of the videos, they come from
rushes taken from several festival Sebkha-Chtot played in in several
places, and neither the quality, nor the aspect ratio, interlace, and so
on are the same on each of them, so it definitely wasn't possible to get
a proper video quality, added to compression for youtube and other
online streaming services using flash.

Than, I just want to precise that the sound is pretty destroy by the
conversion from 24 bits @ 48kHz to that mp3-or-whatever-thing demanded
by those streaming services, and we did it (all wrong) using the video
editor, don't ask me why...
By the way, I'll try to put the sources and the real video with original
sound on the web soon.

And finally, just wanted to tell that we're several sound guys in the
AMMD (label around Sebkha-Chott), and we were working before on proprietary
solutions, like Nuendo, Logic, Cubase, ProTools, using Waves plugins, or
Oxford maximizer, and so on. We're working for several years with
GNU/Linux, and are perfectly satisfied with it. There's sometimes some
tricky things to do to make some things work when you work with
bleeding-egde softs, but:
What you hear on this video, and on our productions is exactly what we
want, or better said: it's exactly what we're able to do considering our
own abilities, and the esthetic concepts that we work on. I might tell
it again another way, to be sure what I write might be understood: we
didin't feel any limitations by using free softwares instead of usual
proprietary ones. It's even the opposite, we're managing sessions with a
lot of tracks in bands like Sebkha-Chott, and GNU/Linux allows us to do
that without fearing no to have the license restricted to 48 tracks or
whatever (already lived this moment!).

So, in my opinion (and I'm not the only one, by now), one can completely
make audio profesionnal with GNU/Linux, it's much more a matter of
hardware (mics, pres) than software, anyway.

Still, it's just a technical point of view, you might find the sound
production not good, but then it would be our fault and not softwares
one!

Concerning creation, so the synth, seq, and sampler part of the things,
I just feel like I can do whatever I want with that modular approach due
to jack than with any of the other solutions, including Ableton Live.
And, as being a sound technician, especially monitor and stage guy, I'm
pretty happy with the stability I can get from GNU/Linux compared to
those poor guys I've seen rebooting 3 or 4 times their Mac OS or W$ at
the beginning of the show because of I don't know what problem
(soundcard not recognize, project not loaded, and so on), all of that
after a soundcheck without any problem.

OK, that's it, pretty long just to tell I and other guys in the AMMD are
happy with our GNU/Linux machines for audio and video productions, and
sound, video and lights management on stage.

See you.

-- 
Aurélien
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