Moving to Linux part 3, audio recording & mixing

I have recently made the move from Windows to Linux. these few articles will hopefully prove useful to others taking the same journey.

Audio Applications
My work with audio is based on my own need to record, mix and produce self hypnosis tracks for download and for use in my own client sessions. There are other far better resources online for how to set up microphones etc.

To record audio
You can of course record audio straight into your Linux laptop or desktop PC as long as it is equipped with a microphone. The quality is unlikely to be very good though. I have, in the past,  used two different recording studios to record voice tracks ready for mixing. However while the quality is excellent it needs more organisation and of course there are costs.

In the end I purchased an Olympus LS11 voice recorder which will save recordings in MP3 or WAV formats.  The files are transferred to the PC over a USB link. However you get those voice files recorded, you'll want a way to edit out the ums, ahhs and random breath noises.

There really is only one tool for this, and that is Audacity. It is available in both Windows and Linux formats. It is a program that you get better at using the more you engage with it (obvious really but you train your ears at the same time). Tips on how to use Audacity are worth a blog post on their own, maybe I'll do that next.

Take a look at it here http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Once you have cut, spliced and otherwise adjusted your voice file, you may wish to mix it with music or sound effects (there are lots of Audacity audio plug-ins freely available as downloads). Audacity can do this but it feels rather clunky compared to a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).

I loved Traktion on the Windows platform but its development seemed to be abandoned for a long time. There now seems to be a Linux version so I'll look at this again.

So after much trial and error I settled on Ardour as my DAW. You can see more details about it here http://ardour.org/

I won't pretend to be an expert in Linux audio, I'm not. It is different to Windows but similar enough that I can get reasonable results.

Start with these few applications and a little bit of knowledge about recording and you'll soon have your own tracks (hypnosis or otherwise) mixed and finished.

Moving to Linux part 2. What software will work for you?

I wrote previously about making the move to Linux on a new laptop.

Now I'd like to let you know about some of the programs I have found useful in that move.

If Linux is still a mystery to you, the important thing to know is that it is based around the idea of free software. Not just free in the sense of not costing money but also free to be modified and reused without limit. (For more on the concept check out the father of free software Richard M. Stallman).

What this means in practical terms is that almost all the software you need is free (money) but for convenience, not all the software you want is free (open source). Some software uses chunks of non-open source or commercial code especially in areas like audio and video (think YouTube). For some this lack of Open Source is a very big deal, for others less so.

So what about the practical programs you'll want which may not be part of a standard package installation.

Graphics
Photo editing  and picture manipulation (like Photoshop) Gimp.
This is often installed with the standard distribution.

For vector drawing (like Adobe Illustrator) use Inkscape No CMYK colour though)

For Desktop publishing (like Adobe InDesign) use Scribus.

For a drawing program like (Microsoft Visio) use Dia.

For 2D CAD work consider LibreCAD.

Office Packages (Wordprocessor, spreadsheet etc)
As a general purpose package use Libreoffice. It will just about everything you need as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

Some may prefer to use OpenOffice which is available as a free download.

Skype, use Skype there is a native Linux version.

For data storage in the cloud with some great ways to share data use Dropbox. There is a native Linux application.

Video applications (web cam)
To get your webcam working check the following applications. Some may work better than others on your hardware.

Cheese allows you to capture stills and video from your web cam and apply effects too.

Guvcview a more basic webcam application that I found easier to get working on my Asus X53 machine.

Video editing
There seem to be plenty of video editing applications out there but I found two that seems to particularly useful; I have not settled on which one will be my main application yet. The first is Openshot, probably the easier of the two applications to use. It seems to be robust with just enough features to your video edited together. It integrates with Inkscape (see above) for producing fancy titles and graphics (or you can just use what is built in).

The second editing application is Kdenlive. This program seems to have more features including a greater number of effects (video transitions for example) but is possibly slightly less easy to get started with. Try both, the software is free after all!

I'll cover audio and other applications in my next post. So if you are waiting to hear how to record your self hypnosis session, stay tuned!