Software on Raven Attic Studio

Midi with Ardour on Linux

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 15:29:28 +0100

Here’s how to get Ardour set up so that the DAW can control a MIDI synthesizer. I’m using Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS, Ardour 5.12.0.

Start Jack (I use QjackCtl).
In a terminal, type
```
 a2jmidid -j default
```

a2jmidid is a bridge between the ALSA MIDI system and JACK.

Start Qsynth (a front-end to the fluidsynth MIDI synthesizer) and make sure a soundfont is loaded.
In the QjackCtl MIDI connections tab, connect the Output Port ‘midi_out’ of the MIDI track in Ardour to the Input Port a2j ‘FLUID Synth’.

Installing Scilab on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Sun, 31 May 2020 15:25:19 +0100

The default install of Scilab doesn’t work on Ubuntu 20.04. I downloaded Scilab 6.1.0 from the Scilcab website. When executing the scilab executable, the following error occurs:

error while loading shared libraries: libtinfo.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Turns out I have libtinfo.so.6 installed, so the fix is:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5

Scripting the Analog Discovery 2 with Python in Linux Part 2

Mon, 25 May 2020 14:43:49 +0100

Now that Python and the Digilent DWF Python wrapper are installed (link), we can start using the Analog Discovery 2 to do something useful. The Waveforms SDK provides access to an API that allows the creation of custom applications using the Digilent Analog Design hardware (e.g. the Analog Discovery 2). The reference manual is here.

Working code examples are installed in /usr/share/digilent/waveforms/samples/

I used AnalogIn_Record_Wave_Mono.py as a basis, and along with it copied dwfconstants.py to the project folder.

Scripting the Analog Discovery 2 with Python in Linux Part 1

Mon, 25 May 2020 14:34:00 +0100

First, install Python, etc

First, check we have python installed:

python3 --version

The result is “Python 3.8.2” on my system. Now check we have setuptools and pip installed. These are third-party Python packages that we (may) need later.

command -v pip

The result is nothing, so we need to install as follows:

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
python3 get-pip.py

This installs to /home/USER/.local/bin which is not on PATH. To add to the path: