My daughters love the movie Pitch Perfect. I suspect our XBMC has played it more than 100 times, and I'm not exaggerating. Whether or not you enjoy young-adult movies about singing competitions and cartoon-like projectile vomiting, I'll admit it's a pretty fun movie.

Several years back, Songbird was going to be the newest, coolest, most-awesome music player ever to grace the Linux desktop. Then things happened, as they often do, and Linux support for Songbird was discontinued.

I hope all my readers enjoyed the best of the holiday season. I've been busy with the predictable confusions and minor crises that attend this time of year, but I managed to find time to jot down some recommendations for my readers. Go on, you've been good, give yourself a few extra belated gifts and don't worry if your budget's busted - it's all free software, you can't beat these deals.

My studio computer collection includes two custom-built desktop machines and a Hewlett-Packard G60 laptop.

Dave needs a new 64-bit Linux for his primary audio production machine. What shall he do ? Read on to learn how and why he decided upon the Arch Linux distribution.

Live DJs chasing a simplistic but attractive application are going to love Giada. At the same time, Giada also covers something I've been wanting for a year now, which is a way to trigger individual samples from a computer keyboard simply in real time. According to the documentation:

Advanced Use

The Book

In the first part of this series I introduced SuperCollider3 and its most basic operations. Now let's make things a little more interesting by adding a little randomization, a neat GUI, and some MIDI control. Creating A GUI

SuperCollider3

On May 7 and 8 I attended the Linux Audio Conference for 2011 held in Maynooth, Ireland. Due to a temporary mental malfeasance - for some reason I assumed the Earth rotated in the opposite direction - I booked my flight for the wrong departure date and was unable to change its itinerary without paying out a hefty sum to the airline.

From April 7 through 9 I attended Beyond, a series of lectures, workshops, and concerts promoted by the DISIS group at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg VA.

Friends Of JACK

Mixbus (Figure 1) is a version of Ardour2 for Linux and OSX that replaces Ardour's native mixer with one designed by the Harrison company, a manufacturer of professional audio mixing boards.

Recently I decided I needed a new guitar amplifier for my studio. Its sole employment would be studio work, so I looked for a small lightweight amp with a good sound, high-quality digital effects, and amplifier/cabinet modeling. Of course I'm always on the look-out for hardware that can be edited from a computer running Linux, and did I mention that a low cost would be nice ?

Some interesting items showed up under Dave's Christmas tree, including a new book by some old friends, a laptop keyboard (music, not QWERTY), and an excellent Linux audio plugin for high-quality reverb. Dave must have been a very good boy last year.

This week's entry looks at a unique new audio editor, some important updates, and a very cool programming environment for graphics (and much more). As always, some tasty treats are cooking in the Linux audio kitchen.

This article is a brief report on some of the current news and activities going on in the world of Ardour, Paul Davis's superb open-source digital audio workstation (DAW). What began as a labor of love has become one of the most significant projects in the world of Linux audio and in the more general world of Linux applications development.

Wine runs many Windows programs nicely these days, including more and more serious music applications. Dave profiles some of those applications running under the latest & greatest Wine 1.2

In this conclusion to my survey of algorithmic music composition systems for Linux I present Christopher Ariza's athenaCL.