# Electronic music production on NetBSD

I like to make dance music on NetBSD.

Here's a brief overview of some of the tools I use.

## Audacity

Audacity is very basic software for manipulating sound waveforms.
You quite possibly don't want to make an entire project in it,
but there's several situations where I find it very useful:

* recording samples
* manipulation of samples (e.g. adjusting tempo and pitch to
  match your project)
* mastering of the final recording (e.g. limiting, amplification,
  fading out or applying effects to the entire waveform, etc.)

Audacity is unfortunately quite a problematic project upstream
and as a result is quite unstable when running on NetBSD.

I've found that setting

```
	export GDK_SYNCHRONIZE=1
```

in the environment gets rid of some really annoying crashes
when working on waveforms.


## LMMS

LMMS is my favorite open source Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
Its primary function is arranging tracks, stacking effects,
and so on. It kind of mimics the interface of FL Studio (a
proprietary tool, previously known as Fruity Loops), which
I also like because it's very simple and accessible.
LMMS is very portable and stable, and works really well on
NetBSD.

LMMS supports running Windows VSTs (for example, for synth
plugins), apparently through WINE, but I haven't got this to
work. Instead I primarily use native plugins, especially
built-in synths like TripleOscillator, which is surprisingly
powerful. ZynAddSubFx is also very powerful, but has a somewhat
less intuitive user interface.

It can also apply LADSPA plugins for effects like filtering,
delay, reverb, chorus, amplification, bit crushing, compression,
etc, etc. LADSPA effect plugins generally have a very simple
user interface consisting of a few knobs. The native LMMS effect
plugin Equalizer is a great example of what can be accomplished
beyond this.

Future releases of LMMS will have LV2 plugin support, allowing
for more advanced plugin UIs. This is really exciting. I'm
interested in eventually trying LV2 synths like amsynth.

## JACK

JACK is really popular for professional audio work on Linux,
but I don't see much advantage to using it on NetBSD except
for compatibility - maybe it's useful for live musicians
who want to do things like apply effects. It can't be
any lower latency than the kernel's audio mixer, by nature.

The JACK output for Audacity provides slightly better
latency, but this is probably a programming error on my part
(I wrote the NetBSD sound output code for both).

## The native mixer - audio(4)

During production work I set the NetBSD kernel mixer to run
at 44.1 KHz, the sample rate of CDs (and my projects). It's about
the limit of what the human ear can percieve, but 48 KHz is usually
the default for synchronization with video. I set it to 44.1 KHz
for accuracy, to ensure accurate reproduction by removing
resampling artifacts (the resampler in the kernel isn't the
smartest thing in the universe, although many programs will
also do resampling in userspace before output).


```
	# audiocfg set 0 p slinear_le 16 2 44100
```