Electric Penguinland

As the Fedora Jam spin rolls onwards , a key component is Jack. The Jack Audio Connection Kit (one of those recursive anagrams so popular in the mid 2000s...) is the glue that binds pro-sound in Linux together. It's used for DAW s, audio plugins , real-time effects processing and generally pushing sound around. To do this it has to play well with another Linux audio layer, PulseAudio , and this is where the trouble starts.

( Wikimedia commons CC-BY-SA ) Work on the Fedora Jam spin has been continuing over the summer, reaching a steady boil. What's new since my last post ? Most of this has gone into packaging software...

Earlier this month the IETF accepted the Opus audio codec . This might not seem like the most exciting news in the world and, unless you're really keen on technology standards or FOSS, it's not. But you might want to keep an eye on it.

Two pickup upgrade posts in a row might be a bit self-indulgent, but things get a bit more complex here, so I'm going to show how I've applied the ideas from last time to design the new setup. Last post I just replaced a pickup and added a simple coil tap, this time round we'll be adding a completely different wiring scheme. The trigger for all this is getting hold of a set of Jailhouse Rails

The pickups are the heart of an electric guitar. People debate about how the sound is affected by string gauge, bridge, body woods, necks, fretboards, even finishes. There's probably someone prepared to tell you inlays make a difference. But no-one questions the pick-ups' contribution. All the other factors change the sound in different (sometimes imaginary) ways, but it's the pickups that pump it out. Fortunately changing them is much easier than a heart transplant.

Back in April Jørn Lomax was awarded a Google Summer of Code ( GSOC ) place to work on the (as it was) Fedora Audio Spin. While there have long been people working on music and audio in Fedora, a GSOC place means there is someone with time (and deadlines) to focus on getting things done. The project is now burning along in 16/16 time as Fedora Jam .

A post which has no Linux, not much guitar, and attempts to persuade you to do something pretty boring.

In 2010 Fender came out with the Mustang range of amplifiers . These are incredibly cheap modelling amplifiers starting at 20Watts (or the 7W battery model), going up to a 150Watt head and this year introducing a floor-unit based on the same technology. I ended up getting one of these a little while ago while looking for something that was more of an all-rounder than my last practice amp.

Over Christmas my Pocket Pod died. I'd been visiting my parents and noticed this when packing up to leave. Some of my things, including pod were sitting in a mysterious liquid and I wasn't very surprised to see that when I plugged it in it didn't turn on.

Nuno is another regular at the Guitarnoise forums , and writes (or more accurately draws) the Vinyl Eraser blog. He's also possibly the only person who actually reads this blog (Hi! Well, that's not strictly true.) and passed along the Versatile Blogger Award to me (thankyou). This gives me a slight dilemma, first I usually avoid chain memes, but this is quite a nice idea which I'd be happy to pass on, except that second I don't really read any blogs regularly, certainly not enough to recommend 15 to anyone. So The Plan is to hold this in reserve until some point in the future. In the meantime, look forward to my attempt to repair a water damaged Pocket Pod...

One of many gaps in my early musical education was good ear training, something I'm now working on fixing. Real tone-deafness is rare, so unless you've actually been tested for it the odds are that if you can't pick out a major from a minor seventh it's because you haven't had enough practice doing it. Fortunately there are now lots of resources you can use to get that practice, so here's a quick round-up of things you can do in Fedora, with a little foray into looping for phrase training.