Open Source: Aksy, becoming the alternative!

Great news!

For those familiar with Open Source Projects. I have been following the Aksy mailing list for a while and guess what:

Predrag Viceic* and Walco van Loon** are 'chatting' about integrating Aksy with Freecycle. In this chat, Walco said something about developing the AksyFS,

I've been doing some work on aksyfs, using FUSE to mount the sampler
directly as a filesystem - that would require no work on the Freecycle
side. Aksyfs is not finished though - although I hope to make a lot of
progress in the coming weeks.

Anyway, these are steps towards an Open Source alternative for Aksys. The Freecycle thingy means you will be able to use your mpc with a sequencer... potentially... For the time, they have been making some progress...

If anybody wants to give money for development (and I know some of us do) please, make contact with these guys and let them know about this.

If interested, please post your offer here. I will let them know, at the mailing list, of the offer and see what happens.

This is not the OS enhancements we were asking for... but it's a great start!

I want to be able to have an Open Source front end for my MPC where I am able to sequence and edit stuff! I think this could be it!

Join the mailing list for more detail at http://lists.n--tree.net/listinfo/aksy

* Creator/Maintainer of Freecycle: http://freecycle.redsteamrecords.com/
** Creator/Maintainer of Aksy: http://walco.n--tree.net/projects/aksy/

Hm interesting. Freecycle seems only to run on linux though which is a horrible idea and totally useless, for me atleast. Theres simply way to many programs and plugins on both windows/mac making a switch to linux to simply chop samples not very likely.

Well, not so horrible if you consider this projects:

http://ardour.org/
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://www.hydrogen-music.org/
http://www.linuxsampler.org/
http://www.ladspa.org/
http://rezound.sourceforge.net/
http://wired.is.free.fr/
http://gneutronica.sourceforge.net/
http://rtcmix.org/
http://muse-sequencer.org/
http://www.nongnu.org/fluid/
http://essej.net/sooperlooper/
http://freeadsp.sourceforge.net/

and all the programs available that I am too lazy to list...

A good list is at: http://linux-sound.org/

Besides, there's the FFADO project: http://www.ffado.org/

This FFADO projects enables a lot of firewire on Linux. Besides, you have OSS and ALSA which support many pro quality recording cards...

In short, GNU & Linux are solid plataforms for audio production... IMO, companies like Propellerheads, M-Audio and Mark of the Unicorn are taking steps towards this new plataform.

Actually, I know that M-Audio is on the move... I think they prefer me to spend my money buying their software/hardware than paying Windows licencing... hehe

an aksys kind of program for Ubuntu would be great!

yeah renich im aware about some of those.. But.. Reality is there is so many vst plugins that are so good and a linux open source project wont come close to alot of them..

that and most people dont want to use linux for alot of reasons.. i just think it would be alot smarter to focus on mac/windows solutions

and to add to taht, alot of soundcards doesnt have linux drivers and will probably never have

Actually, a lot of soundcards are supported in Linux via the ALSA project. I installed Ubuntu Studio recently on a computer upstairs. Brilliant, and there's so many audio apps on there including software synths, drum machines, over 300 plugins etc.

I agree with there being quite a bit to work with in Linux today. But Kalei is right about it not being worth the switch to most people. You are then talking about relearning EVERY program you use, and giving up all the plugins and software you bought. I have quite a bit of gear that uses software to interface with a mac/pc (just like ak.sys) that wont work on other OSes (some only on windows). So unless you are just starting, or starting over, you really need a second computer to make use of it (dual booting doesn't work when you need both at the same time). You run across the same issues with a mac/pc switch. Best bet is to put it on an older computer and use both Linux does pretty well on older machines.

It sounds like all this will do is allow the program to see the MPC's filesystem. That's pretty far from all the features that ak.sys provides. However, if it allowed flawless, large file transfers, at least that is somewhat of an improvement on that feature!

Kalei wrote:yeah renich im aware about some of those.. But.. Reality is there is so many vst plugins that are so good and a linux open source project wont come close to alot of them..

that and most people dont want to use linux for alot of reasons.. i just think it would be alot smarter to focus on mac/windows solutions

and to add to taht, alot of soundcards doesnt have linux drivers and will probably never have

First off, the site says that they have gotten it to work with Mac OS. They said it was ugly and documented, but it worked.

Next they've also indicated that they have no problems with people porting this over to Mac or Windows. The source code is there with somebody with talent. The people with the talent right now, are Linux guys so they're writing for Linux.

And actually a LOT soundcards DO have Linux drivers. You'd be amazed. My M-Audio Quattro card is supported. There are number of Firewire cards that are covered under this one driver:
http://freebob.sourceforge.net/index.ph ... ed_Devices


I agree that it would be cool to have it on Windows or Mac. But if Akai abanden's the 4000 or I have troubles getting Service Packs for my Windows boxes then I'd have no trouble dedicateing a Linux box for 4000.

I've run a Linux Audio computer before and I definitely see me doing that, before learning how to program and port it over to Win or Mac. I'm
just glad that somebody gave us an alternative.


Cheers,
Dave

RME have been hostile to the idea of Linux driver development for their FireWire products. It is unlikely we will ever support these unless they change their minds.

McSmooth wrote:
It sounds like all this will do is allow the program to see the MPC's filesystem. That's pretty far from all the features that ak.sys provides. However, if it allowed flawless, large file transfers, at least that is somewhat of an improvement on that feature!

There's 2 programs he references.

1) Freecycle - the is the beat slicer.

&

2) aksy - this is the new version of Aksys


Here are the actual features of Aksy:

Features

* transfer files from and to sampler using USB.

* access almost all sysex functionality provided by hundreds of Akai system exclusive commands.

* use Python to talk to your sampler. Python is a friendly language which is easy to read and understand - and examples are included!

* cross platform, should run on Windows, MacOSX, Linux (and all Unix flavours for which libusb and Python are available).


So DON'T just concentrate on the Linux only freecycle. Look at the multiplatform Aksy


According to the downloaded source files, here's the dependencies:

Aksy has the following dependencies:

* Python: version > 2.2

* libusb: libusb.sourceforge.net
(win32 port is available at libusb-win32.sourceforge.net)


SO I definitely hope they continue with their work, since Akai's not about to upgrade the Ak.Sys to work with future Mac and Windows OS's.


Cheers,
Dave

drumtrack wrote:RME have been hostile to the idea of Linux driver development for their FireWire products. It is unlikely we will ever support these unless they change their minds.

Well, since I do about 99.9999999% of my music outside of the computer, I can't justify purchasing an RME card, so I wasn't aware of their situation

So, if one doesn't want to go Linux. Skip Freecycle and use Recycle (which DOES save as an .akp) and just use the Win 32 version of aksy.

Cheers,
Dave

Neither does EMU do linux drivers so im fvcked that way too.

Yeah recycle does export to akp, that is what i use today. Too bad it cant export 24 bit files though.

drumtrack wrote:RME have been hostile to the idea of Linux driver development for their FireWire products. It is unlikely we will ever support these unless they change their minds.

Yep, this all that is supported on Linux of RME products:
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/in ... RME#matrix

Firewire is not supported

Kalei wrote:Neither does EMU do linux drivers so im fvcked that way too.

Yeah recycle does export to akp, that is what i use today. Too bad it cant export 24 bit files though.

Yep, in regards to EMU. I just checked ALSA and there's not a lot of support there, i did find this:
http://alsa-project.org/~james/alsa-driver/emu1212m/

I haven't used Recycle in quite a while. 2.1 fully supporst 24 bit, but it won't export 24bit files? Just a 24bit rex file???


Dave

Yeah it doesnt export 24 bit .akp files. Cause when propelleheads added .akp support only the s5000/s6000 series was around and they didnt update it for z4/z8/mpc4000. I had an email conversation with them and they didnt even know about 24 bit for akai and wouldnt tell me if they would include it in a future update.