FLOSS Weekly 707 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is FLOSS Weekly. I'm Doc Sos. This week, Jonathan Bennett and I talked to Robin Gareus of our door. Our door is a pro level Linux audio, Linux and other operating systems, audio editing platform. It's really fabulous. Jonathan knows an awful lot about it. He's a heavy user. I'm becoming one soon. But tune in. That is coming up Next.

VO (00:00:28):
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Tweet.

Doc Searls (00:00:35):
This is FLOSS Weekly, episode 707, recorded Wednesday, November 16th, 2022. ROR and Linux Pro Audio. This episode of FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by Bit Warden. Get the password manager that offers a robust and cost effective solution that can drastically increase your chances of staying safe online. Get started with a free trial of a teams or enterprise plan, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user@bitwarden.com slash TWiT. And by IT pro tv. Join a community of IT learners who access 5,800 plus hours of IT skills and to training courses and interact with each other in subject matter experts to better themselves, their organizations and their careers. Get 30% off when you sign up at it pro.tv/TWiT and use code TWiT 30 at checkout and by code comments and original podcast from Red Hat that lets you listen in on two experienced technologists as they describe their building process and what they've learned from their experiences. Search for code comments in your podcast player. Hey there, everybody everywhere. I am Doc sles, and this is FLOSS Weekly. Today, uh, Jonathan Bennett himself joins me, <laugh> he from his usual there in Oklahoma and me from a hotel in Mountain View, California. <laugh>. Where? So how you doing, man? Second a row.

Jonathan Bennett (00:02:15):
Good. It's a third week in a row, I think.

Doc Searls (00:02:18):
Third week in

Jonathan Bennett (00:02:18):
A row. Uh, last week I got tagged last minute and came in with Einstein here. And today I made sure to get up a little earlier and went and slicked everything back. So we're, we're looking a little better today. A little more professional. Hopefully

Doc Searls (00:02:30):
<laugh>. It, it, it isn't, it isn't, it isn't. Just to look cool. It's actually to control the whole thing. <laugh>, I guess it gets out. Control. I last had hair like that one is about five. The the rest of it wore off after, after a while.

Jonathan Bennett (00:02:47):
That's not the problem. I've got

Doc Searls (00:02:48):
<laugh>. I know. So, so, um, so I guess today is, uh, Robin s will get the correct pronunciation of that eventually. Um, uh, he's with our door. You you're familiar with this? I know.

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:02):
Yes. Uh, in fact, I, I reached out to him on IRC because I've been bugging him about bugs and features I'd like to see in our door. And Robin is one of the guys that, uh, you know, is, is at the keyboard a lot of the times and puts up with, with my, uh, uh, continual dripping of, of asking for things. And we had a, we had the day open. I said, Hey, why don't, uh, first actually I went for Paul Davis, the guy that really runs our door, and he's like, well, I'm gonna be jet lagged and maybe not even home by then, but I would love to hear what Robin has to say about some of these things. So we, we put it together and we've got him here today. Should be fun.

Doc Searls (00:03:34):
So, and, and, uh, and Paul is somebody we had on in the past, long before my time. Right. Many

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:40):
Years I think ago.

Doc Searls (00:03:41):
Yes. Yeah. Many years ago. So there's a, a lot to catch up on. Um, so I'm, I'm going to hurry up. We've got a little bit, little bit of a late start. And, uh, introduce Robin. Um, he tells us he switched back and forth between academic projects, art and r and d. And since 2008, he's been a central figure in the Lennox audio community working full time on Floss, notably <inaudible> itself. So welcome to the show there, Robin. He should Hello, those of us. Thanks for having me. There we go. That looks cool. You're coming in in stereo. You've got two, the, the two speakers behind you.

Robin Gareus (00:04:21):
Yeah, but only one Mac in front, which is kind of a, well anyway, <laugh> one system, right? Yeah.

Doc Searls (00:04:27):
And

Robin Gareus (00:04:28):
Well, it's a home stereo in Indeed. Uh, I have some monitor speakers on the side, um, for, on the desk. But yeah, for, for video it's a lot easier like that. So, um, than to turn around. There's windows in the back and you're gonna see all the, the outside though. It's pretty dark. It's, uh, I'm, I live in Berlin these days. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, so it's already like, uh, um, almost 7:00 PM um, late in the evening for me.

Doc Searls (00:04:53):
Well, if, if you rock out probably the day starting for you, I suppose <laugh>,

Robin Gareus (00:04:58):
Well, since I work with Paul most of the time I'm kind of a, a late bird or like a, I usually spend all the night, uh, coding. Like he gets up early, I get up late, and then we work on order. Most of the, uh, well here it's the afternoon for him early morning. Um, so it's, it's kind of fine. And, uh, I'm used to headphones for, uh, production anyway,

Doc Searls (00:05:18):
So this may not be an art topic at all, but it's interesting for me, which is that I, I'm old enough, so I remember when stereo came along in the 1950s and when it did, well, there's, nobody had headphones. If they did, they were mono. And in my case, they were for ham radio. And who cared about stereo there, there was no source that was stereo. But when stereo first appeared, it was just this amazing thing where you could get this sound stage spread across a wall and you could look at it and say, there are the horns there, and there's the base there, and there's the drums over there. And, um, a cool thing about it is that as far as I know, stereo was not patented. It was just there, it was, you just have two sound sources, but now we've got Doby Pro this and all these other things, which I think are patented, are they not? And I'm wondering if that's an encumbrance at all for, you know, for Ardo or people doing sound production now?

Robin Gareus (00:06:15):
Um, well we don't do the Doby Atmo stuff, which is patented. And for the panning we used a long time, like Viba panning is, that's free. Uh, and, uh, uh, ambisonics was also, uh, or the patents ran out early on. So we, we used a lot of the ambisonics surround panning. And the nice thing about that is you can later on fold it down to like stereo or 5.1 or how many speakers you have. So, uh, uh, you do a generic panning, which is only Angular based. Like you don't specify the direct speaker as you did with, you know, early stereo was like hard left, hard right? When, you know, the first Beatle records, like you couldn't pan in between the speakers, it was one or the other. Uh, and so that's also a bit what, like Toby ats or the 5.1, usually you have the dialogue in only one speaker and the sound effects, it don't really go a lot of, maybe it most overlap between two speakers, but never three or four because in the room there would be so much interference, uh, or like com filtering and well some frequencies canceling each other out.

(00:07:22):
So you try to want to avoid that. And it's pretty much all the way down to like whatever, uh, uh, pretty much a stereo field, uh, effectively. But, uh, that, that's something I'm not really an expert on, to be honest. <laugh>,

Jonathan Bennett (00:07:37):
I don't know, it sounded like some expert dialogue there. Uh, do

Robin Gareus (00:07:41):
Some dsp.

Jonathan Bennett (00:07:44):
I'm real curious. I'm real curious what kind of, what the, what the story is. How did you go from all of the things you had your hand in to to working on our door and becoming a, I believe one of the paid developers there? Right.

Robin Gareus (00:07:56):
Yeah. Well, it started, um, around 2004, five, I was, uh, starting a PhD in physics in Berkeley and was trying to figure out, now this is not what I, what I do for the rest of my life, <laugh>. And at the same point, my wi well that girlfriend, my wife, she got a grant to make a short movie, um, or short film. And so I said like, I'll do all the sound design and do post production because it's gonna be fun. And what you learn is a physicist is basically solving problems. So I just, uh, um, started to dive in. I thought like, how hard can it be? And it was kind of, well, famous last words,

Jonathan Bennett (00:08:33):
<laugh>,

Robin Gareus (00:08:34):
But okay. I found other early on, like Paul was just releasing, or it was 0.99 and it was never a 1.0 version. And then like early 2.0 and I figured out, okay, this can work for doing the basic sound design and I just need a video player to synchronize everything along. And uh, so I started writing Aha, it's a jack synchronized video player. And then I figured out, okay, I need more, I wanna have a timeline for that. And so I started working on like a, um, at first it was a third party tool, like an an application. It shows a video timeline. And I just put the application on top of order, like in synchronized the zoom level. Uh, and then, okay, this works for me. And at one point I thought like, okay, I need to take this to a level that it also works for other guys.

(00:09:22):
And, uh, so I, I met Paul a year or two later at the Olympic Audio Conference, uh, in 2007 in council in Germany. And so we started talking about like, you have video timeline integration and uh, okay, it sounds like a fun thing to do. And I still had a grant for doing a second movie. So I was kind of a, um, I could work on that stuff cuz my interest was also like to get the movie soundtrack done and not to write free software. More kind of a, um, the, the software was a byproduct of what I was actually going to do mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And, uh, I got more and more involved with the Linux audio community at that point. And then in 2009 the financial crisis happened. Like all the movie, there's no funding for movies anymore. And, uh, I kind of needed to, okay, I needed to pivot.

(00:10:14):
I went to do for web design for like half a year and kind of a, uh, and I applied for a university to just keep going in an art department, like making new connections. I thought it's a, it's a nice thing to do. Like in, in Europe you don't pay for education and for a PhD program I was even paid to do that. And so the idea was like getting in touch with new artists to see what else is out there and, uh, also having time and well funding to work on projects that I like to work and develop. And I ended up doing a PhD on auto latency compensation, which is another one of those projects. I thought like, okay, I first started this, okay, I gotta take me three weeks and it's gonna be done. It eventually took like eight years in the whole PhD for, for the project. Yeah. Okay. So it was kind of a, um, a fun way to lure me in

Jonathan Bennett (00:11:06):
Fun. A a true renaissance man then aren't you dabble in lots and lots of things?

Robin Gareus (00:11:12):
Well, yeah, also at the university it helped, I could, uh, organize conferences and, uh, was co organizing the Linux audio conference for five years in a row. Like it was always at a different venue, but I was always involved as an organizer on maintaining or well, reviewing all the papers, organizing, um, well all, all kinds of stuff. And uh, um, that also helped me to like get in touch with different persons in the community, especially ones who write DSP and there's lots of brilliant minds in the Linux, Audi community to do that. But what was missing a big time or like most of the time is a nice front end a UI for users to, or well control block parameters or even to interact with, uh, certain DSP functions, like you said, like stereo panning or Amazons panning. And, uh, we had a lot of the dsp, the hard stuff, but what we are missing were like, uh, nice front ends.

(00:12:09):
So I started writing plugging UIs initially to funds Adrian Ansen, which you might have heard the name of. Um, he does amazing, uh, um, well I call it, uh, most bank provide software. It's like a very tiny efficient pieces. Um, and then he should started writing well front end, so like every two plug-in UIs for that for him. And I learned more and more and eventually also started doing my own plugin line, um, developing DP by myself and just talking to those guys I learned a lot because they share their knowledge freely. It was not like, uh, uh, you need to pay for someone or like, um, to get the knowledge similar like university, uh, the conferences. I was more like hanging around with on the hallway track and learning from all the, all the bright and uh, smart guys, uh, out there. So that definitely helped me to get, get started as well.

Jonathan Bennett (00:13:01):
Yeah, very cool. Now you've got, you've got your own plugins that you've written the X 42 plugins and Right. I gotta admit, I've never, I've never used them. I've historically used calf plugins. Um, but I, I've got to looking at <laugh>, I got to looking at yours

Robin Gareus (00:13:18):
Interview.

Jonathan Bennett (00:13:20):
Yeah, I, it's, it's weird. I really like the CA plugins, but so many people around the community are like, oh, well don't use those. So tell me about yours. What, what all, what all can you do with the X 42 plugins? Question them over.

Robin Gareus (00:13:32):
I started like, I need actually started to look into carf, like, because like with a, I'm trying to, like, if there's a project already existing, I think I should rather go and help the project out than start my own right. Um, if that's, if that's a choice. But with calf there were a lot of, uh, small issues like the, the UI look pretty well and I think that's why most of the people also like them. They're like a nicely designed who is Oh yeah. Uh, the problem is in the, the sound design itself, like the, the, um, the first is if you try to automate the eq, you get all kinds of clicks and pops and like, it's not deci like the zipper noise as soon as you turn any of the, the control knobs. And uh, then I said the multi-band compressor has like facing issues. You can even hear like, uh, the band splitter is not correct and trying to help them out to fix it has like two issues. The first is like the plugin changes. So anybody who uses the plugin and then loads the updated version in a new session, it will sound different.

(00:14:33):
He do not want to have that with blockchains. Like if you, well open the same session, it should sound again in the future and not have a different sound because some, these PAC was fixed and the other one like was, it was kind of hard to interact with uh, Cal developers at some point. Um, well I'm also not alone with that regard. There's a few other blocking two started in the, in the same manner, like people who first contributed and then went off and did their own line. Like we all are Cal graduates. If you wanna put that alumni

Jonathan Bennett (00:15:03):
<laugh>. Uh, that's fun. So at, at this point in the calf plugins, uh, the, the DSP bugs are more of a feature that's, that's one of the quirks that indeed that make them endearing. <laugh>.

Robin Gareus (00:15:15):
There's also anfa, he kind of, well it's, it's perfectly fine to do that in audio. There's one guy called Anfa, he does sound design and he actually really abuses the stuff like he knows what goes wrong and if he overdrive and you get distortion, all kinds of effects. So it's kind of a, whatever works is in the audio department the right approach. Like, uh, you're not always aiming for the clean sound, but sometimes you want to have the um, well a dirty old cable that just sounds great because it's a dirty old cable and you won. You want that guy. Well, same reason you still use tubes, like tube S also have like imperfections, which are great at some point.

Jonathan Bennett (00:15:50):
Yeah, well it's a, it's amazing how many of the, the rock albums from the eighties when you read about production, they went and did the vocals in the bathrooms because that was the place where they could get that awesome crazy reverb sound. Right? Yeah, that's a thing. So tell us about the, about your plugins X 42. What all can you do with those?

Robin Gareus (00:16:08):
Well, in my case, I really wanted to have something clean that always works, especially for movie productions. I don't want to have the imperfections. I really want to have a clean sound of a quartet and I needed to clean up like vocals or like the dialogue on set and have a nice mastering equalizer that doesn't well have any imperfections of those that I can clean automate. And initially there was like, uh, there were hatless plugins that were lava plugins from font. So the first one was the equalizer and I need to have a nice ui, not just like some weird sliders that you have. I wanted to have a visual representation. Um, and then I also needed professional audio blocking meters. Well that's the equalizer you see. Mm-hmm <affirmative> one part of the equalizer I liked, I built in dedicated limitations. Like each band has a def dedicated frequency range that you can dial in because with other equal, there's no limitation under the hood.

(00:17:03):
Like in theory you can just go from 20 or to 20 K, but I like, like coming from an old analog world and I like to have really a dedicated base band to dedicated middle mid frequency bands in a high band. Cuz I find those constraints are more beneficial doing production. Like you don't move all over the place and you focus more on what you're doing. So the feature of the equalizer is more the constraints that are built in rather than the flexibility. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and so there's also convenient, uh, analyzer in the back, like a frequency analyzer, which is pretty common. And you can also directly see a media keyboard below like, you know, which frequencies are you're affecting. That helps. Yeah. Um, so it's, there's nothing really special. There's lots of equalizers out there, but it's kind of the way that I found like this is always one that I wanted to have something that's easy to use. The

Jonathan Bennett (00:17:59):
Yeah. So I know, I know for my use at least, it's really useful to have, uh, these plugins that'll actually work on our door on Linux. Cause that's where I use it and I assume the X 42 plugins, they work on Linux, Mac and Windows plugged into ror,

Robin Gareus (00:18:13):
Right? Yes, that's true. Also free bbc, although I don't package them for free bsd for, for Mac and Windows. I do provide binaries. Uh, but yeah,

Jonathan Bennett (00:18:24):
That's, that's kind of a, a rabbit hole in and of itself is trying to get plugins that'll work on different platforms, isn't it?

Robin Gareus (00:18:31):
These p part not so much, so much. It's just C code. The hard part is the gooey or like the user interface because they have different event systems also on special cases on Mac, like your readiness screens, you need to upscale them and Windows event handling system is completely different again. Um, and what I chose to do early on was like for the drawing to use open gl and that is very much cross-platform. The API is the same. And so I only needed to have like dedicated event like for mouse keyboard, um, and the window itself, the system. But it wasn't too hard. Like I tried to, um, have a nice architecture in the first place. That's one thing I learned from Paul doing a, he came up with an amazing clean architecture. And once you have that like building everything else around or even augmenting it and like all the design afterwards is so much easier than if you just start with a well messy system and later on try to bolt on things. And uh, Paul is an amazing system architect. Like he's not much of an like a DP engineer so much so that's why I come in. But like the overall system, I was so impressed finding arra as a dw, so I was kind of Okay. Uh, it's an amazing project to, uh, well be a part of.

Jonathan Bennett (00:19:48):
Yeah. Very cool.

Doc Searls (00:19:49):
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(00:22:01):
Get started with a free trial of a teams or enterprise plan or gets started for free across all devices as an individual user@bitwarden.com slash TWiT. That's bit warden.com/TWiT. So Robin, I'm wondering how over the time you've been working with, with ar how the usage of it has changed as the usage of audio has changed, especially by amateurs becoming professional. There are many, many more people involved in many, many more industries here. Um, podcasting in the last few years has taken off enormously has been around for a long time. Um, but everybody's doing production in one kind or another. Either it's music or it's podcasting or movies you mentioned. And I'm wondering how overall demand on you as an auto developer has changed based on the usages.

Robin Gareus (00:22:55):
That's the hard part because we don't directly connect with a lot of users. Uh, and we don't have like any, um, well surveys of, um, direct interaction with any of the guys except for irc, which we use a lot for, uh, for connecting with, with other users. So I expected a lot of them out there and we just don't know about them. And for the podcast, I knew there were guys doing that, but until like two weeks ago, I had never met any of them personally. And we were at the Paul and we were both invited to the Ubuntu Summit in Prague and there were two teams, like one is called the Linux Labs, they're doing podcasts in general. There's like an Irish guy. They're doing it weekly, mostly on like new products that came out. And there's the Buntu Portugal podcast and both of them have presentations and they use auto.

(00:23:47):
Like they came up afterwards like, well, to follow me, like nice software and they really, uh, well the first time we got feedback on persons using auto for podcasts, which is kind of fun. And uh, it also coincides with a few new features we added, like in version seven for dedicating, well streamlining podcast editing in a, in a wider sense. And those were motivated by Paul himself doing a podcast like he was connecting with just in Frankl from Mari Repo, which is another dw like they had a two hour long conversations and then Paul started editing in auto and said like, this is hard. Like how could I even edit it? Like how does anyone manage to use auto for podcasts? It's like he got busy for for a week or two and uh, he edited like a few new ripple edit modes for simplifying podcast edits.

(00:24:36):
And those guys also loved it. And they said like the, the hard part with editing podcasts is not really the technical issues, it's really the time consuming part. Like if you have a three hour podcast, you need to listen to it for three hours and find out what to put in like, uh, and uh, the tooling isn't the, is the, is a minor issue, like pretty much, uh, everything works there. So, uh, um, and one feature that we added a few weeks ago, like you can just kind of vary speed, like just listen to it twice the speed. But then, um, I wrote a plug-in for that for like a also a year ago for, um, a similar use case to everything pitched down in the end. Like you can listen at twice a speed but still get like the normal pitch and that can help. Um, but yeah, anyway,

Jonathan Bennett (00:25:28):
I I'll have to remember that. So I'm, I'm one of the users that uses our door for, for editing. It's not exactly a podcast, but something like a podcast. And, uh, I did by the way find that new ripple mode to be extremely useful. One of the, one of the fun things is hanging out in the IRC and getting to hear people come in with their, you know, stories about the crazy things that they're trying to make our door do. And kind of, you can, you can just feel sometimes the creative juices that start percolating around as people ask for features and tell you guys stuff that's working and isn't working. And you and Paul will both be going, oh, that's an interesting idea. We can do. It's, it's fun. It's this collaborative process. I think it's one of the, one of the neatest things about open source is to be able to connect with users and make new fun things happen.

Robin Gareus (00:26:14):
I think the same also for the users, like try to connect to Ableton and reach the head guide, like there will be three levels of support or Steinberg and in IRC just hang out with Paul. And there's me, there's a few other guys who contribute regularly, like Lynn Ovens, he's a, he's also a contributor. And then Alexandra manages our manual. Like he does lot of translations, so there's a couple of regular crowd around who contribute. Yeah. But it's kind of a, there's no, uh, well support level in, uh, happening now, which is kind of fun.

Jonathan Bennett (00:26:47):
Speaking of commercial offerings, something I really wanted to ask you about is Harrison Mix Bus. What's, what's the connection there? And I, if I understand correctly, that's one that you directly have your fingers in,

Robin Gareus (00:26:59):
Right? Um, um, Harrison is like a derivative product. Their product manager, Ben, Ben Loftis, he had like in 2009, he had was one of the few guys who had an idea how to commercialize a free software product, a project like to take order and make something out that he can sell without, uh, having any issues, uh, of uh, like publishing the source at the same time. And there's not a lot of projects who can do that or even like people with a vision of how to, how to do that. And Harrison is like, well, they're like 40 or 50 years in business. They started doing analog consoles, then they had this like, digital controlled analog consoles and they have like huge, like, um, well both in Hollywood they have big business and the cold well used for a lot of famous records, like from starting with Michael Checks and Simonon, all the big hit records from the seventies and eighties were done on Harrison consoles.

(00:27:56):
So they try to like, okay, we need to move having a digital product at some point, and they want to focus on what they're doing best, like the mixing desks or the mixer in, in the, uh, in the dsp in the processing. And they don't wanna worry about all the other stuff like recording and the editor and all the, all the stuff that well constitutes to digital audio workstation or like media recording, like why reinvent the wheel. So it's not like, okay, we can team up. And they use like, well, Harrison Mix Plus is an auto derivative with a custom mixer, like they change the ui and that's also still also gp, like all free software. And then they bundle it with their proprietary plugins, which like a dedicated equalizer, a dedicated compressor, and uh, also an, um, again, staging over, uh, whatever they put in to model that transformer of the audio workstation.

(00:28:50):
And that part is, uh, closed source. Um, but you can still run it like without having all the closed source stuff, it just will be like order in that case. Like it won't add you anything. So in that case, you're, you're better off with order than with Mixed Plus. And I'd say we benefit a lot from the collaboration with Harrison because they have all these experiences, uh, for like how it should work, how to streamline the work project. Like they work with the big parts in the industry for a long time and also for movie production, they, they have like a, well, they have a couple of Oscars under their belt indirectly because they, well, um, they work with Oscar producers for, for the audio world and they know exactly where, how to lay out stuff, how to efficiently use the tooling. And um, that's a huge influence on the auto development or in a benefit for us.

(00:29:43):
And it's a healthy collaboration since over 10 years now. And, uh, I do regular contract work for them, but they hire me mostly to work on order, like it's a 50 50 thing. Uh, uh, at first I, they started to pay me, well a small, they call it retainer fee, um, for me to work on order and, uh, uh, I didn't, I wasn't involved in the closed source part. I was also free software guy and eh, okay, I understand the need for it and we benefited a lot from that, but I try to stay out your outside of the main business and mostly work on the free software stuff. And then at some point the main P guy retired, uh, like he was also later, let's say was around there since, since the beginning from Harrison. So, uh, they were looking for a new guy and like, they offered me the job and I said like, okay, it's kind of, uh, tempting because like it's, where else do you find like, uh, free software project? Like there's, there's nothing like that out there. Like it's pretty unique. And so I do work, uh, partly on their closed source blockings as well. And, uh, it's fine.

Jonathan Bennett (00:30:46):
So, um, I don't know if you're, if you're able to, to tell us this, but I'm curious, uh, are some of the big hits today produced on, uh, essentially our door source code?

Robin Gareus (00:30:57):
Um, I honestly don't know <laugh>, um, because really I don't follow up, like we don't get, there's on other forum we have like a made with Oder, but then it's mostly like home or bedroom recorders who come there. Um, I know like there's one guy in Berlin who uses it for postproduction of like famous jazz bands and he's doing mostly mastering and I've seen youth at the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. So they like, they're recording the main orchestra with oor, like this looks familiar down there. Like I had a look <laugh> and I came afterwards down to the guy, but he was like, oh, I see you, he in, but he was very defensive, like was, oh yeah, okay. He was kind of not expecting someone to show like, uh, he was expecting me to tell him like, he should like use MES or Windows. So I didn't really get to tell him like I, I'm in Wolf with that. This was kind of a shame.

Jonathan Bennett (00:31:50):
Oh, that's

Robin Gareus (00:31:51):
Fun. So I know a few places that used it, but yeah. Um,

Jonathan Bennett (00:31:54):
And then I, I was actually thinking about, uh, mixed bus, um, so that, like you said, it's a lot ofor code under the hood. Uh, does is Mixed Bus have quite a bit of buy-in in some of the bigger places.

Robin Gareus (00:32:07):
Um, they, um, well you would need to ask the Harrison guys because I really can't talk about this also very,

Jonathan Bennett (00:32:14):
Uh, understood. Yeah. I, I thought that that might potentially be the case. Um, I,

Robin Gareus (00:32:20):
You never see a CD that says, like, with Pro Tools, like nobody says what they're using during production. That's true. Um, and there's a few big guys on the forum as well, um, but just do occasional contract work for them. Like, I'm not really working for Harrison. Uh, so it's um, got it. Maybe you can get Ben Loft is there at one point, like he can talk about all the fun stuff.

Jonathan Bennett (00:32:43):
Oh,

Robin Gareus (00:32:43):
That'd be fine.

Jonathan Bennett (00:32:44):
Um, so our door just had a big release, the 7.0 and then a follow up, the 7.1. Let's, let's chat a little bit about some of the new stuff that's in our door seven. And I'm sure you, you got a hand in working on a bunch of that. Kind of, what's the overview? What's new in seven?

Robin Gareus (00:33:00):
The, the amazing part in seven, like the for casual user, there was initially known big news at all because the last two years we're working under the hood to change the complete time represe time representation. Um, how we, uh, auto represents like audio time, which is like samples, uh, that comes from the audio clock and like music time, which is bars and beads. And we had lots of box in pretty much all the versions earlier because we were always using sample time for representation representing music clock in, in the way under the hood. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And that led to like lost notes or like all the media stuff was kind of subtly broken. You changed your tempo and at some point, like a note went like, well it didn't play anymore or it played, it was stuck forever and we figured we needed to fix, uh, this for good and it was like a, well, two or three year long effort to change everything under the hood.

(00:33:57):
And then we figured, okay, well for Lil's now no one's gonna notice the difference. Okay, maybe we'll just work, but yeah, big deal. And then Paul came up like it was his kind of idea to start like what Ableton Live does, to have like a cue or well clip launching feature in it because now that we have like proper musical time, we can really just do this, uh, correctly. We can time stretch any region, which can be audio media and then time stretch exactly to the bar beat and having lit loop correctly and even well repeated correctly without having any lost events or lost notes. So, well, if you scroll a bit back up, you see like the big new part in R seven was like well called trigger page or queue. Um, cuz you can queue up new events to happen and those queues just do something which is usually like launch a new clip or, um, trigger some automation. And, um, that was, well the main thing,

Jonathan Bennett (00:34:56):
Yeah, it's, it's this guy. So for those, those that don't understand what we're talking about, it's, it's using a controller kinda like this, this one's not yet supported. Um, it's coming hopefully. Um, but the ability to have different loops on different buttons and punch a button and get a loop to start, say like a base drum on your, your one and your three boom boom. And then you can add a snare on two and four and, you know, add some chords and add something else. And then in the middle of a performance or recording a song, you can hit one of the other buttons and mix up what your bass drum is doing. And, uh, that's, that is a, it's a pretty, as far as music goes, a pretty new way to perform music, but there are some people doing some very impressive things with that both recording mixing and also live performance. And I am pretty stoked because I see, I see a future for using ROR for all of that stuff. Um, and you know, once it's, it's early on in that being supported now hardware, but it's really a, it's a pretty cool feature that's added. I, I, I'm excited about it.

Robin Gareus (00:36:01):
Well, I explain it a lot better than I do. Uh, well there's one key difference,

Jonathan Bennett (00:36:05):
<laugh>, it helps to have the prop <laugh>

Robin Gareus (00:36:08):
Indeed. It's not like when you press a button, like it starts immediately, but you, you cue it for the next speed or the next bar, like you say like in the start of the next bar, the kick drum goes in or at the end of the bar, the kick drum stops. Um, so it's like you're not life playing it, but you're like, you, you're preparing a bit ahead of time what will happen. So,

Jonathan Bennett (00:36:27):
So you're setting up all the things that are gonna happen on the next measure

Robin Gareus (00:36:31):
Yeah. Or the next piece. It's like that is, uh, that's a, that's a fun part of the whole thing to do anyway.

Jonathan Bennett (00:36:40):
Yeah, it's, it's very fun. So what, uh, what plans, what, what, what crazy new things are coming down the pipe for, uh, 7.2 then?

Robin Gareus (00:36:50):
Well, we still have a lot of clean up, like the, the 7.0 release was, uh, from, well as most of the dot releases are like lots of small issues in bug. So we immediately had a 7.1 a hot fix release, um, to get well, uh, there was a couple of really critical bug, uh, bug in the, in a do release and we still have one more to go. I think. Um, the big new thing is also like having support for a launchpad that will be down the road pretty soon. Um, and it's a good, well, I actually, well have to check what I'm going, what we're gonna do. Just gonna wing it.

Jonathan Bennett (00:37:32):
It depends upon what people come into I and ask about <laugh>.

Robin Gareus (00:37:36):
I have a, one big thing that's coming is like, for BST three blockings, we don't have multi bus support, so that will take me better of a month, like the end of the year to add that. And lots of people have been asking that as well for if you have like a drum uh, machine and, uh, um, then you can have like a stereo output or you can have like a dedicated snare output and a higher output, like you have multi bussing. Um, and you can then make all of those outputs separately or individually. And it works for VST two plugins and for audio unit. But in auto we don't have support for VST three yet. So that's kind of a technical thing, but many people it comes up like every week twice or three times. Um,

Doc Searls (00:38:17):
This is great. Okay, I find myself wanting to see demos, um, but I, I I want, I want to get around to asking, um, before I get to that, I have to let everybody know that this episode of Fluff Weekly is brought to you by IT Pro tv. Whether you're new to the IT field or a seasoned pro IT pro TVs online IT training courses can change your life. They offer virtual learning solutions for everyone. IT training videos, every vendor and skill you need to start or advance your IT career done an in talk show format that keeps you interested and excited to learn it. Pro TV has more than 5,800 hours of IT training with current content added daily. So courses are always up to date courses you can binge in 20 to 30 minute episodes, interactive IT virtual labs, IT pro TV sets itself apart with hands on learning via their hosted virtual labs.

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(00:41:00):
So, so Robin, um, I've been using Audacity, um, for very long time. Never thought of anything else. And I'm wondering is, and I'm not, I'm not a heavy heavy duty user. I've edited some podcasts and pulled together, you know, things for family and stuff like that. Um, but I'm wondering, um, you know what, AR seems a more heavy duty, um, almost a vertical application for kind of workstation operators and people with really big screens and really good speakers and headphones. But, but I'm wondering, you know, what's, you know, how does that sort out, that's an open source program too. So what's the, what's the comparison there between the two?

Robin Gareus (00:41:45):
In the past until lately? Um, audacity was a sound file editor. Like, you open a w file, you make changes and it directly changes the data on what's in the file on disk. And it's called like destructive editing, right? So, uh, every time you make a change, uh, like, well, it changes the file on disk if you apply effect, like you lose whatever was there before. They're changing that recently also in Audacity, like they're also moving more and more towards a DW workflow. And in order, uh, one of the main concepts is like, it's non-destructive. Like once you've recorded audio and disk, it stays like that forever. And it, uh, everything else, all the edits you've done, all the effects you apply are just meta data. And so as soon as you, like, even if you play, like the effects are applied in real time and you can automate the effects or if you have a mixing desk, you can move a failure live in real time, it will apply, um, whatever you're doing.

(00:42:40):
So people have also been using order for doing like life mixing in, in a way. And you couldn't do that with Audacity, uh, which is more kind of, well you operate on a file which happens on your heart desk. Um, and I think, well, you can still do any life mixing Udacity, but they're starting to having like audio regions. So edits are no longer destructive. Uh, they're moving more and more in the DW direction since a year or two. Um, but then otherwise a second difference is a massive multi-tracking. Like if you, if you go to a concert like, or even like a live festival, like you suddenly have 64 audio inputs or 128 and auto like scales, even like the people using up for like soundtracks, you also use a few hundred tracks. Like you tracks are not expensive in o you can just have even a thousand of them.

(00:43:29):
Like at some point it's just a screen estate. That's the hard part. But under the hood, uh, other scales a lot like, well most DWS do and sound file editors operating on files are not designed for that workflow. So it's another reason why, uh, if you're doing more and more music or if you record a drum set, like even you have like, well 16 inputs fornay are high at kick drum and all that. You wanna put them on different tracks and then group them. A DAW is made for the kind of workflow, um, as opposed to a sound well sound front editor, which is more kind of a, for simple theory. You're recording if you wanna split up or like cut up some, some stuff that you don't want to hear anymore or rearrange things. Um, and also now that we're the third part that we're adding like the, the trigger or Q page when you do life, uh, um, performances or like we can, new feature that I was going to continue early on is like recording into those trigger slots, like in directly recording slot and then trigger it on a, on a button for life performance.

(00:44:32):
That's also stuff you can do with a well in order right now, but you couldn't do with Audacity. So, um, it's different. It's conceptually different why you would use when use the different tools even though they, they have some overlap in the use cases, um, um, eventually mm-hmm. <affirmative>.

Jonathan Bennett (00:44:53):
So I'm, I'm curious, uh, do you actually use our door outside of developing on it? You still have some projects you do with it and then if you do, what, what does your setup look like? What platform do you use it on and all of that?

Robin Gareus (00:45:05):
Well, less and less. That's the funny thing. Like the more I get to do programming, the, the more I spent time music and then when I actually do make music, I'm kind of, uh, it's great to be away from the computer screen. So I do have a small fend fend twin Amp. Uh, I play guitar through, um, I used to play saxophone as well, but it's kind of, uh, um, ever since I moved out of my, well, my student apartment like 20 years ago and not really much of an option anymore. Like most of the apartments I've been into, like I'll get in, well my neighbors will complain sooner or later. <laugh> it's fine here, but it's still kind of a, yeah, okay. I can play guitar fine also through a headphones and it's okay. Yep. Um, well I used to do lots of, well for the sound design I was recording and also did fo A works, uh, so like microphone in and did edit that for the movies. It was the last big productions. I did also using order and then afterwards, um, I've been at two jam sessions that I didn't record myself, like also here in Berlin, a guy using audio to record. And then I used Mixed Bus, uh, afterwards for the post-production and I was playing mostly guitar and bass. Um, and uh, um, well I do have some sound cards these days. They're mostly really more for testing than any, any production. Yeah. You know how it goes. Yes, yes.

Jonathan Bennett (00:46:27):
Yeah. You, you end up with a lot of hardware laying around that you know, somebody requested and maybe pay you to, to make sure this works. And so you end up with Fire Wire and USB and PCI Express and just all the things laying around and not enough time to go and actually play with them. I understand.

Robin Gareus (00:46:43):
Well, I did did try some kernel drivers for some of them. Uh, and so that's kind of also helpful to getting hardware, uh, in, uh, I still use 'em for testing for an order like some, what I use as a constant permanent feedback or like loop so I can measure and latency, like I play out one channel and loop back on an input and I also build like a small or so that the small adapt board for the media, like I can send media out and get the raw media signal as, or the input in and the other way around so I can, uh, check that everything lines up. Like if you record overtops, you want everything to line up perfectly. Like the, well it just remove the human, like get the headphones directly into the mic and measure it on the cable because what, whatever.

(00:47:26):
That's perfect. I don't, I don't need to to have the human in there as well. <laugh>. Um, so I have one sound card set up complete like that to do like, uh, constant well Q and a if you want it like that to, um, to see if everything works. And the other one is like, now I use a, it's a personas, I bought it myself for doing music in the early days. It's the pretty much the only one, uh, um, I paid for and I still love it. That's what what I'm using right now as well for the podcast.

Jonathan Bennett (00:47:55):
Yeah. Do you do Mac, do you do primarily work on, on Linux?

Robin Gareus (00:47:59):
Yeah. Well, um, I started getting a Mac mostly if the Harrison says they keep sending me, I refuse to have a Windows machine around since I haven't used Windows since 95. That's what got me on Linux. Like I had like a, um, um, I was like 16 or 17 and my first PC was like, it came with Windows and I kind of was not happy with it. Yeah. The cool thing was mine sweeper. I think that's the only one thing I used to play on there, <laugh>.

Jonathan Bennett (00:48:26):
That sounds about right.

Robin Gareus (00:48:28):
And okay, I got on Linux like in 96, 97. I didn't have much of a use case back then. Um, but then as soon as I went to university I was a hundred percent Linux. I never looked back. Yeah. Also helped me get a couple of jobs at a university in the computational department and helped with a, my thesis. So it was kind of a, yeah. Um,

Jonathan Bennett (00:48:49):
Right. So I, I'm gonna go down the rabbit hole just a little bit and uh, I've gotta ask you about pipe wire. This is, this is a thing that I just love. I think pipe wire's the best and it's kind of like calf, A lot of people when you say that, they go, oh, so let's chat about it. What do you think <laugh>?

Robin Gareus (00:49:08):
I still have hopes it's gonna be the future. So, uh, um, back when it started, like I connected with whim in, uh, like 2018 or 2019 and he had like a first prototype and was Paul and me were like, uh, kind of, uh, no, you really wanna redesign that. And he did. Like, I was really surprised like in the, because Jack was so amazing as a sound system on Linux, it scales up to like, you can even like, uh, wayfield synthesis systems with like 3000 speakers. Like, uh, there's one at the, uh, du in Berlin like that just close by. I can, I can walk there, which is pretty fancy. They're still using Jack mm-hmm. <affirmative> and it scales amazingly well. And so it was the first revolutions of pipe boy, I just didn't have that nice of a performance. And uh, so Wim wasn't also aware of all the implications of doing that.

(00:49:58):
And uh, uh, afterwards, uh, I toyed with it a few times. I'm not using pipe wire myself, um, yet. Uh, and it fixed like most of the big issues and it's, uh, impressive in the sense like, uh, we kept telling him like, copy what Apple on Core audio does because they got it right. And it is possible. And a lot of the concepts are amazing. Like, uh, um, I still wish we had like a Steve's jobs kind of person in Leno's audio. Someone who could really put the foot down is like, no, you're going use that and you don't use anything else. <laugh>,

Jonathan Bennett (00:50:30):
Because

Robin Gareus (00:50:31):
We have a huge fragmentation, uh, in Linux and that was happening in the same time when OSX came out or OS 10 like you said. Like, okay, no, all the audio stuff likes gonna be core audio, all your old applications won't work anymore. You gotta switch and that's gonna be the system you're gonna use. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and uh, on it doesn't work like that. So we need to have someone who builds a system that everybody will want to use. So the other one's gonna fall into disrepair. And that was my motivation to push a pipe wire so that we can finally have like one system that can pretty much supersede everything else. And, uh, okay, <laugh>,

Jonathan Bennett (00:51:09):
The, the, the coolest thing that I, that, that I like so much about pipe wire is that it lets you, so using Jack on Linux, you're pretty much locked to a single input device and a single output device, which there are reasons for that. It makes sense, but CPUs are fast enough now that that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. And Pipe wire just said, oh, we're gonna do away with that limitation and we're just gonna resample and we need to. And so you can do, well, you can do fun things like my microphone is being recorded by Zoom cuz that's what we're using for the conference. My microphone is also being recorded by our door and pipe wire just goes, yeah, I'll make two copies of that. No problem. And that was something that just you couldn't do. You may have been able to do it with Paul Audio, but it would've been janky

Robin Gareus (00:51:56):
To do it. There's applications, party applications to do it, but you need the command line, which is the hard part. Well, not

Jonathan Bennett (00:52:04):
The problem with trying to do it with, the problem with trying to do it with Jack though, is that Zoom doesn't have a Jack, uh, zoom is not a Jack client. And so you've gotta set up something real crazy like, all right, Jack working with Pulse audio and be able to make those two things happen and yeah, I've, I've set it up and it is a pain, whereas with pipe wire it just works, which is great. <laugh>, right?

Robin Gareus (00:52:25):
Yeah. They simplified the, that setup of course. Uh, well, it's a lot simpler to get started with. Um, and there was also some refusals, like in check, when you record in a pro studio, you don't want to resample, it's not a CPU overhead, it's a, a quality issue from the sound. Like you don't wanna resample your snap drum for example, because you're gonna hear a difference. Uh, it's not so much of an issue with voice like your human, well, there's not a lot of either high frequency contract, uh, content that would be affected and also the facing issue like this, well, you're fine. You can just resample it. Uh, nobody will hear it. Um, also because, uh, the artifacts are so low down in the noise floor that most people won't even realize it on a casual laptop, but if you do music production, you care about those, those things.

(00:53:12):
And so a lot of the Jack developers or Linux Pro audio guys, they were kind of a, yeah, we could do that, but we kind of, we don't want to make it possible because it affects like the, the pro audio user. And there's still kind of a disconnect from the, from like a little bit of pushback from those guys with to pipe wire. And we even still, we recommend like if you do a production or like pro audio production, don't use pipe wire. Like, they still allow you to connect, like bypass it and use the also device auto can just connect to it directly so you don't have all the artifacts. Um, but I think for the casual desktop user, it will be the way to go, uh, in the long run.

Doc Searls (00:53:53):
Yeah.

Robin Gareus (00:53:53):
There's still small artifacts. Um, yeah, like latency compensation is one. Like you need to, uh, well, at one point you need to measure like, how long does it take for my audio, um, to reach a speaker or the same from getting from my microphone until it gets digitized. My sound card. The sound card has a small systemic latency, which you need to measure. It's different for every sound card. And then the bus, the PCI bus, how long does it take until it reaches the CPU and it actually reaches auto. And those delays you need to like, measure and compensate for if you do like, uh, overtops with a guitar in a studio and pipeline is not quite there yet with a, uh, with getting that stuff, right. So anyway, um, but they're moving fast. Like Whis an amazing person. Like, uh, I met him, uh, half a year ago. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and we, we hang out for a day or two in Berlin and well discussing about all the stuff that still needs to happen. Um, but yeah, on the other hand, they're pushing it out because they need Buck reports from the normal desktop users, which are the big crowd. And so if you don't release, like it's a release early releases often kind of a thing like, uh, uh, to collect buck reports and well, we know it's not quite there yet, but it will get there.

Doc Searls (00:55:08):
Yes, indeed. I, I have a, I have a question from the back channel I, I want to get to, but first I have to let you know that this episode of plus weekly is brought to you by code comments and original podcast from Red Hat, you know, when you're working on a project and you leave behind a small reminder in the code, a code comment to help others learn from your work. Well, this podcast takes that idea by letting you listen in on two experienced technologists as they describe their building process. There's a lot of work required to bring a project from whiteboard to development, and none of us can do it alone. The host Bur Sutter, is a Red Hatter and a lifelong developer advocate and a community organizer. In each episode, Burr sits down with experienced technologists from across the industry to trade stories and talk about what they've learned from their experiences.

(00:56:01):
Um, for example, I check that a deep learning episode. It's really good. I subscribe to it. It's a really great podcast. Those episodes are available anywhere you listen to podcast and at red hat.com/code comments podcast, search for code comments in your podcast player will also include a link in the show notes. My thanks to code comments for their support. So we have a, we have a question in back channel about, um, your, your own work and can we, you know, can we see, can we hear, I guess, some of your own stuff out there that you've produced with ror? If I'm remembering that right? It's been,

Robin Gareus (00:56:41):
Yeah, yeah. <laugh>, the movies we did, they're online also on, you can find them on YouTube and for the music I did, there's like the few on my website, but I don't usually, um, um, I don't have a SoundCloud account. I'm not very much of a social media person. Like I sent them an IRC to some guys, but I'm more kind of a, uh, um, well, one to one to one exchange, not like, I don't post all the stuff like one to many publishing things, so, so much so, yeah. But I can give you a link later on, uh, that you can put in the subscript, uh, subtitles or, um, of the podcast that might work.

Jonathan Bennett (00:57:20):
Uh, what are that, just so we can find the movies, what are the names of them? What do we search for to find those couple of movies online?

Robin Gareus (00:57:26):
Okay. The first is called a matan, like a, a marcan in English, I guess the suite you get on Christmas. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And you would look for my wife's name, Kalina Fes. She's a movie director. Um, okay. And then, uh, um, that would be, uh, on YouTube.

Jonathan Bennett (00:57:44):
All

Robin Gareus (00:57:45):
Right. And the other one, they were in competition on a couple of, uh, or like <inaudible> movies website, but that doesn't link to the, uh, doesn't link to the YouTube journal, I guess

Jonathan Bennett (00:57:52):
<laugh> <laugh>,

Robin Gareus (00:57:54):
They were in competition at some of them of the festival. So like, initially we couldn't like publish them and it was also uploaded by a third party. Like we're not involved in getting this on YouTube, uh, <laugh>. Um, cuz it was founded by the Dutch film phones. We made them on like 16 and 35 millimeter. Like it wasn't, it was really movie movies, like, uh, not another, um, video camera, but like actually cutting film. Uh, and uh, that also was a lot easier for me to make sound design to that because all the movie editing was done before I got started with the soundtrack mm-hmm. <affirmative> and I could just with like a one light scan and I could have already made, um, well short video to work with and not having any forth and back what you do most more commonly these days. And then you would need to have also video editor to pull a new changes and have a proper exchange format. So like in the early two thousands was still kind of a well old school, uh, production thing, uh, that we did.

Jonathan Bennett (00:58:51):
Yeah. So you, you and Paul just recently got together at one of the conferences in Europe, didn't you?

Robin Gareus (00:58:58):
Yeah, so it's funny, we haven't met each other for like five years and then we, uh, also, well we're averaging like from meeting at least like every two years, but then Okay, COVID happened and, you know, all the, all kinds of the world shutdown kind of thing, which was good for us because everybody was sitting at home and making music <laugh>. So, uh, a lot of new other users, like also our finances, uh, got a lot better for, for those two years. But then, uh, we only chatted on IRC and we Okay. We needed to meet up and we, I'm gonna fly over and visit Paul in, um, early January next year. So as soon as we set it up, um, there was one guy who packages AR for Ubuntu, Eric I, Eric h Meer, and he kind of, uh, asked like, Hey, you wanna guy come off to the Ubuntu summit?

(00:59:44):
They're having some like tracks with artists and uh, content creators. And so suddenly we met as well, like last, just last week, which kind of funny. So we saw each other right now and we see each other again, like just, uh, two months from now. Um, yeah, already looking forward. It's, it's really fun playing out with Paul, speaking of which, yes, like this code comments. Like that's also something I really love in a, the first time I got into the source code, he left a really couple of really funny code comments in there. Like, uh, you go through the code base <laugh>, you're gonna love that like this, uh, well with the profanity here and there as well.

Jonathan Bennett (01:00:21):
Oh, of course, of course. Always <laugh>.

Robin Gareus (01:00:24):
But so something

Jonathan Bennett (01:00:28):
To, so when you guys, when you guys got together, did you, uh, come up with any, any grand plans for the future? Or was, did, was it trying to ignore our door and, and just spend some time together?

Robin Gareus (01:00:39):
Well, we started really talking about a at all. Like, because when you in office with another guy, just like having a fun, uh, talk at the coffee machine about other stuff that happens. Yeah. And we never really have that. And so the, the first couple of days were really just like, um, catching up and hanging out and having fun. But yeah, we, we had a couple of ideas for the future as well for modulation is another big feature that we wanna introduce, um, uh, parameter modulation, um, for that. So you can, well it's one big feature that Arda doesn't have yet, and you could just like grab one. Um, well, dub step might be an example. Um, you have like a kick drum and you use the, the, well, the volume of the kick to change and equalizer later on. Um, or to change even, uh, like using side chain input to compress or like to dub another track depending on input from, from an, uh, from a different source. Or you have like musical time ion, like you have a vibratto effect that goes depending on your, on your musical time. You have like a volume modulation, uh, going out or you can imagine all kinds of stuff. Um, uh, a cutoff filter for, um, an instrument that is being controlled by the outer timeline. Uh, so

Jonathan Bennett (01:01:55):
It almost sounds like you're trying to, to take some inspiration from what guys are doing with modular synthesis and some of the crazy, crazy Euro rack stuff that would be fun to see too. I may or may not have some Euro rack modules over there. I'm playing with, you

Robin Gareus (01:02:08):
Can have Btv Rack. Paul loves to play with rec. Um-huh. And so I think that's also some part of his motivation. Although modulation in a, in a door is usually less, uh, not as a, a sample, uh, level, but more like a higher level a control. Um, but you don't have like RGA modulation, you don't use it to sculpt sounds, what you do in a mo Lucent, but more kind of, it's a control parameter that changes over time or depending on an input. Um, so that's one of the, uh, thing that we kind of planned out how to do that. Um, in an evening

Jonathan Bennett (01:02:42):
<laugh>,

Robin Gareus (01:02:43):
Well, it's gonna be two years of work, like Yeah, okay. But kind of a, it was a fun, fun thing to talk about. So that, um, um, uh, there was also a nice band at the summit, like at the last day there was, they had a, a river boat. Like we were really, like they hired a whole boat for 200 guys and we went, uh, uh, on the ow on the river for the whole evening and had a band LE's Audio band playing there. Nice. And they're from Madison, Wisconsin and they publish all their auto sessions on GitHub. I didn't even know, like they, they're doing these since 10 years is also kind of, uh, auto users are everywhere at we No clue. They're out there

Jonathan Bennett (01:03:20):
<laugh>. So Yeah. So I've gotta ask,

Robin Gareus (01:03:23):
Ask Bundle them anyway.

Jonathan Bennett (01:03:25):
Yes. Oh yeah, that would be fun. Um, that would be a lot of fun actually. So I've gotta ask, what is the weirdest or most notable thing that you are aware of somebody doing with our door?

Robin Gareus (01:03:38):
There was, um, one guy, you know, net Mayer, he did live front of house mixes with ato and he even, like in between breaks he find the Buck report and he compiled it. And then during the break one show we're having a break

Jonathan Bennett (01:03:52):
And

Robin Gareus (01:03:52):
Then getting back on a buck fix and like that was one of the craziest experience I was like while being around. That's awesome. Um, so, uh, yeah, anyway, well,

Doc Searls (01:04:04):
Well that is a great question. You almost close with. Um, are there, just quickly, is there anything that we haven't asked that you'd like us to have asked that we you can answer quickly? <laugh>,

Robin Gareus (01:04:15):
I think I talked about so much over the last, uh, hour. Like, um, um, well I'm pretty good actually. Um,

Doc Searls (01:04:23):
Yeah, I, I I've, I learned a lot. Um, uh, so we, we have some final questions we always ask at, at final two, which is, uh, what are your favorite text editor in scripting language

Robin Gareus (01:04:35):
<laugh>? Um, I worked with vi, um, pretty much well because it works in every system, even me or the university. They had AI systems, it was installed just wherever, every system I touched VI was around or later via. And I'm pretty comfortable with using that also for doing auto scripting. Languages would probably be Lua these days. Um, also cuz I, it's a real time safe language and I started adding support for it in o um, a few years ago. Never got, I used to do Pearl a lot more than Python, but yeah. Um, I'm gonna go with Lua and vi.

Doc Searls (01:05:14):
That's good. That's good. A lot of vote for Villa, one of our first for Lewis, so that's, uh, good to have it in there. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, not that we're keeping a record, but it's just memories. I

Robin Gareus (01:05:25):
Don't care. I've been in like doing programming languages since like 20 years or so at some point. Uh, they're all pretty much, uh, well same concepts and then, uh, it takes an hour or two to get into again, but afterwards, well, um, <laugh>. But yeah.

Doc Searls (01:05:41):
Cool. It, it has been great having you on the show. Um, we'd love to have you back. We say that often, but, um, with stuff moving as quickly as yours is, um, this is, you know, very tempting, so we look forward to having you back.

Robin Gareus (01:05:58):
Well, thanks for having me. Uh, that hour flew by like, uh, uh, thought it take a lot longer to talk about. Yeah, yeah. Time flies when you're having fun.

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:09):
Yes.

Doc Searls (01:06:11):
So thanks again. See

Robin Gareus (01:06:13):
You. Yeah, see

Doc Searls (01:06:15):
You. So Jonathan, that was good.

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:18):
Oh, that

Doc Searls (01:06:19):
Was fun. You a lot of great questions. Are you a musician also? You sounds that you are a musician, I think,

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:25):
Is that right? I'm in this weird spot where I have musical instruments and I like to fiddle around with them sometimes. Uh, I don't know that I would call myself a, at least not currently a musician, uh, <laugh>. It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's an odd spot now. I've been, I've been using ROR for a long time. Let's see, it was 2006 or so, uh, while I was in college. Wow. Somebody introduced to me this, this really cool, uh, thing to do music to, to, actually, we were, we were recording live music and he was using ROR to add some, uh, some effects and do the mastering. And I, I saw that and realized that, oh, that runs on Lenox too because I, I, at about that same time finally jettisoned to my Windows install and gone to Lenox only. And, uh, so that was just kind of this breakthrough, oh, oh, there's this really ridiculously good setup out there and, uh, you can get it at the time as a poor college student.

(01:07:19):
So I was excited that you could get it for free through your, uh, your distro. And then, you know, recently I've actually become, uh, one of the paid subscribers to ror. They've got, we didn't even talk about their funding model at all today. We talked about it when we talked to Paul. Um, but you can, you can pay, uh, a dollar, $4 or $10 or I think 50 is their top tier for, you know, commercial use and you get a little bit of support and you get the official downloads. Um, and so I, you know, I'm, I'm actually a subscriber now to ror, but I, it's, it's a, it's a neat system and using it with pipe wire on Linux, the things that you can do and, and the ways that you can make, uh, audio move around throughout your system to be able to record things and do live processing is, it's, it's just really impressive. The, the things you can do with it are really cool.

Doc Searls (01:08:07):
Well, that's great. Um, and I, I, oh man, my time is so used up with other things, but, um, <laugh>, uh, I'm, I'm gonna try it out. I'm gonna see what I can do, you know, see how, see how that works. Then get off Audacity a little bit. Um, so what, what have you got to plug? I know hack a day, but give us the whole scope. Yeah,

Jonathan Bennett (01:08:29):
So I've got the security column goes live on hack a day every Friday morning. And that's a, that's a big deal. That's a lot of fun. Uh, you can follow me there for security updates, which you need to know. Um, but also we, we need to talk about club TWiT briefly. So there's two things. There's the Untitled Linux Show, which is every Saturday evening we record and have a lot of fun there. And then tomorrow, uh, let's see the 17th I think. Yes, November 17th we're doing an ask Me Anything, uh, where people have been compiling questions and they're gonna be thrown to me live real time on Club Twit and I'm going to scramble with what I try to come up with answers and not make myself look ridiculously <laugh>. And it's gonna be a great time. So make sure to be there too.

Doc Searls (01:09:16):
I was thinking Saturday night, every Saturday night, every, you could have a date, a date night with Jonathan. I like that. <laugh>,

Jonathan Bennett (01:09:24):
Yes. To geek Out over Lin stuff. Sounds great. <laugh>

Doc Searls (01:09:29):
Geek out over Lin stuff. Well this has been great. This has been a great show and thanks for, for coming off three weeks in a row so far. <laugh> as cohost. Um, next week, um, we have Mattias, uh, Kersner of the Free Software Foundation. Um, been a while we heard from the F fsf I think. So it'll be great to have him on. So that is coming up next week and until then, I'm Doc sos has been plus weekly. We'll see you then.

Ant Pruitt  (01:09:57):
Hey folks, I'm Aunt Pruit and what do you get your favorite tech that has everything. A club TWiT gift subscription, of course, TWiT podcast, keep them informed and entertained with the most relevant Tech News podcast available. With the Club twit subscription, they get access to all of our podcasts ad-free. They also get access to our members-only Discord access to exclusive outtakes behind the scenes in special content such as AMAs, which I just love hosting. Plus exclusive shows such as End Zone, Mac, end Zone Windows, and the Untitled Lenox Show Purchase Your Geeks gift at TWiT tv slash club twit. And it will Thank you every day.