Sonic Visualiser

[danboid]

This request for a new app - Sonic Visualiser - to be added to AV 6 may actually be redundant? I can't help but think one of the apps already included with 5.0.3 should be able to do the same job but I've not found it yet if there is one?

I'm doing a cover of an old jazz tune right now that I was unable to find a score for and so I've found the 'Melodic Range Spectrogram' view pane of SV to be an immense help in the transcription process.

There is also waon for this purpose under Linux I know but the MIDI files it produces are often pretty much unusable and require so much cleaning that you often are effectively starting over anyway so SV is now my tool of choice but sadly it seems that its missing from the Deb repos.

http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

PS I made the nasty discovery last night that you cannot install KDE from the repos under 5.0.3 without downgrading half of the included libs which ends up breaking all the included KDE and Qt apps, at least. Looks like those AVers who prefer KDE over the more lightweight DE's would be required to compile it themselves under this latest release although I must admit I've never tried installing KDE under a previous AVL so I dunno if this has always been the case? There are too many missing features and bugs within both lxde and XFCE for my liking so I tend to either go very minimal with fluxbox or go whole-hog with KDE when I have the RAM these days seeing as GNOME 3 is a write-off in my book. Its too early for Razor-Qt yet but I may end up using that when its ready.

[varpa]

On 5.0.2 I installed sonic-visualizer 1.9 (current) with synaptic - is it not available in 5.0.3? 

I wonder if you could avoid the KDE downgrading by turning on the unstable or testing repositories?   Still might be tricky to avoid installing too much stuff which might break other things.   Turn off these repos when done to avoid accidentally installing other upgraded stuff.

[danboid]

Hi Varpa!

With SV, maybe I can get it from the some repos (if not the official Debian ones yet) and I can certainly compile it myself but doing either defeats the whole point of using a distro and unless there is another app already included in AV 5.0.3 that does a similar thing as well as or better than SV then I see this as a must-have inclusion for the next release personally.

As for KDE, I realise that GMaq has chosen LXDE over KDE for numerous very good reasons and I'm not intending to argue with any of them here but it would certainly be nice if users could easily switch to KDE if LXDE isn't fully-featured enough for them without having to compile as KDE is a bit of a beast for sure. No, I've not attempted to install KDE from testing but that sounds shifty as hell and I think I'd rather self-compile to be honest!

 

[varpa]

I believe the AVLinux install image is limited to 2 GB (due to Remastersys bootable-image limits or something like that).  Therefore everything can not be included on the ISO.  If an application is available in the Debian repos in recent version as Sonic Visualizer is it does not seem to critical to include it on the ISO.   However, its a fair argument that if there is enough interest it could be included in the ISO, though probably at the expense of some other application.  Well, this is Gmaq's call, I'm just pointing out the constraints.

[GMaq]

Hi,

I provided the Sonic Visualizer binary from their site a few versions ago and it was very unstable, simply clicking certain buttons on the GUI made it go poof. Varpa is correct that my ISO's are limited to 2Gb not by Remastersys (that limit is 4Gb) but by the apache servers my web hosting uses which make a file larger than 2Gb not appear visible although they are there. Other than that my hosting is very good to work with and 2Gb seems like a reasonable size limit that kind of makes me keep an eye on keeping things lean.

As far as KDE4, I don't test other DE's, the fact is that in order to make AV Linux what is is I have to occasionally make some deals with the devil (devil=Debian unstable) and those deals have a cost somewhere. It has always been my intention for AV Linux to be a functional unit unto itself and not a universal Debian spin-off. If you want something that open-ended than use Ubuntu or pure Debian because they are made for that (although Ubuntu is completely useless as a multimedia OS unless you know the KXStudio PPAs and dozen or so other obscure PPA's to add to actually get version of the applications that work... look at the Ardour and Kdenlive forums sometime...end of rant)

As far as Debian if you want to compare, download an ISO of pure Squeeze and check out the default versions of everything and hopefully what AV Linux is giving you is worth the few choice constraints it asks of you. Granted Debian Testing and Sid solve some of those issues but can't be Remastered and Sid especially can pull the rug out from under you when you least expect it. I don't have to tell you Linux is about compromises, that is why there are thousands of distros and half a dozen of each kind of application...

[danboid]

Hi GMaq!

I didn't know that SV used to be included with AVL and nor have I tested the deb package offered on the SV DL page- primarily because I have a healthy distrust of Debian binary packages that don't even tell you if they were compiled with Ubuntu or Debian- nevermind which of the many versions of either! I compiled SV myself under AVL and I've not experienced a single crash so I'm suggesting you do the same, give it another go and seriously consider including a AVL-specific package of it in the next release coz it was meant to be!

I wasn't expecting you to test AV with all the different desktops and nowhere do you claim to support KDE. I also realise that if I want things exactly as I prefer then I should start my own distro- which is on the cards but you're doing such a fine job GMaq I'm quite happy just helping you right now.

 

[GMaq]

Hi,

Will look at the new version, however if you don't trust their Debs why would you trust their source? Doesn't really make sense to me...

[danboid]

It makes perfect sense and the fact that you say their .deb is crash-prone whilst my self-compiled build works great is the proof in the pudding.

I would only ever install a 'unknown' (as in not knowing the distro (Deb/Ubuntu) and version it was compiled on) deb if it was a 'noarch' one ie script(s) or platform agnostic data files or admitedly I do so sometimes out of desparation if I have trouble compiling the source and the developers are less than helpful or not so responsive.

I think it pretty unrealistic to expect .debs to work when they are unlabelled as you could be running Debian unstable whilst the Deb you're trying to install could've realistically been compiled for Ubuntu 10.04 still with its totally different versions of libs etc.

Deb rant done! 

 

[danboid]

NB If you want the SV 1.9 source tarball to link successfully under 5.0.3 (or earlier) you need to append:

-lX11

To the end of line 19 of $SRCDIR/sonic-visualiser-1.9/sonic-visualiser/Makefile