Linux pulls even

I had some surprising success yesterday. I was able to record music on my crappy lappy running Ubuntu Studio.

I'm as surprised as anyone.

I had an idea to try plugging my Line 6 into the Mac instead of the Vox headphone amp to see if it sounded any better. Since my wife was using the MacBook for school work, I had no choice but to try the Compaq again.

I still had the same problem with JACK, so I had to start it from the command line again instead of using the GUI. I opened up Patchage - which I really like, by the way - and mapped the line-in to the output.

Then something strange happened.

I heard my guitar!

And it didn't even sound that bad. There was some latency, but it was hardly noticeable.

But I wasn't out of the woods yet. I had to find a way to record. Ubuntu Studio comes with oodles of great tools, but they're all fairly advanced. I tried Ardour (a mixer-recorder similar to ProTools) and after fiddling around for a while, finally figured out how to capture audio.

It worked.

Hot damn and pass the ketchup!

There's a lot of interference in the headphones, so I don't know if that was captured or not, but I now have another crappy riff recorded on a computer, this time using Linux.

At the end of the first, it's Mac 1, Linux 1.