Well, to me the best GNU/Linux app for making music is audacity. Perhaps it lacks something, but is a clean and easy to use software, with great features and there are MacOSX and Windows port… Having Audacity on Haiku would be really wonderful…
IIRC: mmu_man’s OSS package doesn’t provide any OSS API in Haiku. It only implements a fallback drivers for some sound devices (when no native driver is available).
Audiacity is a simple (user-unfriendly) audio editor. Sure would like it to support Haiku, but it is of limited use.
I’m okay with Audacity for tweaking/mixing use, but as others have noted, it’s not a sequencer/tracker or instrument host.
I’ve just been speaking to mmu_man on irc and he’s answered a lot of the questions I had about OSS under Haiku.
To check if you’re running with OSS under Haiku, see if you have any files under /dev/audio/oss/
I’ve not tried it yet but you can supposedly force the use of OSS if you have it installed by creating a symlink like so:
ln -s …/bin/oss_loader /boot/home/config/add-ons/kernel/drivers/dev/
mmu_man strongly advises against any apps depending upon OSS because it is not the Haiku way which I interpreted as OSS being basically unsupported. He also mentioned there is a potential Haiku OSS bug where it stops working after 6h15m which you could work around by restarting media_server.
I think that we need, in music production, two kind of software: the first should be similar to cubase 3: handling multi track and instrument host (via VST and VSTi) and the second software, should be something similar to BeAE and/or Audacity, for simple audio editing and for post editing.
Just my two cents.
Yes, a Haiku Audacity port would be cool but Audacity is no replacement or rival for qtractor or OOM as it is really just a sound editor rather than a multitrack DAW. The beta versions of Audacity can load MIDI files I think but there is no support for MIDI editing. Audacity uses wxwidgets but I’m unsure what the status is of the haiku wxwidgets port as osdrawer still seems to be down right now. Rather than porting Audacity I’d rather see work go into improving BeAE personally.
@starsseeds
Thanks for that! Have you ever had to use opensound under Haiku? Is it controlled by the regular Haiku audio mixer apps or do I need to use a separate OSS mixer? Can I run it even if my soundcard is supported natively by Haiku ie force it to use OSS? I’ve not been able to find much info on Haiku and OSS as you can tell.
Maybe I’ll just need to compile OSS from scratch myself to get the dev headers etc but getting JACK running with OSS under Haiku should obviously be a lot easier than porting JACK to the native Haiku sound/media api but that is what needs to be done eventually I should imagine.
There is a multitrack recording and MIDI editing app in the Haiku ports archive called Hyperstudio. I’ve got it to build and install but I’ve not been able to get it to do anything. Its author abandonned it about 6 years ago but that doesn’t matter so much now as this afternoon I got ecasound to build under Haiku.
Unsurprisingly, ecasound doesn’t have any support for Haiku’s native sound system so I’ve had to build it against OSS, which Haiku can use as a fallback sound system. The main disadvantage with this at the moment is that OSS only supports sound output and not input for USB audio devices so recording with OSS (under Haiku or the BSDs) is pretty much restricted to PCI and onboard devices as it stands.
I’ll have to try one of the ecasound UIs like Tkeca with it soon.
Dan, feel free to post your findings on ecasound in an issue report at http://bitbucket.org/haikuports/.
This way your effort won’t be lost and will be eventually picked up by someone.
media-sound/ecasound
Hi Korli
I mailed the author of ecasound (Kai) yesterday to tell him how I had to modify the configure script to get ecasound to build. I’m not expecting him to add support for Haiku’s sound system to ecasound but hopefully he’ll at least modify the configure script so that vanilla ecasound can build for Haiku/OSS without any patching.
I didn’t have time to test ecasound yesterday but once I’ve confirmed it works and I’ve had a response from Kai I intend to create a recipe for it. I also want to see if I can get any of the ecasound UIs to run under Haiku and the LADSPA recipe needs to be fixed so hopefully I’ll get that done soon too.
I have been meaning to file a ticket for porting JACK. The JACK2 recipe is broken (I expect it never worked) but I have got further building JACK1. Being a command line app, ecasound doesn’t have any support for MIDI sequencing but once we have JACK ported then that opens the door to porting the Muse DAW amongst others.
I’d love to see qtractor ported to Haiku but its heavily reliant on ALSA for its MIDI whereas Muse supports JACK MIDI. qtractor would require a large rewrite to make it work without ALSA and Rui isn’t interested in supporting non-Linux platforms.
I have got JACK 0.124.1 to build under Haiku although only with the dummy backend currently.
Haiku (and JACK) can use OSS although it doesn’t look like the Haiku developers want any OSS apps or libs in their repos so JACK would require a new Haiku mediaserver backend. Alternately, there is another project I’ve yet to try called libjackcompat which is written from scratch to use the mediaserver although its currently deemed experimental.
Total Haiku NOOB here, but as I look at Haiku’s Media Kit https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheMediaKit_Overview_Introduction.html
it seems to me that many primitives for streaming media are included in the OS Media Kit, and that compatibility with Linux and ALSA is pointless and actually disadvantageous (Media Kit won’t be on Linux anytime soon, LOL)
Trying to support any other platform than Haiku OS is basically throwing away the advantages of Media Kit and not driving platform adoption.
I am NOT a NOOB about using DAW’s, however, and I toured for over a decade living 100% off producing electronic dance music on various DAW’s, as well as having over 30 years experience of recording instruments editing mixing mastering traditional studio work.
I currently make a living programming web server applications on Linux, and I’m aware of the advantages this platform provides for this application. My principle language these days produces executable binaries and has an HTTP server in the standard library 
I “get it”.
ALSA, however, is an impediment (device trees being one strategy for setting up channel mapping that users need for multi-channel audio interfaces that ALSA cares not a whit about, etc.)
Linux diversity and layering and modular software ideas are also not useful given the interfaces and state machines it’s subsystems provide. (I get that modular “glue code scripting” of OS primitives would be cool, but that’s not what’s available with our favorite SERVER (mainframe) OS)
Most audio developers who have worked on all platforms will agree that CoreAudio is basically the most pleasurable to work with. In practice, you use RTaudio or portaudio or whatever and you can just open an soundcard driver and register your callback function and call it a day, but you certainly can’t use any OS provided datatypes nor know anything about the data until you have defined your own and pipe everything through it. (pre-buffering, recording, any memory-mapped spaces where you do outboard processing like UAD does, etc…)
Reaper Ardour Cubase Ableton and other cross platform apps will basically let you select an audio driver and open it for duplex communication and they function by having all timing, buffering, etc defined inside the application, and they all have their own libraries for dealing with this.
Logic and Mac only software often take advantage of CoreAudio data types inside the program and if you look at Media Kit, you can basically use glue logic to make some primitive multi-media applications directly with the OS…
I’ll not have much time to argue with folks here, etc… but I will report back later with code, and my hope is to do a from-scratch DAW, and not by being arduous or torturing myself trying to replicate Pro-Tools nor Cubase functionality that the users don’t like anyway, but are the historical results of trying to continually be everything to everyone and add features to software.
Ableton threw away most of those obsolete rules and simplified things and things “just work” the way you expect them to, first time you touch it, no owners manual needed.
I intend to consider the nature of Media Kit and write a Haiku OS ONLY DAW that will never work on Linux Mac or PC, because any serious music person cares about the DAW as a holistic tool they can achieve songs with, and will be OK installing a partition or building a dedicated tower for this task.
A DAW is a single purpose computer, in a way, and the less unrelated gack in the way of this = the better.
Oh, don’t expect anything from me soon, LOL… I’ll talk to you in a couple of years… LOL…
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Good luck and may Zenja be your inspiration! 
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Good day,
@aaron_peacock, Go for it!!! Look what @Zenja did with Medo, the video editor, as @Parnikkapore said, you can use it as inspiration.
I would certainly use such software, a native DAW would make things easier for me too… (once my audio issues get wiped out though 
)
Regards,
RR
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Yes, that’s very impressive! (Medo)
I’m still working my way through the Haiku API documentation and the various guides as well.
I intend to try to work with the system as much as possible, but Medo, especially open-source, is a fantastic gift to us all indeed!
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hi and a warm welcome from here! it’s also an old and intense wish of mine, to do serious audio-stuff on the haiku-platform. i’ve tested a lot of audio-cards and interfaces without any luck, so there is some way in front of us, but this is something i know from linux, too 
but what do you think about plugins? there are a lot of people, who cannot (or don’t want to) migrate to linux, because they have some important synths or plugins, which exists for mac and windows only.
@aaron_peacock As Magix (was Sony and previously SonicFoundfy) Vegas - and partially Acid - does, it would be great to have a DAW+NLE into a single software…
As said before (even in this discussion), nowdays certain features are needed (es. online collaboration), IMHO.
Anyway, to me the 1st impostant thing is to have a clear GUI.
Here’s some - maybe - inspiring open source resources:
- http://lnxstudio.sourceforge.net/ - a way of bring people together to make music with new and innovative tools.
- https://www.zrythm.org/ - Almost-mature DAW with a not-so-clear GUI
- https://github.com/kmatheussen/radium - a music editor with a new type of interface.
- https://www.shotcut.org/ - well-known NLE with a very clean GUI
- https://github.com/Reaper10/Sound-Ocean - An (adbandoned ?) attempt to put Traverso and Koblo DAWs’ features togheter
- https://github.com/dliganov/Chaotic-DAW - handy music composing tool, allowing to achieve complex results with minimal interface losses.
- https://sourceforge.net/projects/hyperengine/ - Floating windows NLE
Hope that inspires.
That’s of course a good point. And for me personally it’s one of the main reasons I use OSX for my recording stuff. Even if we had a good DAW it would be lacking my guitar amp plugins like S-Gear (real quality stuff sound wise).
But that said, it would be great to be able to do normal audio editing stuff under Haiku. I’ve tried BeAE but it chokes on just about every wav file I tried. Maybe BeAE could be fixed and enhanced so we wouldn’t have to start at zero.
Btw, can the newly released Medo video editor do audio-only?
Yes, a solid editor would be a good start (and unfortunately i’m dependent from some plugins and macos, too).
I was’nt able to test Medo yet, since i’m using a 32 bit system at the moment.
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Yes, it can be used as a simple DAW, ie. you can position clips on a timeline and trim clips accordingly. At this point in time, there are only 2 audio effects you can use (per channel gain, and a 20 band equaliser). More will come in time, I plan to hook into ffmpeg audio filters for more audio effects. An industrious volunteer can create a plugin to parse Audacity effects …