init
12 Jan 2020 -
- in which we begin our story of Aoede Linux
Several years ago I created a Github repository in which I declared my intent to author a Linux distribution for the purposes of audio production and engineering. And then years passed and the project seemed both unecessary and convoluted when considering the tools already available for the purpose. Yet I continued to feel drawn to the idea for a few key reasons:
1.
The trust factor.
I must always compromise between my desire to ensure that my system is not compromised in its security and the realities of modern computing; we cannot have both perfect security and a functioning application ecosystem simultaneously. There are always tradeoffs. It becomes a matter of where and which kinds of tradeoffs are made and if I can reduce my surface area it’s a high level way of mitigating the risks associated with using other people’s builds/binaries and trusting that their stacks remain uncompromised. I am reminded – for anyone who feels this is needless paranoia – of the recent compromise of a major PGP keyserver.
Although I have provided a build for anyone who might be interested in jumping in immediately, if I were someone discovering this project I would be pleased to find that I could easly reproduce the image with my current system using only the source code. I am aware of other methods but the archiso project – really, the Arch Linux release engineering team – has made this essentially trivial.
2.
Ease of use.
Needless to say a system I have designed for myself is going to be more immediately useful than one I must decipher – in the sense of decoding another’s designs. With a system like this one – only relevant to people looking to craft segments of audio in a variety of ways with often scientific-grade tools – getting out of the way of the user (even if that only means myself) is a top priority. Frills, in my opinion, ought to be kept to a minimum as well. Arguably this is a matter of taste, and my tastes are minimal.
3.
There was a gap.
For those of us for whom the “Arch way” is appealing, and to whom the Unix philosophy is essential, the approach to this project seems to fill an obvious void in the current map of Linux-based offerings. And when you consider what it does and who it is for in the context of the broader climate of the computer industry and mass media, it is filling an even more specific niche. It doesn’t do exactly what many professional-grade tools can be expected to do, but having tested Linux audio software for years I’m confident that all but the most pristine studio-grade recordings can be replicated with the available tools – specifically Ardour and the LV2 plugin collection. For a little bit of cash you can upgrade to MixBus or Bitwig and then you are really starting to be competitive. At the very minimum, there are some approached to music making that can supplement the commercial offerings found os Windows and Mac platforms and this system is agile enough to boot into a VM and add some special sauce to a mix.
I suspect I’ll have more to say as time wears on but those are the essential bits.