Use Rakarrack for Electric Guitar Effects [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
May 21, 2008

Rakarrack is a new GUI-based application that can turn a Linux machine into a collection of audio effects for use in the making of music. The developers include Josep Andreu, Daniel Vidal and Hernán Ordiales with help from other individuals. Rakarrack version 0.1.2 was recently announced, it appears to be the first public release. From the project's web page:

Rakarrack is a guitar effects processor for GNU / Linux simple and easy to use but it contains features that make it unique in this field of applications. It contains 10 effects: Linear Equalizer, Parametric Equalizer, Compressor, Distorsion, Overdrive, Echo, Chorus, Phaser, Flanger and Reverb. It integrates a tuner and a MIDI converter (experimental). It can also be handled by an external MIDI controller. The settings designed by the user can be stored in presets and these presets can be used to create banks of effects.

The README file in the source code has some information on the motivation behind the project: "This app born after an informal conversation about effects for guitar over GNU/linux. The major part of this apps are discontinued or simply not have new versions after few years. Josep Andreu say on the IRC chat "I can made an app based on the effects set hid[d]en on code of ZynAddSubFX (by Paul Nasca Octavian). Some time after here is the result of our work..."

The project screen shots show the GUI layout and various color schemes. Compared to a typical hardware audio processor, the GUI has big advantages over the usual LCD display that most effect units have. One need not hunt around a pushbutton-controlled memory to view and change the many adjustable parameters and the system disk provides nearly unlimited configuration storage possibilities. To hear Rakarrac in action, listen to the demo by Carlos Pino (ogg format).

One might wonder if audio effects processors will soon follow mobile phones, TiVo-like video recorders and consumer-based audio recorders in the transition from proprietary operating systems to Linux-based embedded systems. Such a system could be put together with a small Linux-compatible embedded platform, an LCD interface such as LCDproc (with the aforementioned UI limitations), keyboard and audio interfaces and some DSP software similar to Rakarrac. In the mean time, if you have a need for a versatile hardware effector and can spare some CPU cycles, Rakarrac may be an effective solution. The software is available for download here.

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Use Rakarrack for Electric Guitar Effects

Posted May 22, 2008 14:55 UTC (Thu) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]

I am pessimistic about this.

I have also contributed a few effects into GNUitar. Sadly, we haven't made release for ages.
The CVS version is compilable and works quite well, though, at least with JACK.

Linux audio processing seems to be a veritable graveyard of mostly dead projects. Stompboxes
went on a rewrite and apparently died there, creox hasn't been updated forever, FX processor
was last updated in 2000... And GNUitar's latest release was in 2005. All in all, all these
projects might have satisfied the developer's need, but they also have attracted so few users
that there has been no real push in making this type of software better.

Does anyone know where the linux audio action is, especially regarding guitar effects? I have
hard time believing these standalone applications is the best we got going.

Maybe it's all with LADSPA & LADSPA hosts? If it is, I'm surprised because I must have missed
that really good LADSPA host which everyone else is using. Not to mention a really good set of
LADSPA plugins. The hosts make little effort to visualize the plugins well, and the plugins in
turn provide poorly explained, unitless sliders with very few sanity checks, allowing moments
of experimentation to be punctuated by other moments of ear-splitting, speaker-shredding
wailing.

Use Rakarrack for Electric Guitar Effects

Posted Jun 1, 2008 2:10 UTC (Sun) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]

The Free software audio community is large and thriving.

But it mainly consists of people who like to do things right - if doing realtime audio they
tend to write their own DSP chains in puredata or their favourite music programming language
to shave off valuable latency milliseconds.

http://linuxaudio.org is a good place to start.

Many people find jack-rack to be a good ladspa host. Although soon we'll all be using LV2
instead.