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Contributors: dharanamrs and Dakylla.

Getting started with LADI

So that's it, you have everything installed: laditools, a working jackdbus and ladish. What's next? The best way to get started with LADI is via the LadiTray system tray menu.

LadiTray

You will find this program in your desktop menu. You can also call it by launching

laditray

from a terminal. A tray icon like this should now appear in your system tray. Right click on it to get the laditray menu:

Gladish

Now start gladish, the first LadiTray menu entry. This will open the gladish window, which is a central point from which you can control everything. You see instructions how to proceed:

The first step is to create a new studio in the Studio menu. We will call it mystudio in this example. Noticed the gladish main area becoming totally black? This area is where jack audio and MIDI components will show up later.

Ladiconf - Configuring JACK

Now we first need to setup JACK to work properly on the system. From the Tools menu select Configure JACK:

Upon selecting Configure JACK, you will see a small window appearing:

This window is actually an application called ladiconf, and it allows setting all JACK parameters, although we will bother here only about essential parameters for getting started. Click on the JACK engine parameters button. You will see the following:

If you are used to working with JACK, most of these parameters will be familiar to you. All parameters are explained in the window, but let's pick up the most important ones for getting started:

driver

your JACK backend, which is alsa if you have an internal or USB audio device or firewire/freebob if you have a firewire audio device. You can also setup the backend for using netjack here.

name

The name of the JACK process on your system. Do not change this.

realtime

this option should be checked.

realtime priority

set this to a value lower than what you have defined in your limits.conf file.

client timeout

it may be helpful to increase the default value to avoid slow reacting applications being ejected from the JACK process.

port-max

this is the maximumum number of jack ports available for your work. It can be reduced to have JACK allocating less memory.

sync

JACK2 can operate all clients synchronously or asynchronously. JACK2 by default operates in asynchronous mode, which adds one period of latency, but which will make it more stable in case an application has problems delivering its data on time. If you encounter problems with the default setting, you can try to change it.

If you are through this menu, you can Apply the changes and step to the next Ladiconf button: JACK driver parameters:

The items you see here concern your audio device on the backend. You might have to select a specific alsa device. Some devices also require that you tell how many capture and playback ports it provides, but for most devices, you can leave those two as default. You should select your rate, period and nperiods, for which 48000 (or 44100), 256 and 3, respectively, are starting values that work for many system setups. But you should get information upon how to optimize them for yours. Let's not bother about the rest at the moment and step down right to the bottom of the window. Here you can specify, whether JACK itself should provide ALSA MIDI ports as JACK MIDI ports using the internal 'raw' or the 'seq' driver. If you don't select anything here, you will not see your ALSA MIDI applications/devices in gladish. Alternatively to specifying a driver here, you can leave it to no MIDI driver and use a2jmidid to provide this bridge. A2jmidid might at this time be a safer way to bridge ALSA MIDI to JACK.

If you are done with this, you can Apply the changes, and we're through the hard part.

Start Studio

Now that JACK is configured, select Start Studio from the Studio menu. If everything is OK, you'll see boxes appearing in the black main area:

Also notice the status bar on the bottom. There is a green LED indicating that JACK is actually running along with other information. Also, the laditray icon indicates a running JACK by a green arrow. Not the case? Well, there is probably some configuration error, and the studio probably didn't start because JACK could not start properly. Choose Logs... from the LadiTray? menu and check for errors. It is likely that you have to reactivate JACK through the LadiTray? menu entry. Maybe you also have to reactivate ladishd in the LadiTray? menu.

If everything went OK, and you have the green LED, let's see what to do next.

Save your setup

To be sure we keep at least the JACK setup, we will save the parameters we just entered by choosing Save Studio in the gladish Tools menu. You will have seen meanwhile that actually most of the actions can also be directly called from LadiTray?, so we could also save the whole setup using the LadiTray? menu. Once you saved everything you can try Unload Studio. This will stop JACK and remove the canvas area. Upon reload it should come back with a started JACK and the input/output boxes on the canvas.

Gladish canvas

We'll now step through the elements you see on and around the canvas: it is the main area showing all audio and MIDI applications and equipment on the system. You can connect and disconnect ports by clicking them sequentially. Note that all connections you do here will be saved with your Studio and get re-established when you load or start the Studio.

Status bar

At the bottom of the display, you see all information about the JACK status, the dropout aka xrun counter as well as current and peak DSP usage.

Filling your studio with life

Your studio is configured, now it's time to make it useful. We will first rename it to a meaningful name and then add different application components useful for the music project we want to setup.

Studio renaming

In the previous section, we created a studio called "mystudio". We are going to rename it to something more specific, let's say "reggae rhythm". To rename a studio, select the rename studio option from the Studio menu entry

You can also use the keyboard shortcut "Shift+Ctrl+R"

An example Studio

You probably didn't guess that, but we are going to create a reggae rhythm, and we will need the following applications:

• a drum machine and rhythm application
• a piano, provided by a sampler
• a guitar, also provided by a sampler
• an organ, provided by a specific application
• a midi sequencer

so we choose to use:

•  Hydrogen as drum machine
•  Linuxsampler as sampler (we will use its Qt frontend,  Qsampler)
•  Horgand as organ

Adding applications to your studio

Let's first add the  Hydrogen drum machine as application. Go to the Application menu and choose Run

You can also use the keyboard shortcut "F2"

You will be confronted with this Add Application dialog box

Dialog disection

Command: the application command. The same that you would type on the terminal to launch it. Here it is hydrogen
Name: The name which will be displayed in gladish left panel aka application list.
Run in terminal: select this if your application requires a terminal .
Run Level: Hydrogen is level 1 compliant so we choose "Level 1" here. Information about application level compliance can be found here: Compliance levels?

After validation of this dialog, hydrogen should start automatically. If not, type the same command on a terminal to see what's going on.

Application support for Level 0 and 1 do not provide a path for your project/studio files to be saved. So to take care of where our applications (hydrogen, Qsampler and the others) files will be stored, we will create a path on our own.
Let's assume our project (our reggae rhythm) files will be stored in this directory:

~/Music/reggae_rhythm

The hydrogen song file will be called "reggae_rhythm.h2song", so the full path will be :

~/Music/reggae_rhythm/reggae_rhythm.h2song

Now, in hydrogen's program window, save your project to that file (~/Music/reggae_rhythm/reggae_rhythm.h2song).

For this studio, we always want to load this hydrogen song file, so we need to tell gladish to do it so. This is done by adding the hydrogen song to be loaded to the application startup command. For this, we first need to stop hydrogen in gladish: Right click on Hydrogen in the Application list and choose Stop. This should make disappear hydrogen and its boxes on the canvas as well. The reason we stopped hydrogen is that we wish to do some modifications in the application properties, and this can only be done when an application is stopped.

You can now change it's properties:

You can note the command is now :

hydrogen ~/Music/reggae_rhythm/reggae_rhythm.h2song

Let's start hydrogen now to see if it loads our provided song file (~/Music/reggae_rhythm/reggae_rhythm.h2song) automatically. If something goes wrong here, type the command on a terminal to get things cleared.

Features and functions one by one

What is a studio?

A studio is an audio setup configuration. You can think of it as an audio session configuration or a project
Studio contains:

• JACK audio server and its settings
• Rooms, those are where projects are loaded. They define set of ports that are used for connecting with rest of the studio.
• Applications whose JACK clients are part of the high level, hardware setup. For example, master mixer, equalizer, crossover. Settings for connecting to remote hosts are also part of the studio.
• Connections between studio applications, hardware jack client, netjack client(s) and room ports

Basic studio management

Application List

To be done

Studio creation

Start gladish, if it is not running already. You can find gladish in your system menu. Create a new studio by selection "New Studio" from the menu

Studio creation

Label your studio : we choose "reggae". Your studio is now created.

Studio renaming

To rename a studio, select the rename option from the Studio menu entry

You can also use the keyboard shortcuts "Shift+Ctrl+R"

Studio unloading

You may need to remove any loaded (active) studio from LADI, to do so, you have the unloading facility. You may consider saving your studio setup before unloading it, it's up to you To unload a studio, select the "Unload Studio" option from the Studio menu entry

You can also use the keyboard shortcuts "Shift+Ctrl+U"

Studio loading

If you want to load a studio to work on, you just have to go to the "Load Studio" from the Studio menu entry

You can also use the keyboard shortcuts "Ctrl+O"

Studio deletion

When you have done all you needed to do with a studio, you can consider deleting it from your studio list. Everything related to this studio will be trashed so be sure about your doing To delete a studio from the studio list, select the "Delete Studio" option from the Studio menu entry

You can also use the keyboard shortcuts "Sift+Ctrl+D"