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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.

Setting up more stuff

Application List

To be done

Studios management

Yes, your LADI configuration is done, now it's time to see how the whole thing work. first of all, 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

Let's start with some basic studio management

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

In the previous section, we created a studio called "reggae". We are going to rename it to something more specific, let's say "reggae rhythm" 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"

Using your studio

Your studio is configured, now it's time to make it useful. Load your studio, the one called "reggae rhythm". Obvious isn't it ?, we are going to create a reggae rhythm. For a basic reggae rhythm, we will need the fellowing :

• a battery, rhythm software
• a piano provided by a sampler
• a guitar provided by a sampler too
• an organ provided by a specific software
• a software to drive all the previous one, a midi sequencer

so we will use :

• Hydrogen for the battery software
• Linuxsampler for the sampler's need (we will use a frontend, qsampler)
• Horgand for the organ