Nicholas Toone

  • Linux Tip #1: Max Amount of Locked Memory

    This is primarily for Mixbus and Mixbus32c running on Linux. It also applies to Ardour, which Mixbus is based on. The distro I’m using is Fedora Jam, however this most likely applies to whatever distro you’re using.

    Issue

    Mixbus 32c shows the following message when launched:

    WARNING: Your system has a limit for maximum amount of locked memory.
    This might cause Mixbus32C to run out of memory before your system runs
    out of memory.
    You can view the memory limit with ‘ulimit -l’, and it is normally controlled by /etc/security/limits.conf
    Solution

    Open a Terminal window and check the memory limit by typing ulimit -l . You may see something like this:

    $ ulimit -l
    8192

    This means that Mixbus is limited to 8GB of memory. To open this limit up, in Terminal, edit limits.conf:

    $ sudo vi /etc/security/limits.conf

    Add the following lines (or if they already exist with a # in front of it remove the # and change the number value of memlock to unlimited):

    @audio – rtprio  95
    @audio – memlock unlimited

    Save the file and check the ulimit again. You should see this:

    $ ulimit -l
    $ unlimited

    If you don’t see this, then restart. You can try logging out and back in, but I found this didn’t work. A full restart, for whatever reason did.

    Launch Mixbus. If you see the same warning message, check your group in Terminal:

    $ groups yourusername

    If you don’t see the audio group listed, for example:

    username : username wheel pkg-build

    add your user to the audio group:

    $ sudo usermod -a -G audio yourusername

    Check groups again. You should see audio listed:

    $ groups yourusername
    username : username wheel audio pkg-build

    Launch Mixbus and the message should be gone.

  • Another Major Shift

    After all my posts opining about Apple, macOS, Dell, and Windows, I’ve thrown my hands in the air and given up looking at new computer hardware. I have a ton of reasons which I’ll write about, but the main one is that I’ve become dismayed thinking about the amount of second hand computers that exist while companies churn out new product for ridiculous prices. As a friend of mine recently said: “I like the idea that Apple is making high performance chips that are low on power consumption but I can’t, and won’t spend that much money on a computer.”

    After looking into the second hand market, I headed to a local, mom and pop refurbished computer store and marveled at the WALL OF LAPTOPS they had on display:

    WALL OF LAPTOPS

    These are all second hand/refurbished. And they have more than these stored away in the back. They have old old computers, not so old computers, and newish computers. Give them an idea of what you’re looking for and they’ll hook you up. Why would anyone buy something brand new? Performance? The ability to run whatever is shiny and new?

    Well …

    I ended up purchasing a refurbished HP EliteBook  850 G3. The model is around six years old and came with an i7 6600u, 16GB of memory (which I upgraded to 32GB thank to an extra stick of ram I had lying around) and a 512 SSD. Supposedly the CPU is not Windows 11 supported but who cares?

    In another twist, I decided to flatten the hard drive and give Linux a run for its money.

    After doing some research, I settled on Fedora Jam as it’s geared towards music production and so far so good.

    I’ve got my Tascam US16x08 running using ALSA – which came with Fedora Jam and needed no configuration – and it all works with Mixbus32c. I have to say that, so far, Mixbus runs so goddamned smooth on Linux, which makes sense considering it’s based on Ardour.

    My usual go-to and longtime favorite DAW is Reaper, and it turns out they have a Linux build.  I managed to get it installed and running but, at first, it would not pick up the Tascam. I kept at it over the past few days and now it seems to be running just fine – although under JACK rather than ALSA. I mean ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Music aside, I’ve managed to set it up Fedora as a full-on desktop environment running KDE Plasma and with all my usual apps (Firefox, Spotify, FocusWriter) as well as a good number of Open Source alternatives. The most pleasing surprise is a video editor called Kdenlive. it’s got just the right amount of features that I used in DaVinci Resolve and Premier Pro to make it just right without excessive bloat.

    I’m also loving how well a new release of Linux runs on six year old hardware. When I first brought the laptop home, and before I nuked the drive, I gave the Windows 10 install a spin and it was a little sluggish. Fedora, on the other hand, is running like a dream.

    Linux has come a long, long way since I seriously tired it last. I know it will never overtake Windows or macOS – I mean, it’s been poised to take over for as long as I can remember – but wow, it’s so much better than I remember.

    So far so good.

  • A Call To Action

    Last year I decided to try my hand at content creation on YouTube.

    I ended up doing five videos which picked up a grand total of twenty one subscribers, got some comments, and one video got well over a hundred views. Nothing earth shattering, but kind of cool since I didn’t tell anyone at all I was doing this. I never promoted my channel in any way, other than posting the videos here (and I haven’t told anyone about this site either).

    While it was fun and I learned a little more about video editing, I came to realize that the sheer amount of time needed to keep a channel going is simply unsustainable for me.

    The effort it takes just to get a piece of content done is amazing. Scripting, lighting, sound, shooting, editing 1 all takes time. A lot of time, which is something I have precious little of.

    Now I know there are those out there that who would simply pshaw at not having enough time 2:

    “You need to sacrifice everything to make it, man!”

    “You gotta hustle, man! You gotta griiiind!”

    Listen, the Hustle/Grind Culture thing is toxic and grossly misleading. Like everything else, there are a lucky few who manage to break through the cracks and make it. For everyone else, the grind becomes expectation, and hardly anyone achieves the promised pot of gold.

    The Grind only leads to burnout. Which leads to stress and illness.

    An old manager said to me regarding raises and promotions: “There are rarely salary bumps. We reward hard work with more work”.

    I have a family that I love and I work to make sure they’re happy. I have a good job that I enjoy. Both of these things take up a good chunk of my life, and I jealously covet my time outside of work and I refuse to ignore this for a small slice of the YouTube global audience.

    I’m well past the time in my life where I could make it in any artistic career. In my late twenties, I made a conscious decision to stop pursuing art as a career and, for lack of a better term, I “sold out”. I got trained up in computers, snagged a job in IT and have done pretty well for myself and my family.

    Music, visual art, video creation are fun for me. It’s what relaxes me during the down time that I do have. Why ruin that by hustling and grinding away my free time to pump out YouTube videos that won’t even guarantee any kind of success?

    I made a conscious decision: I’ve deleted the Low Budget Lifer YouTube channel. I didn’t even want to keep it up as a “hobby” or whatever, I wanted to be completely off the platform.

    I am still playing around with video creation, and any that I complete will be will be posted on this very site. When I want. How I want.

    1: Then there is the obsession with stats. When one of the videos got enough views to open up the stats a little more, I stared going back again and again and again to look at the graphs and charts – even though there was very little happening.

    2: This fucking guy. I could do a whole rant about this dude because: JFC, really?

     

  • Punk Rock

    Punk Rock is about freedom, it’s not about your chart position, and I’ll sing any fucking song I want.

    – Patti Smith (The Defiant Ones, Ep1)

  • “Because Joe Rogan Uses It”

    This is a great video about Shure microphones and how you don’t really have to drop serious cash on things to get a great result.

    Remember, just because it’s expensive and all the famous people use it, doesn’t necessarily make it the best. You can work with what you can afford and still get a fantastic result.

  • Free Your Mind

    I’ve been bashing away at the seven-ish songs I have in various states of progress. It’s slow going to say the least but the motivation is there. I’m currently working on the following:

        1. Writing and re-working (and practicing!) drum parts
        2. Writing Lyrics
        3. Tearing songs apart and building them back up again

    Number One is fun and loud even though it’s a reminder that I haven’t been practicing, which is embarrassing.  The ideas are there but my execution is very, very rough. It’s all practice, practice, practice from here.

    Number Two is somewhat difficult. The last time I sat down to pen lyrics was with White Lake Mountain. Writing words for for that band wasn’t what I’d call burdensome; it was stoner rock so I drew from Science Fiction and Fantasy. No inspiration required.

    This time I’m running up a steep hill. While I have some half baked ideas, I’m having a hard time coming up with topics to write about. I’m not into love songs, or party anthems. With a few exceptions, I’m not really keen on political words. I’m also no longer the angry dude I once was; I’m happy in life. I also don’t like super lazy lyrics.

    For now, I’ve dusted off my thesaurus and am chipping away at words. Hopefully good things will materialize.1

    Number Three is, right now, the most important part of this whole process.

    I took a two week break from the songs and then went back and listened to what I had with fresh ears. What I heard made me realize that I had fallen into a pattern. Most of what I had consisted of the same orchestration and arrangements: Guitar chords using the standard verse-chorus-verse-chosrus-overly long bridge-verse -chorus.

    I like the bare bones of all the songs, but in their current state, they sound predictable. The lengths were all around five minutes and the arrangements were nearly identical; I was reminded of that Nickleback How You Remind Me Of Someday mashup.

    It was time to get out the jackhammer.

    I’ve stripped two songs back to just drums and bass and have removed the semi-flashy, dad rock guitars. It’s back to root notes and four on the floor beats and rearrangement.

    So far so good on all fronts. There is good stuff to be found here. I just have to be patient and wait for it to show itself.

    1: I have to write lyrics in a notebook with a pen. I’ve tried tapping on my phone and/or laptop and jut can’t make it work probably because pen and paper removes the distraction of the internet.

  • It’s Alive!

    At the end of February, I posted about my beloved 11″ MacBook Air finally giving up the ghost.

    This morning I was reading that the last of the 11″ MBA’s were being added to the obsolete list and I started thinking about the error icon I saw:

    bork bork bork

    I looked it up. And found that it was most likely an issue with the SSD. For a goof, I pulled the laptop off the shelf, removed the back and and found …

    There was no screw holding the M2 SSD in place. How in the … ?

    My best guess is that when I took that machine apart a couple of years ago to  replace the battery, I forgot to put the screw that secures the M2 drive back in place. And in the time between then and now, the SSD managed to wiggled itself loose.

    I have this tiny, external drive that holds a 128GB M2. I took it  apart and removed one of the screws holding the M2 in place. I then went to the Mac, re-seated the SSD, put in the screw, put the back cover on.  plugged it in, hit the power button and …

    The Mac is humming away running a software update. Who knows how much longer it has, but I’ll take it.

  • Bagpipes

    Bagpipes. They’re not just Scottish, Celtic or Irish. There are Caledonian ones and Spanish ones and Middle Eastern ones. Wherever you have a goat and you have a piece of wood, all I want to say is the goat better watch out because it’s probably going to end up being a bagpipe.

    – Hans Zimmer On Creating the Dune Soundtrack.

  • Band Vs Music

    … I realized that the mistake was that I thought I wanted to be in a band. What I should have been thinking about was wanting to play music.

    – Ian MacKaye

  • RIP Taylor Hawkins

    1972-2022.

    (Photo by Daniel DeSlover/imageSPACE)