[deleted] jawkins
It occurred to me that this technology couldn't possibly exist to the layman. Everything recorded in a studio has a different track for each dub/instrument even back to the day of vacuum tubes and analog. Only the record company/engineer could isolate the tracks. They own it. There's no profit to make selling a bass track, for example, to the general public. These stems as you call them probably do originate from the studio and a royalty is paid by Rock Band. By the time it is MP4 or other, it is a wholly compressed file anyway so unworkable.

This ^^^ entire paragraph is 100% speculation on my part, but seems likely the truth or close to it, whatever the truth may be regarding acquiring a particular drum track, vocal etc.

****Footnote. There are craploads of guitar players and drummers on youtube playing over an existing (copyrighted) song with a their particular instrument stripped out. A guy playing Eddie Van Halen over a guitar-less "Running With The Devil" for example. So we know some technology exists to us peons that can strip out a single track...so everything I wrote up to now is invalidated. But what becomes of the single missing track? Can I have it?🙂
edit...unless ALL the youtubers above are using rock band?

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        • Post #8

        brent How Rock Band works is it contains all the stems separately, so it can mute the corresponding track when you make a mistake while playing. My hunch is most of the backing tracks are either remakes or indeed, original stems layered without the one (in this case guitar) track.

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          • Post #10

          jawkins physics with mathematics, mostly. And the problem i had with Steam was when i couldnt view any broadcasts on the client, which was my fault because i did not reboot after the weekly update 😛

            9 months later

            jawkins Hi, I too would like to integrate drumgizmo into ardour, however, even though the instructions for compiling seem straightforward enough and I think I have the correct tools installed, not having much success. If you have found a way to successfully build it could you describe the necesary steps or required tools to install? Much appreciated in advance.

              I use Ardour for recording songs, mainly just guitar and vocals. Somewhat recently got a Spark Amp, which has a USB cable, and the recording quality has skyrocketed. It's my first real amp, and I've been enjoying it a lot.

              Have yet to take the plunge with a drum machine. I play a lot of blues and rock.

              However, my main creative endeavor is writing. I am self-published (though without much fanfare or sales), and I wrote the entire thing on Solus and open source software (even included a little mention in the back of the book). Apps I like are ghostwriter, pandoc, and Vim.

              My experience in the beginning was very bad lol. I had this issue where I had to logout and log back in every time I needed to start JACK. Having automatic login was the cause. For whatever reason no password at login meant no JACK. Eventually I figured out that any program that prompts the "Unlock Login Keyring" thing will make JACK work without having to logout. No more impeded workflow 🥳

              But overall I loved producing music on Ardour. I loved exploring all the cool things the linux music community had to offer. Seeing people like Unfa (an open source music producer and sound designer) doing cool things inspired me to continue fiddling and having fun with it all.

              Nowadays, I just want things to work. There are a bunch of inconveniences that make it frustrating when you want to jot an idea down. The midi editor for example 🤮 , the constant crashes, no workable inspiring presets for a lot of the plugins, and so on. For example, when I'm making music with friends these inconveniences will show up a bunch through out the session, but what's really upsetting is when you don't even have an approximation of the tone that you want for a song your making and they give you that face 😞. Very uninspiring when working with other people in the moment. By myself its fine because I'll eventually find the tone, but still very unfun.

              Basically, I see a lot of potential. Things sucks but they suck everywhere don't they lol. One day I hope that I can contribute to the community and make things suck less, but for now I'll continue making music with the mediocre skill I have 🤠

              As for my tools:
              DAW: Ardour
              Guitar: Squier Jaguar
              Amp: Blackstar HT-20
              Audio interface: Behringer U-Phoria UM2
              Plugins: Calf Stuff, LSP stuff, Vitalium, Zynaddsubfx
              Drums: AVL drums, Hydrogen

              Links to Music:

              My first attempt at a completely electronic song. It's definitely not on the grid and the sounds are terrible 😂 But there are some good ideas in there that I would like to expand upon.


              This is one I made as a joke. If you understand spanish this one may be funny to you LMAO. First time working with samples. If you recognize the intro, your a friend of mine 🤝

                jawkins I'm also a musician and I'm very happy with Solus. My last two songs I produced entirely at Solus.

                    RicSense Would you be willing to share. I'm interested in listening might find inspiration in your work

                        TeenCorn Of course! I'm sharer much stuff on youtube. If you interested in my autoral work there's a playlist on my channel titled "AUTORAL / demos".
                        If you want to know the two songs entirely produce in Solus: and

                            TeenCorn I'm glad you liked it and thanks for your feedback. This motivates me to continue sharing the results of my "study" of how to make a diy production in the gnu/linux world. It's been a great learning experience for me.

                              OK, think I am close now, found I was missing some build tools, (probably have too many installed now) mainly being solbuild{duh}, arcanist and solbuild-config-unstable as well as component system.devel. Now when I run the ./configure I recieve an error that x11>= 1.0 not found, this is after installing xorg-server-devel package. Could this be because solus doesnt name the package as 'x11'? Still hacking at it blindly in case I make a lucky hit to report.

                              Maybe just asking brought the answer to me, I installed libx11-devel and libxext-devel and IT WORKED!!!

                              TeenCorn I'm under the impression (perhaps mistaken) that much best in class software and gear is Windows or Mac only.

                              All of the stuff I use is one or the other (with Windows making great strides in this space). Graphics I think is at least on par on Linux (at least for my limited uses), but anything audio it seems Linux is too much of a handicap (Ableton, Foobar2000, EAC, etc.).

                              We'll see if this changes.

                                  qsl Every system has it's paper cuts. The thing that inconveniences me the most is JACK. The hassle of even just booting it up is terrible. While on Windows it's seamless with ASIO and Reaper. On top of that, you can't play video in browser because it doesn't use JACK, switch audio output when you want to listen through speakers instead of headphone, and it kill pulseaudio when you kill JACK. So an extra step of going to the terminal and turning it back on when done using JACK. So in this respect Windows is miles better.

                                  But I've experience better plugins on linux for the most part. At least the free ones. I haven't ever bought a plugin so I'm sure those are of higher quality.

                                  Hopefully it does improve but I doubt it.

                                      TeenCorn Way back in the day, Apple products use to dominate this field with Window offerings barely adequate (at least for the low rent neighborhoods I tend to travel in). Now, relatively decent software comes bundled often enough, with cheap options available if you use older editions. A Win 7 license can be had for $20 (but let me tell you about the [on-going] nightmare of installing it on modern hardware).

                                      Similarly, gaming on Linux use to be a joke, but the community make great strides in this department to where you can say it is comparable overall (and in some cases better), without having to to be apologetic with "it's free".

                                      Big point is being honest with its capabilities (and on the other side, what costs you are actually paying). Too often I get pointed to software as being equivalent to the windows version when it's not even close.

                                          qsl Valve were the ones that made gaming on linux a seamless experience. Though the work of the community like dxvk, vkd3d, wine, and much more are incredible achievements, Valve focused and funded them into a usable program for the layman in proton. Of course this is only for the benefit of Valve; not all.

                                          I do believe that similar results can be achieved without a centralized force like Valve pushing for change through the might of their wallet. Though it'll be very difficult.

                                          In the realm of audio it seems PipeWire will handle the different audio systems in linux seamlessly. So there is exciting stuff happening. But after that much more work needs to be done.

                                          • qsl replied to this.