
Radium – The Music Editor - buovjaga
http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/
======
ne0phyte
It looks nice, but, serious question, is there a reason why the UI in all
screenshots is so dark and completely lacks contrast? I really couldn't look
at black text or dark blue text on a dark background all day :/

Examples of what I mean:

\-
[http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/pictures/overview1.p...](http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/pictures/overview1.png)

\-
[http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/pictures/pluginmenu....](http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/pictures/pluginmenu.png)

~~~
agumonkey
Unless they hardcoded the color scheme, this won't be an issue for long.

~~~
Gracana
Yeah, it's all editable.
[http://i.imgur.com/8pJMhCb.png](http://i.imgur.com/8pJMhCb.png)

~~~
ne0phyte
Ah, nice. I was just looking through the github repo and found some config
files for qt with color schemes. And yet my question stands: Why present a
project like that?

~~~
socceroos
Because the team is primarily developers, not designers? That's my best
guess... its quite common amongst open source projects (although this is
becoming increasingly rare).

~~~
buovjaga
The team is one person in this case. Project started in 1999.

------
SwellJoe
So, because I can't resist any new audio toy, I downloaded it and tried
it...it locked up X, or the desktop or something, on Fedora 21. Which seems
odd, as it's using tk for the interface, which ought to be old and stable, by
now. But, maybe nobody is testing current desktops against tk anymore, so bugs
don't get found.

Also, the color scheme in the screenshots is really the color scheme; it's not
just botched screenshots. Completely unreadable, for me, at any reasonable
distance from my monitor. I mean, I understand I'm not so young and my
eyesight has never been great, but I can't believe this is a comfortable level
of contrast for anyone. Hopefully this is easily configurable.

~~~
fundamental
There was a relatively recent bug in X11 which would cause X to crash when any
arcs were drawn on screen with certain beginning/ending angles. This might be
what's affecting you at the moment.

~~~
SwellJoe
A yum update and reboot allowed it to work. You're likely right (or it was
some other Xorg bug). Getting color scheme readable was easy (making it look
nice _and_ be readable will take a lot more work).

It feels pretty complex, and it seems like it's heavily reliant on hotkeys to
be able to do much of anything quickly/easily. I recall being very effective
at getting ideas working on hotkey based trackers in the distant past, but
it's been a long time, and I dunno if I have the patience to learn enough of
it to be productive even approaching the level I'm productive on other tools.
It almost feels like Impulse Tracker is its ideological ancestor, in its
reliance on keyboard navigation. Which some folks love. I'm not necessarily in
that camp these days.

But, still an interesting experiment and UI design for music.

------
bane
Wow, this looks really impressive. I've messed around with trackers since the
90s, and I think lots of people who do kind of wish they operated a bit more
like this rather than with fussy hex values and hard to remember effect codes.
I've always, for example, just wanted to draw the shape of the track volume as
a left-to-right line over top of a track rather than having to hand edit the
volume column or use a volume effect (or use a track-effect that's in a
different window somewhere).

This looks like it's really going the right direction.

The compressor also is worth taking a look at.

------
Tunecrew
A serious question from someone who is in and out of studios weekly and who
works almost daily in Ableton and weekly in Pro Tools and Logic (doing
production as well as post stuff).

Does anybody use something like this to make music for any
professional/commercial use or is it really just of academic interest and for
tinkerers (no offense - there is value there to I know).

I ask because when I look at this (and I'm also an EE and a software
developer) I get a headache.

~~~
dvirsky
I wonder if you've ever tried Ardour and what's your take on it as recording
pro? Personally I think it's wonderful. I haven't used ProTool and Nuendo etc
for years (I produced a couple of albums about 15 years ago, but haven't done
much professionally since), but it seems very nice and produces great results
IMO.

~~~
brusch64
I am a big advocate of Ardour. But I really hope they get their act together
and stop adding new features, but start making the release more stable. The
last really stable and great version for me was the last of the 2.x releases.

They improved the looks but there was always something that didn't work quite
right. IN the 3.x series Midi was introduced, but it crashed all the time (and
I've updated every time there was a new release).

Now I am using 4.x and it is dog slow for big sessions (which I originally
recorded and mixed in 2.x on a much lesser PC with no problems).

I do understand their arguments. I know that they want to release something
for Windows, Mac and Linux to improve their customer base (greatly). But I
really hope that Ardour solidifies and they start improving the quality that
it comes back to the quality of the 2.x releases.

~~~
dvirsky
I used 3.5 about a year ago for a few months, and it was pretty stable once I
got my Jack setup stable. It seemed like most problems were with iffy drivers
and plugins. Installing everything from Ubuntu Studio's apt repos seemed to
produce pretty stable setup and it was also pretty fast (I used a VERY strong
machine thuogh). Haven't tried 4.0 yet.

~~~
brusch64
I didn't had any problems with Jack or plugins - the problem with 3.x was Midi
editing. Well it was introduced in this release, but I did some drum
programming (our drummer was sick, so we've programmed drums to our music) and
it sucked.

It was totally normal that Ardour crashed at least twice in the 1 or 2 hours
when we were editing drums. And the devs knew that this problem existed, but
they've basically told, that it should be fixed in 4.x.

~~~
dvirsky
I hardly did any midi with it, maybe that's why I didn't encounter that :)

------
bittercynic
The subscription model is beautiful.

Must subscribe to access the full version. You can unsubscribe and only lose
access to updates.

------
pdkl95
Warning: this program trashes the keymap table.

An incorrect attempt is made to save/restore the by extracting the original
name (e.g. "us") of the keymap layout with

    
    
         ${RADIUM_DIR}/bin/packages/setxkbmap/setxkbmap -query
    

and then attempting to restore the keymap table with

    
    
         # LAYOUT_NAME="us"  
         ${RADIUM_DIR}/bin/packages/setxkbmap/setxkbmap -synch -layout ${LAYOUT_NAME}
    

That is, it assumes no modifications have been made to the table, and restores
the original standard layout. This is a serious problem if you use utilities
like xmodmap(1).

------
yellowapple
Seems to check off all the boxes for things I'm looking for in a good music
editor. The CMN support is nice, too. Downloading the demo right now.

------
z5h
Looks very cool. I'll definitely give it a try.

As a huge fan of Sunvox, Radium looks quite appealing.

------
abruzzi
I love this line on the download page:

Information to warez groups: Since the source is open, it should be simple to
turn the demo into a fully featured version. Please let me know of any
problems. (Just compiling the source is cheating!)

------
dmacvicar
It looks awesome.

First thing that looks like candidate for contributions is a build system. I
tried to build a package out of it and it is a collection of Makefiles and
shell scripts that for sure can be used to build the thing on a developer's
machine, but not useful outside that context.

~~~
programLyrique
Not sure the developper is interested in contributions about that:
[https://github.com/kmatheussen/radium/issues/223](https://github.com/kmatheussen/radium/issues/223)

~~~
dmacvicar
I see. Well, from the homepage, the developer sells the builds so I can
understand he is not interested in making packaging and distribution easier.

~~~
buovjaga
It doesn't seem to be the case, though:

"The linux binaries have only existed a few months, and I've got requests to
add a "make install" option to the makefile for a couple of years, so that it
would be easier to package. And I've refused to to it for the same reasons as
above. So this has got very little to do with "selling builds".

Of course, I can't deny anyone to make custom radium packages, but I hope they
won't. It's simpler and safer if everyone uses the official package, which I
also know is packaged (fairly) properly."

------
alecrasmussen
The features mention "Extension language support" that lets a user write
programs to generate music / modify songs. Anyone care to elaborate on this or
provide some examples of extension languages (maybe integration with ChucK or
Max/MSP)?

~~~
SwellJoe
Some of the screenshots have Pd (Pure Data) running.

~~~
alecrasmussen
Ah, thanks! It even looks like Pure Data is already embedded (says it's linux-
only for now). According to Pd's homepage it looks like you can even use
"externals, i.e. objects developed in another programming language" as part of
your workflow.

~~~
buovjaga
[https://github.com/kmatheussen/radium/issues/69](https://github.com/kmatheussen/radium/issues/69)

The developer says: "Pd should be included in both windows and osx as soon as
I convert Radium to use the new multi-dsp system in Pd that Miller made last
year."

------
omfg
Might want to change the name, Radium is an internet streaming application
that has been around for years. People might find it confusing, I did..:
[http://catpigstudios.com](http://catpigstudios.com)

~~~
moogly
This Radium has been around since 1999.

------
pen2l
Sorry for silly question, but: is "Radium" a DAW? If not, how does it compare
-- what can it do that a DAW can't, and what can't it do that a DAW can

~~~
SwellJoe
"DAW" is a ridiculously overloaded term.

It contains such diverse tools as:

REAPER and Ardour and ProTools - Multitrack recording tools, used for
recording live performances, with some basic MIDI capabilities built up over
the years.

Cubase and Logic - MIDI sequencers, with multitrack capabilities accreted over
many years to the point where multitrack recording (in the same contexts as
the above category) is not unheard of, though the UI focus is different.

Fruity Loops and Ableton Live - Loop composition tools (for lack of a better
description). Both are designed around loops as the basic building block of
sound. While they have limited recording and MIDI capabilities, one likely
wouldn't use FL or Ableton to make a symphonic soundtrack for a film, and
certainly wouldn't use either to record a full band of performing musicians.

Renoise and apparently Radium - Trackers for the current century. These
evolved out of the old Soundtracker style music programs (including
Protracker, MED, etc. on the Amiga and then onto FT and Impulse Tracker on
early PCs). They've acquired most of the functionality one expects from
sequencers and loop based music programs, but don't usually have any multi-
track recording facilities.

All are called DAWs by their developers and users, and yet how one uses them
is pretty different. I pretty regularly use Ardour and REAPER for multitrack
recording. And, I occasionally use Fruity Loops and LMMS for tinkering with
remixes. And, I occasionally use Renoise for making electronic music.

I'd like it if there were separate terms for each of these concepts, as it
would give folks a good language for talking about what each of these types of
tools do. It would also rule out a lot of the stupid confrontational crap that
often comes up ("Your program sucks because I can't do X, Y and Z, and I only
ever use this other program!" where X, Y, and Z are functions specific to one
of the above types of DAW...like "I can't easily do loop-based remixes in
ProTools. ProTools sucks!").

~~~
bphogan
...I use Ableton Live to do quite a bit of non loop-based composition. It's
quite easy to do and feels well supported.

~~~
SwellJoe
Yes, there's tons of overlap in all of these (sequencers and multi-track
recorders were the first to begin to blur the lines, but now basic loop-based
features are creeping into sequencers and both FL and Ableton can be used for
nearly any basic sequencing task), but the focus of the tool makes a
difference in workflow.

And, the tools that pros use for specific tasks can also be indicative. You
won't be surprised to find ProTools in a high end recording studio, and you
won't be surprised to find a film soundtrack composer using Logic or Cubase.
Likewise, you won't be surprised to find an EDM producer using Ableton.
There's less overlap in what pros use than in what the tools are capable of in
the hands of someone really good with that specific tool.

Anyway, doesn't matter. My point is that there are several different
categories of program called DAW. The way they display and receive data varies
wildly, and the use cases for them is pretty diverse, and I think it's weird
to call them all the same name.

------
the_cat_kittles
it would be nice to see an editor that stops locking pitch, time, and velocity
together. i made a prototype where you can manipulate sequences of pitch,
velocity, time, and other concepts independently- its really awesome!

