caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

Army · 2008-11-28 14:25:27

Hi there

Yesterday I finally wanted to try out my new M-Audio Transit with jack and jack-rack and play the guitar a little using ladspa to make a fine distortion. I always preferred caps, because their sound fits my needs best. However, there is no sound coming out of my headphone, when I select an amp simulator (there are several ones of them in caps). The speaker simulators work fine as usual. I didn't try out the modulation plugins. SOOO, what is wrong here?!?! In the first test, I used 48000Hz as samplerate and there were dozens of xruns per second. Switching back to 44100 made it relatively stable, but still no sound.

Any idea?

redbit · 2008-12-29 20:10:25

Hi Army,

I am interested in these plugins, too.

Until I read your post I was thinking that the input level of the guitar is too low, because I have no preamp. But unfortunately there must be something wrong with these plugins.

Last edited by redbit (2008-12-29 20:10:47)

redbit · 2008-12-29 21:29:23

good news! The amps seem to work again. You simply have to remove the -ffast-math compiler option from the makefile. Got this hint from a webpage.

Hope this helps.

redbit

Army · 2008-12-30 14:43:09

Yeah, I saw the comment in the AUR. I'll try it out and will tell the results hier, gell

DonVla · 2008-12-30 16:11:50

hi army, redbit.
i've written o the developer some time ago, but he didn't answer. i'll try redbit's suggestion and then i'll change the pkgbuild.

vlad

Army · 2008-12-30 22:30:01

I wrote him as well 2 weeks ago and no answer as well ... Damn, I hope he's ok, seems very strange to me.

The fix of removing the -ffast-math compiler option doesn't work here. Well, it changes something, but still the plugins don't work. WITH this option, my system freezes, as soon as I activate one of those amp simulators. Now it doesn't freeze, but there is no sound coming out of the speakers, just like being muted.

redbit · 2008-12-30 23:21:06

I wrote him a mail two days ago, still got no answer ;-)

@army
hmm I'm sad to hear this, how could this happen? I mean, we have the same distribution?

I noticed some noise like xruns quite often. But I don't know if this is due to running jack not in real time mode or not using a real time kernel.

Army · 2008-12-31 01:34:42

I'll try it out tomorrow, maybe I'm just too ... sic in da hed I ran jack in realtime mode with stock kernel, maybe that's the thing? ... We'll see, as said, I'll do more tests tomorrow (today, it's past midnight in Allemania)

DonVla · 2008-12-31 14:38:52

redbit wrote:

But I don't know if this is due to running jack not in real time mode or not using a real time kernel.

afaik there is no realtime kernel needed anymore. you can set your prefs through /etc/security/limits.conf.
put therein smth like:

@audio          -       rtprio          80
@audio          -       nice           -10
@audio          -       memlock         250000

i haven't noticed any diference when i switched from the rt-kernel to the stock kernel last year (though i'm no sound pro).

funny, the good tim quitte gets mail bombardments...

redbit · 2009-01-01 12:43:45

thanks DonVla, I already increased the numbers in the limits.conf file in order to run jack in realtime mode) and jack-rack at the same time. But if the real time kernel makes no difference to the stock kernel, I'm asking myself why there are so much xruns. I'm not a music producer, but for such a person it would be unusable.
My hardware consists of a Centrino 1.6Ghz with 2GB RAM, is it too slow for such type auf audio editing?

Happy new year :-)

redbit

Army · 2009-01-01 15:25:44

I do have a Pentium M with 1,7GHz and 512MB of RAM, so I think your machine is quite capable
Redbit, did you have some custom compiler flags enabled, when you built caps? Because I have

CFLAGS="-march=native -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

and I was thinking that there might be the culprit, causing caps not to work for me.

edit:
Okay, stupid me, should have tested it before asking things It works now, reverted it to default CFLAGS line and now caps works fine So the PKGBUILD should contain a

unset CFLAGS

in the build section and modify this line in the Makefile. Thanks redbit for finding the solution and thanks me for finding a solution which (hopefully) works for everybody and thanks DonVla for maintaining the package in the AUR!

Last edited by Army (2009-01-01 15:40:51)

redbit · 2009-01-01 17:53:39

I'm glad to hear you got it working!

But I can hardly follow you, Army. The CFLAGS you posted above, aren't these the normal CFLAGS? But you are saying that it didn't work with these Flags.

And you are right, I have different CFLAGS:

CFLAGS="-march=pentium-m -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

Btw: Do you know any good tutorial for the caps plugins? I'm a total newbie in playing the e-guitar and I can't get any sounds out of it which sound in any way similiar to a normal e-guitar sound.

Last edited by redbit (2009-01-01 18:01:39)

Army · 2009-01-01 18:19:22

No, here the two of them for comparison
Mine

CFLAGS="-march=native -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

Default

CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

Actually, as I have a Pentium M, -march=pentium-m should be the same as -march=native (can be read here http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Safe_Cfl … h.3Dnative )

I don't know any tutorial, it's more like trial and error ... I did some recording in the past with Ardour + caps and Hydrogen, here some examples: http://unstucc.de/myspace/3.Song.mp3, http://unstucc.de/myspace/4.Song.mp3 or http://unstucc.de/s0ngz/Armys_Idee.mp3

DonVla · 2009-01-02 15:04:14

Army wrote:

It works now, reverted it to default CFLAGS line and now caps works fine So the PKGBUILD should contain a
unset CFLAGS
in the build section and modify this line in the Makefile.

do'h! it's so obvious! that's actually the first thing to try. i also haven't thought about that. it seems that all these audio apps have their own flags. i'll change the PKGBUILD today.

redbit wrote:

Btw: Do you know any good tutorial for the caps plugins? I'm a total newbie in playing the e-guitar and I can't get any sounds out of it which sound in any way similiar to a normal e-guitar sound.

there are several ways to use these plugins. try jack-rack or you can directly choose them in ardour or i think even in lmms.
with jack-rack: connect your midi input, etc, inside qjackctl with jack-rack, chose the plugins you need in jack-rack and then connect jack-rack to your sound output (PCM or so) or recording app. i use timemachine, but you can also use ardour. but as army said, try try try.
the realtime stuff: are you in the audio group? the limits.conf settings affect only members of the audio group.
the xruns: afaik it depends not directly on the cpu, but on ram and soundcard. 2gb ram should be sufficient, but if you have a totally cheap soundcard that might be a problem. though i used a sb live value soundcard with the emu10k1 chip for some time and i hadn't have any bigger problems, and that's a really cheap card. i don't know what chipsets they use for laptop mainboards. however, if you want to have good sound quality on a laptop you could buy an usb soundcard, but that might get very expensive.
their is no golden way or rule, try that for yourself.

vlad

Army · 2009-01-02 15:09:54

One important thing: Always do audio stuff with "performance" as cpufreq-governor. xruns sometimes happen, when the cpu takes a step.

@DonVla: redbit owns the M-Audio Transit, so this won't be his problem

redbit · 2009-01-02 15:47:17

At the moment I'm using Jack-Rack with Caps Preamp, AmpVST, Cabinet, Compressor and Equalizer. But there are so many parameters to vary that I am totally loosing the overview. But probably you both are right, I have to try.

As Army already mentioned I am using a M-Audio Transit USB soundcard. But no matter which soundcard I'm using, xruns occur. I just tried the hint with setting the cpu to perfomance governor. I think it improved a bit, but there are still xruns.
Somewhere else I read that it could be an interrupt problem.

Really nice samples, Army! Like them.

[edit]
sorry, I forgot to mention that I am member of audio. I increased rtprio to 99 and mem to unlimitied.

Last edited by redbit (2009-01-02 16:58:11)

markuman · 2009-01-04 11:18:55

yeah! the new caps 0.4.2-4 with the patch works now for me on x86_64!
Great work! thx!

redbit · 2009-12-12 12:28:05

Once again, I can't get jack-rack and caps plugin working. I've installed them from AUR (caps 0.4.4-1, jack-rack). As soon as I'm clicking on caps plugin to add it to the signal chain, jack-rack gives me a error message: "Error loading plugin from /usr/lib/ladspa/caps.so"
Starting jack-rack in a terminal gives the following output, when adding a caps plugin:
plugin_open_plugin: error opening shared object file '/usr/lib/ladspa/caps.so': /usr/lib/ladspa/caps.so: Fehler beim Mappen des Shared Objects: Die Ressource ist zur Zeit nicht verfügbar (Translation: Error while mapping shared objects: The resource is busy)

Arch Linux

#1 2008-11-28 14:25:27

caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#2 2008-12-29 20:10:25

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#3 2008-12-29 21:29:23

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#4 2008-12-30 14:43:09

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#5 2008-12-30 16:11:50

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#6 2008-12-30 22:30:01

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#7 2008-12-30 23:21:06

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#8 2008-12-31 01:34:42

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#9 2008-12-31 14:38:52

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#10 2009-01-01 12:43:45

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#11 2009-01-01 15:25:44

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#12 2009-01-01 17:53:39

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#13 2009-01-01 18:19:22

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#14 2009-01-02 15:04:14

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#15 2009-01-02 15:09:54

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#16 2009-01-02 15:47:17

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#17 2009-01-04 11:18:55

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

#18 2009-12-12 12:28:05

Re: caps (ladspa plugins collection for guitar players) doesn't work

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