Having just made the switch to Linux and with Garageband playing up on me (for some reason it starts 3/4 bars before the audio appears on the timeline) I decided to try and use Linux to record my demos. Although this ultimately means learning a new recording package it will hopefully give me more freedom later on. I ran into some issues while setting up though. Firstly getting the JACK server to run was a pain but I solved that by watching some great Youtube videos (embedded below for you) this helped me get realtime audio on my system and also allowed me to use the various recoding programs out there for Linux. Secondly getting an actual line-in signal from my Mac Pro seemed impossible. Finally solved this issue too (and it was quite simple).

Setting up JACK

JACK is the audio interface for Linux. It’s the place where you patch everything together. The beauty of this way of working means that you can have an array of apps that feed into your recording app. For instance if on Garageband I wanted to have a seperate app for guitar sounds I’d have to hope it was released as a Audio Unit for Garageband. On Linux I run my input into the guitar sounds app, then the output of that into the recording app. The great videos below show you how to set JACK up on you system. Or you can just install the Ubuntu studio packages into Ubuntu

Getting your Mac Pro’s line-in to work

This was the frustrating bit, I read somewhere that using Audacity to locate the working line-in would be the easiest method (it’s not) so tried the 50+ options on there while monitoring to see if any noise came out. Turns out much like on OS X you just go to your sounds preferences.

To get mine working I went to ‘System > Preferences > Multimedia Systems Selector’ and under ‘Default Input’ I changed the ‘Device’ to ‘ALC889A Analog’. After this I went to ‘System > Preferences > Sound’ and on the Input tab I went through the options, although my line-in is located on the back of my Mac Pro the setting that worked was Front Microphone (??). After selecting this and seeing the mic input tester move a little bit I then started JACK and Rakarrack, I disconnected Input 2 from the input patches as this was just noise and was screwing up the input signal. I was then able to play my guitar through JACK into Rakarrack and make some tasty metal sounds

My metal sounds for Rakarrack

I tweaked the existing metal patch to give it more gain and sustain, I also put it through a Marshall amp for added awesomeness. Download ‘Colin Metal’ .