My stalling was definitely partly due to the fact that I I'm a newbie, and it didn't help that I'd forgotten everything I ever learned about the command line back in grad school in the late 80s/early 90s.
But, I finally decided it was time to try this out. And it turned out to be pretty much painless.
-----
Warning: I DO NOT know what I am doing. This is probably not be the best way to install Renoise on Ubuntu. I'm sure over time I'll learn that. I'm just a guy with a bit of time on his hands.
-----
I did the normal research first, which mostly meant reading the Renoise for Linux FAQ. But I'm a visual learner, so when I couldn't find a visual description of the installation for Ubuntu, I promised myself that if all this worked, I would make a blog post for others.
Honestly, as a linux newbie, this FAQ made me just a little bit nervous. I didn't understand 99.9% of the linux-talk, and it made it seem like someone needed to use Terminal quite a bit during installation, typing in archaic-looking commands.
But, at the top of the FAQ, it does say:
"Renoise for Linux should work just out-of-the-box by decompressing the archive in any correctly installed Linux-box where X.org is installed and the sound playback thru ALSA work."I figured that I could probably get away with using the Ubuntu GUI as much as possible. That's what Ubuntu is all about, right? RIGHT?
Yup!
So, lets get started...
I had originally downloaded the Renoise tar.gz package from my Renoise Backstage account onto a USB stick. So, the first thing I did was copy the Tar archive file to my home directory - in this case '/dick' (um... er... don't ask :) .
I then double-clicked on the Tar archive, figuring that, like on Windows machines, this would decompress the files. Indeed, it opened up the Archive Manager program to extract the files. I then clicked on the "Extract" icon at the top of the window, which opened up the "Extract" screen.
Once the "Extract" screen opened, I clicked on the "Extract" button in the bottom right hand corner of the window.
This extracted the Renoise folder into the /dick directory.
I then opened up the Renoise folder (rns_2_7_2_reg_x86) to see what was in there, and, sure enough, all the files had been extracted into it. Nice.
I got very excited, so I double-clicked the Renoise icon to start the program. It started to load properly, but then suddenly stopped, popping-up a screen to warn me that it "failed to create a RealTime priority thread for ALSA". Since it only "highly recommended" me to use RealTime priority audio threads, I took that to mean that I could still proceed. So, I clicked on the OK button, and Renoise finished loading.
I loaded the first demo song and it played properly, except for a bit of audio clicking/distortion - that sound you always get when the buffer is too low. And when I tried a few of the other demos, I quickly ran out of CPU power.
Changing the buffer size in the preference/audio device settings helped quite a bit, but, the reality is that this is a first generation netbook (an N270 Atom chip maybe?). No very powerful.
But it definitely works. And I plan to use it.
In my next post, I'll explain how I got RealTime audio priority threads working (that *did* involve the command line), which not only stopped that annoying pop-up while loading Renoise, but also decreased the CPU load quite a bit.
