Linux Audio Developers

A view of our booth the day before the show with Frank\'s MIDI gear and the monitors that the HP folks from the opposite booth would soon begin to hate :).

The other side of the booth with Julien\'s braille workstation to the right (the screen was just a service to visitors so they could see what he is doing). Jörn and Steve are trying to figure out why the demo machine won\'t boot, and Julien is under the table, hooking up his speakers.

An impression from the KaLUG (Karlsruhe Linux User Group) party at the university on Saturday. They had a barbecue and showed weird educational films from way back when... "COBOL: a powerful language on systems as big as 512k ferrit-core RAM" and a nasty one about how hogs are transformed into schnitzels, which had no effect on our appetite, though.

Steve immersed in thought and conversation with a visitor. In the background, Julien is restoring his box which had crashed rather interestingly the day before. We were really amazed how fast he can work with his setup. He types on the normal keyboard and reads lines of console output from the braille device, and watching him work with it was an impressive experience. It also showed in how many subtle ways you can f&%$ up an otherwise accessible text-based user interface (Kernel build from scratch with "make config" anyone ? "menuconfig" doesn\'t work with braille lines...)'

Peter had made it all the way from Paris to join us for the weekend. Here he is probably discussing softsynth stuff with Matthias.

Sitting on the chair is Rene Rebe of RockLinux (known to the Linux audio community by his GSMP project), briefly visiting us for a chat with Richard.

Here you can see Takashi and Jaroslav, the two elder wizards of ALSA at work, doing some stuff to .asoundrc files that is undocumented so as not to frighten off little children :). It turned out that this was only the second time that the two had ever met in real life. They spent the time continuously hacking and discussing. It was obvious that such eye-to-eye meetings are a very useful and effective way of exchanging questions and solving problems, much faster than E-mail could ever be.

Unfortunately, Jaroslav joined us only for Thursday, but he had a very good and rather pleasant excuse...

Matthias and Steve doing interesting things with a computer that (judging from the sparkle in Matthias\' eyes) likely involved some psyched-out canyon_delay LADSPA effects and a virtual analog synthesizer.'

Richard (in the orange shirt) showing GLAME to some visitors in one of the less crowded moments at the booth, probably right before the show closed.

Tobias in conversation with a visitor and Takashi and Matthias. Julien is talking to Jaroslav in the back, offering you an excellent view of our extremely cool t-shirt.

The same situation, from another point of view. To the front you can see our leaflets and the LAD stickers donated by Patrick Shirkey (thanks and greetings, Patrick !) that will eventually pave our way to world domination.

Tobias and Matthias demonstrating some sequencing with MusE, softsynths and external MIDI gear.

Julien carefully operates a squeaking tux puppet (HP gave those away as PR material) during a weird collective improvisation that took place on Friday evening after the gates had closed.

To get the whole picture, you must imagine a steady, quiet beat from MusE, Frank playing hypnotic basslines on a keyboard, Jörn doing some realtime FX with the mixer and a weird LADSPA filternetwork, and Matthias playing a virtual organ on his ALSA Synth with a laptop keyboard, just having discovered that a touchpad makes an excellent ribbon controller, and constantly demanding "more canyon_delay!", all this going on for at least half an hour. Did I mention we had fun ?'

Here you can see Jaroslav and a perfect excuse for leaving early: his wife Petra, whom he had married only days before. She is a very nice person and put up with all the nerds around her most gracefully. They left the next morning to celebrate some more in their hometown of Budvar, Czech Republic. Best wishes to the young couple ! (The photo was taken at the social event in the entrance hall of the ZKM in Karlsruhe.)