I've had a crack at Rosegarden and Ardour.

My problem is that I use Cakewalk for hard disk recording on XP and I know how it works...

My aim is to have a total Deb system.
I love Debs Proper
The only thing is that I have an acx111 chip, which annoys me cause I wanna
net install...
I can configure my wireless no worries with acx, but if I change my kernel image
to 64, I'm rooted.
I used to have a SiS315 video driver which wouldn't work with any knoppix related disks, ( It would shit itself. )
Why is everything based on Knoppix ?
Now I've upgraded to ATI Radeon 128 chip,
which makes Agnula work for me but now Solar Wolf goes spastic ?
Never ending problems.

If there is any nutbag dirty rock n roll types that use audio recording
with linux let me know ...

please try not to use foul language on LQ.org in future, thanks.

Hi,
Your post is confusing. What is your question? Are you having trouble with audio recording or everything else you talked about?

yeah sorry about that,

my default lingo seems to be pirate talk when I've had 10 Guinness and assorted beers...
The dilemma is that I can either use the snapshot of deb sarge from last year and base-config and add demudi and have internet with that which is good, but I've upgraded to an amd64 now and I
would like to use a kernel based on that...
But I do realise that I have slightly jumped ahead of myself thinking of the future and will have to contend with 32 bit jobbies for the meantime as my wireless will not work with anything else for the moment...
I'm just a little bit frustrated because I would like a total Deb box like I said,
plus I'm impatient.
In regards to recording, I have to use a 2.4 multimedia kernel for most things to work properly like
jack and ardour.
Just wanted to know if anyone had any good tips for audio recording and what packages they used in particular.
Thanks...

Okay,

For the audio part. Whenever i record, I usually use Audacity, but Ardour looks just a little bit fancier.

For everything else.

video - most people have better luck with nvidia cards than ati becasue of their open source drivers. I know you probably won't go out and get a new card, but it's the only advice I have. You might wanna read this for help with the ati card.
wirelss card - i have a card using the rt2500 chipset, which has open source drivers, but thats in 32 bit, so I don't know if it would work in amd64. You might find more information here.

Welcome to my world, man. I've been pounding my brains out trying to make a decent digital audio workstation on my debian system for over a year. The first thing to do is get the rest of your system functioning, so you're not screwing around with graphics cards, wireless devices, etc.
Once you get all that figured out, the next thing to concentrate on is ALSA. Make sure you have the latest alsa-base and all the other alsa packages. Also, if you use gnome, get all the gstreamer-alsa and related gstreamer packages. I use gnome because once gstreamer is set up, it works pretty well, and is able to give up control to jack easily.
Ok, so you know alsa is set up well when you have control over your soundcard using either alsactl, or gmixer (which I prefer). You may run into some nasty business if you have multiple soundcards like I do.
In win2K, I use SONAR3 (Cakewalk) and I have a M-Audio Delta 410 for audio and a Soundblaster Live for MIDI/hardware synth. Works great with Reason soft synth.
In Debian, these things don't coordinate as easily. Audacity is great for audio sketches, but its tempo control and overall project flow manipulation is very simplistic. Basically, I use it when I want to just record an idea.
Ardour is much more advanced than audacity, but I have not found a way to integrate MIDI. Also, I've ran into some issues doing more than 2 tracks.
There is a crazy new program out there called protux that looks interesting. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be jack-enabled, so it gags on my multi-soundcard configuration.
Another sweet looking new program is called wired. You have to compile it from source, which failed when I tried. There are half a dozen other apps and libs that you must compile first.
Rosegarden looks excellent for midi sequencing and maybe even audio projects, but I've ran into all kinds of hell with it.

In short, I just don't think GNU/Linux/Debian/ALSA/Jack is quite ready for use by people who consider themselves musicians before computer geeks. I know some hard core linux jockeys that have had some success with digital audio, but they are not musicians making new music. They just loop and sample.

On the other hand, I might just be a total retard and not know enough about anything to make it work.

-HD

by the way, let us know what soundcard you're using and versions of ALSA, jack, etc if you want specific technical help

Linux Journal ran a good article on setting up a home system. I'm not a musician and haven't tried to build this, but it may be of interest. Good luck with it -- J.W.

I don't use debian but I have a linux based rec. studio and I would sugest ardour and hydrogen. I've used cakewalk and it sucks. audacity is also good but you can't record and play at the same time. alsa is what you want for your audio system check out the "el cheapo" on google it shows how to sync multiple cards so you can cut more than 2 traks at once.