Norwegians Release FOSS GNOME Software for Music Recording, Internet Radio, and Cameras

ole (Slashdot reader #19,909) writes in about his free, Norwegian open-source music recording studio for GNOME called GarageJam, which he says allows musicians to compose, record, and share original music seamlessly on the Internet. The latest release, GarageJam 8.0.1, is available in C and Python. It records audio immediately to Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) files in the current working directory and lets you edit metadata in .gjxml XML files from a GTK/GNOME wizard — all built on the Gingerblue Recording Studio API.
Ole shares links to its IETF GarageJam XML draft and GitHub repositories, and there's also GarageJam Studio, "a commercial music and audio recording app for the World Wide Web written by Aamot Innovation from Norway.".

ole is also spreading the word about GNOME Media, which "puts internet radio and your photographs on one OpenStreetMap... built from GNOME Radio 85.0.1." Click a station on the map to listen. Cities with several stations show a count and a menu. Open a folder of pictures or import from a camera. Photos with a GPS position in their EXIF data appear on the map. Double-click a thumbnail to open it. The search box filters the station list and the map together.
ole also announces:

• GPhoto 3.0.1. ("After 25 years, libgphoto2 2.5.34 now supports more than 2,500 camera models, and GPhoto 3.0.1 is built on it.")

• Skolelinux 13.6.0. Built on Debian 13 âoetrixieâ, Skolelinux is "a complete, ready-to-use Free Software operating system for schools, classrooms and home computers... an office suite, web browser, educational programs and network services for an entire school, all set up out of the box."

Fjords guitars and Linux

[Mirnotoriety]

Only in open source can one release a music studio, an internet radio map, camera software and an educational Linux distribution and call it a Sunday afternoon's work. Joking aside, it's great to see people building useful, quirky software instead of another subscription-based cloud service. More of this, please!

Re:

[ole]

Thank you.

You can download RPMS and SRPMS from https://www.aamot.org/ [aamot.org]

Best,
Ole Aamot

Re:

[test321]

I use Audacity for recording and I'm getting a bit frustrated. It does too many things, UI is crowded, hard to manipulate when my focus is music and not handling a complex UI. I just want to repeatedly record the same over and over until I'm happy with the result, it does nto offer a simple workflow for that.

GarageJam seems much cleaner for my use. Unfortunately not in my distro.

Re:

[ambrandt12]

But, it's an option that's been around for a long time.
There was never 'no options' for FOSS, it's just that the user didn't prefer the option.
Same with Window$... some people prefer doing everything in Premiere or Vegas... I prefer Vegas for video stuff, Audacity for audio stuff (have tried Premiere... couldn't figure it out).

Re:

[ole]

Thanks! That repeat-take workflow is exactly what GarageJam is for: open it, hit record, and each take lands as a file in your working directory. No project setup needed.

Which distro are you on?
- RPM-based: packages are at https://www.aamot.org/ [aamot.org]
- Anything else: grab the release tarball at https://www.garagejam.org/src/... [garagejam.org] (source on GitHub: https://github.com/oleaamot-de... [github.com]). It builds with the usual GNOME toolchain.

If there's interest from your distro, I'd be glad to help get it packaged.

And if GarageJam i

Re:

[test321]

I' using gentoo. Since you're apparently good with packaging, you could consider a universal binary. Personally I sometimes download Inkscape inAppImage format, it just runs and I can try out the latest features. This isn't the perfect solution, but it is ok for testing. Also since it isn't going to be in a distro repo but only on your site, this is something you can charge for.

Re:

[Buchenskjoll]

I got a bit frustrated once - it went from 0 to 1 in no time.

Re:

[nightflameauto]

I use Audacity for recording and I'm getting a bit frustrated. It does too many things, UI is crowded, hard to manipulate when my focus is music and not handling a complex UI. I just want to repeatedly record the same over and over until I'm happy with the result, it does nto offer a simple workflow for that.

GarageJam seems much cleaner for my use. Unfortunately not in my distro.

Look at Ardour. It can be complicated, but it can also be a simple multi-tracker. And it's been around long enough it's pretty stable so long as you avoid the Mixbus iterations where they try to tack so much shit onto it that it tends to collapse on itself repeatedly.

Re:

[allo]

The new audacity version has ruined the UX. Did anyone know if tenacity (if still maintained) keeps the classic Gtk UI?

Is there a lossless file format option?

[zuki]

We're about to be in 2027. Which is a quarter of a century (25 years) after Napster, WinAmp, RealAudio and all of the rest of that crap we had to suffer through when bandwidth was scarce and storage extremely expensive.

Would there be any downside to offering lossless audio from the get-go? Like, what are the negatives?

I'm trying to take this project seriously. The first reason to record something is fidelity, not mere convenience.

Re:Is there a lossless file format option?

[drinkypoo]

I'm trying to take this project seriously. The first reason to record something is fidelity, not mere convenience.

I think there's probably a lot of potential primary reasons to record something. Sometimes audio is ephemeral and your goal is text output, in which case the primary goal is recognizability.

However, ogg is a container, and it can contain FLAC.

...ok, and just got done building and running the C version. Got some errors like

(garagejam:23589): Gtk-WARNING **: 12:51:54.197: Broken accounting of active state for widget 0x5579c0ad17c0(GtkBox)

but it seems to be functioning.

I hit record and it opened up a track and found I think my webcam. Or, he said up his sleeve, my LG TV. It's quite opaque, though. There's no apparent audio device selection, though I have several inputs to choose from. To assuage your concerns about audio fidelity, it actually tells me it recorded the track as a .wav. At the bottom of the screen it says it's 48 kHz. It puts the files into Music, where your music library normally goes, I'd put that in Documents but anyhoo.

track-3-take1.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, stereo 48000 Hz

Thanks to it being based on a framework (GTK4) I can right-click on text-fields and insert emoji, but I still can't find anywhere to click to select audio devices. I'm going to say you can stop trying, but not for the reason you were thinking.

Re:

[ole]

Thanks for building it and putting it through its paces!

GarageJam doesn’t have its own device picker. It records from whatever your system has set as the default input. To choose the mic, open GNOME Settings Sound, pick the device you want under Input, and then hit record again in GarageJam. If you’d rather switch inputs for GarageJam only and leave the system default alone, use pavucontrol: start recording, open the Recording tab, and pick the source for GarageJam from the dropdown there.

You

I've just finished GarageJam 9.0.0. Please fund.

[ole]

I've just finished GarageJam 9.0.0. The changes in this release:

- Input selector: choose which audio input to record from instead of relying on the default device.
- Current-input indicator: the active input is shown in the UI, so you can see what you're recording from before you hit record.
- Configurable save folder: recordings go wherever you want them, not only the default location.
- GTK warning fixed: I tracked down the warning that showed up in the terminal at runtime, so the console output is clean aga

Re:

[ole]

Fair point, and thanks for taking the project seriously. GarageJam currently records straight to Ogg Vorbis because the original goal was quick capture and easy sharing over the Internet, where small files matter. There’s no real technical downside to lossless: you can mix down multiple tracks to WAV. The recording pipeline is built on GStreamer, so FLAC (or WAV) is mostly a matter of swapping the encoder element and exposing the choice in the wizard. The only cost is disk space, and that’s che

Re:

[zuki]

Thank you for considering it, and best of luck developing the project.

If you need some feedback, I'd be happy to perhaps beta-test a bit when it's further along: [e-mail]

Re:

[ole]

Hi Zuki,

I have published garagejam 9.0.0 with your suggestions for improvement on
https://entertainment.slashdot... [slashdot.org]

https://www.garagejam.org/src/... [garagejam.org]

Do share the music if you record something interesting in GarageJam 9.0.0!

I recommend https://cdbaby.com/ [cdbaby.com] for paid distribution on streaming networks with revenue on streaming.

https://www.oleaamot.com/ [oleaamot.com]

https://www.garagejam.org/ [garagejam.org]

Ole Kristian Aamot
Product Designer, R&D
Aamot Innovation

Another good FOSS audio project

[daHIFI]

Wanted to add that openDAW.studio is another great FOSS music application that I've been digging lately. Runs in browser and has p2p streaming for the audio files, tons of effects that really line up against the commercial tools.

The software wave is coming

[Elektroschock]

I think we will soon see an AI clone of good old Atari Band-in-a-Box. And there is already SoundCraft.