Tagged: community

L2Ork Tweeter Alpha Test and L2Orkist Reunion

It’s been a while since we’ve posted news on our main site, in good part because we’ve been voicing ourselves mostly via Facebook. Today, however, things are different. A whole lot different. The world is facing an unprecedented pandemic, and we felt like we had to do something to help us all get through these tough times. While we may not be good at developing a vaccine, what we are good at is connecting people. And connect people we shall. With this in mind, we are pleased to announce a free collaborative online laptop music making tool whose brevity has inspired its name.

L2Ork Tweeter (formerly known as L2Orkmatic) is a free open source, collaborative, and cross-platform laptop orchestra telematic (online) jamming tool destined to bring current, past, and aspiring L2Orkists and the community members closer through music. Driven by a simple FM synthesis engine and a loop-based 64-note tracker that runs locally, it aims to minimize the impact of the network latency inherent to online collaboration. The system allows for basic server admin, presence of both performers and guests/observers/audience, includes a chat system, as well as a way for sharing instrument presets, tracker loops, and even entire sessions. It also offers an offline mode where users can create their own works, or enhance the existing ones. So, head to the L2Ork Tweeter page to learn how to install your own free copy and start jamming today!

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As busy as things have been since the onset of the spring semester, only now are we finally getting to updating community resources. To start off, we have created a general l2ork-dev public mailing list for the purpose of encouraging community participation in our infrastructure development as well as for support of creation of other L*Orks around the globe. In addition, since in L2Ork we do not like compromises, we’ve also provided a custom Ubuntu 9.10 real-time kernel that provides 100% hardware support for the MSI Wind U100 notebooks (available on the Software page). A growing library of Pure-Data externals and abstractions should follow shortly.

For additional info on the said content visit “Join the L2Orkmania” page.

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L2Ork = L2ork * 2

It has begun. The excitement, patching, updating, coding, composing, fixing, soldering,… well, you get the point. L2Ork is back and is now bigger than ever. On the first day of classes we had students literally in the hallway as we could not fit everyone in the classroom, and DISIS is by no means a small space. So, now we are facing a problem: we have more students than stations. Our current infrastructure can support up to 16 l2orkists which leaves us with one dev notebook. In such a setup, however, we won’t have backup speakers left which is probably not a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a good problem to have, yet on a flip side, given the nosedive our University’s budget has taken, it may be a while before we can support additional musicians, which is a shame as the very last thing I would want to do right now is to lose momentum because of such a problem.

Even though the ensemble has effectively doubled in size, we also lost in the process one of our last semester’s members. Jen is getting ready to graduate and that has made it difficult for her to stay with us, particularly as we look forward to hopefully touring later this year. On behalf of entire L2Ork I would like to hereby thank Jen for being a l2orkist when no one yet knew what being one even meant (needless to mention what it required), for believing in L2Ork and for being a part of the great success we’ve enjoyed in our debut performance last December.

One of the top priority tasks awaiting us this week is upgrading of our machines. After some testing we’ve decided to upgrade our setup to Ubuntu 9.10 (up from 9.04) which brings about a number of enhancements we like, including a prebuilt real-time kernel. So far the only regression we’ve identified is apparently buggy webcam driver. Given that currently we are not using camera for any of our L2Ork needs, it appears that benefits of upgrading to 9.10 far outweigh potential shortcomings. The word is also that a fix is in the works and that it has been already included in the upcoming 10.04 LTS (Long-Term-Support) release which is our ultimate near-term target upgrade currently scheduled for the summer of 2010.

There are a lot of other things and exciting news I wanted to share with you today but perhaps I should leave them for another time–in a sea of looming deadlines, time is truly a rare commodity we all are acutely low on, so I should probably get back to work and hope to get some decent sleep tonight…

Speaking of work, in the coming weeks, as we hopefully find time to catch our collective breaths, we will be posting additional content, including Linux resources, a new mailing list, detailed how-to documentation, and other goodies.

As always, please do not hesitate to contact us–we would love to hear your thoughts, comments, and ideas!

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