Installing and First Steps with Ubuntu Studio and StealthPlug

Do you wanna get rocked?

A few weeks ago I finally managed to repartition a Windows Vista laptop so I could install Ubuntu Studio on it and try my hand at recording again, something I haven't done for quite some years. For those unaware, Ubuntu Studio is a real time version of Ubuntu (shocker) that comes bundled with a whole host of very useful music making and production software.

To install Ubuntu Studio, the first step (not surprisingly) was to download the ISO image (here is the download page). Now came the first wrinkle, which was that I seemed to have great trouble having the BIOS recognise large USB sticks. I would usually just dd the image to a stick and boot from it but this seemed to fail with the 3-4 sticks I had lying around. I therefore resorted to the tried and tested method and burnt a DVD. This worked without problems and I breezed through the install process (I seem to remember a question asking about including non-open source software which I said yes to. That was the only thing I had to actually think about).

So now I had a working install of Ubuntu Studio dual booting on my old Vista laptop. Next step: Getting my StealthPlug working on it. Now this is where the audio system in Ubuntu Studio requires a bit of explanation (and note that I'm by no means an expert here!). It seems the best method to use to give the smallest latency is Jack. This is very clever bit of software that 'registers' any inputs and outputs (both physical and software created) and allows you to link between any and all of these as you like (like putting jack leads between them, which I guess is where it gets it's name. Or that could just be a massive coincidence). As long as the Jack software is running you can hotplug these as much as you want.

So, how to get this to recognise the StealthPlug? Well plugging it in seemed to make it appear in both /dev and in the main UI. However, by default Jack runs with the main sound card and the inputs/outputs supplied don't show up. The secret of this is in the setup panel. So after starting Jack (Audio Production -> QJackCtl), go to setup and you should see something like this:

If you change the selected hardware device to the plugged in device (the arrow next to Interface will tell you which - /dev/hw1 for my Stealthplug for example) you should be away. To test it, fire up Guitarix (I rather cool open source amp simulator), select a sound (I went for HighGainSolo here) and then wire up the Jack controls something like the following:

and it should start making noise. Well I say that - make sure you're using the headphone output of the Stealthplug otherwise you won't hear anything!

So I now have a low latency monitor solution running with very little trouble. Next job: Direct output to the main card while still using the StealthPlug as input and add in MIDI and a USB mic as well.