NAME
Nama - digital audio workstation
DESCRIPTION
Nama is a lightweight digital audio workstation based on Ecasound. It is suitable for multitrack recording, mixing, effects-processing and other audio processing tasks.
New projects begin with a mixer, and may include tracks, buses, effects, sends, inserts, marks, regions, fades, edits and sequences.
Command language and help system
Nama provides a command interpreter with help system and GUI. Commands have full names and shortcuts (e.g. "add-effect" and "afx"). Commands may to be iterated over multiple tracks.
Nama has the concept of a currently selected object. At any time, there is usually a current bus, current track and current effect and current parameter. Track commands will act on the current track, bus commands on the currently selected bus, effect commands on the currently selected effect/parameter.
The help system provides searchable access to documentation for all Nama commands and shortcuts, and for LADSPA, LV2 and Ecasound effects.
In addition to executing its own commands, Nama will pass commands to Ecasound, Midish, the perl interpreter and the shell.
Backend
Nama creates signal processing graphs for the Ecasound engine; applies fades, effects and edits to the audio streams; and manages successive configure-run cycles. If jackd is running, Nama will automatically map soundcard IO via JACK.
When a user command requires it, Nama automatically reconfigures the Ecasound engine. While the engine is running Nama accepts parameter control inputs from GUI sliders, hotkeys, text commands, MIDI devices, OSC packets, and preprogrammed envelopes.
GUI
Nama's GUI will display if Tk is available. Nama can spawn Audacity or MHWaveedit to view/edit selected waveforms.
Project management
Project state is serialized as JSON files and the entire project history is managed by Git. Projects can be branched, and easily restored to earlier states.
Project reuse
Three types of templates are available to reuse project components: effect chains, effect profiles, and project templates. An effect chain is a series of effects with parameters. An effect profile includes one or more tracks with their effects and inserts. Nama's mastering network is stored as an effect profile.
INSTALLATION
Installing Nama and its Perl Dependencies from CPAN
The following command will install Nama, automatically pulling in all Perl modules required to run Nama in text mode:
cpanm Audio::NamaHowever if you don't have cpanm, this should still work:
PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 cpan Audio::NamaTo use the GUI, you will need to install Tk:
cpanm TkYou may optionally install Audio::Ecasound to run Ecasound via libecasoundc:
cpanm Audio::EcasoundYou can browse the sources or download a tarball via:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Audio-NamaBuilding from Source
If you want to inspect or modify Nama's internals, or keep up with new developments, you can pull the source code as follows:
git clone git://github.com/bolangi/nama.gitConsult the BUILD file for build instructions.
Non-Perl Dependencies
The Ecasound audio processing libraries should be installed. Ecasound should be compiled with support for LADSPA, libsndfile, libsamplerate and JACK. Ecasound may be obtained from http://ecasound.seul.org/ecasound/ or as precompiled binary package for your Un*x distribution.
The LADSPA SDK is required to autosense LADSPA plugins and scaling hints. It is available at:
http://www.ladspa.org/ladspa_sdk/download.html
In particular the utility program 'analyseplugin' must be installed in a directory in your execution PATH.
Nama's mastering mode uses a number of LADSPA plugins in a reasonably flat starting configuration. provided that the user installs the plugins listed in the default configuration file .namarc.
Git is required to utilize Nama's project management and and undo features.
COPYRIGHT
Unless specified otherwise, this code is 2003 - 2014, copyright Joel Roth
All rights are reserved except as provided by the Gnu Public License, version 3, as detailed in the file COPYING provided with this distribution.